How bout a Diamond bracelet for a Whopper?

Summary notes:

• Hoarders are disturbed individuals.
• They often live in shit.
• I lose my appetite every Monday night at 10pm, watching them try to exist in their cluttered lives.
• Their living spaces often resemble the aftermath of a natural disaster.
• I might add hoarders to my list of pet peeves.
• Single White Femme better pick up her socks (literally) to avoid this fate. 

I can hardly stomach the show Hoarders. It's not even the car wreck effect where you can't look away, as is the case with Intervention, another one of A&E's beauts. Instead, I am absolutely unable to watch someone live in a state of disaster and subject their CHILDREN to a life of piled boxes, clutter, filth, countless (useless) items and sometimes literal shit. I even saw an episode where the kids were forced to sleep in tents in the backyard. No big deal, just a cockroach infestation. Sleeping in tents? Fun for a night in the summer with your friends. Not so fun when you are cuddled up next to your brother and sister due to lack of better options.

I am getting more and more angry just thinking about it, and part of me wants to hoard all these neglectful hoarders up into a house all together. It wouldn't be torture, they would be in utter bliss. Collectors unite! They could sit around in their diapers, on boxes of used tupper ware and broken toasters and compare 'gems'. I wonder if A&E would be open to that pilot proposal.

I know we all have our attachments to "things" that have some sort of important meaning attributed to them, and sometimes our lives get too busy and the household chore schedule falls to the wayside. I am not the female version of Mr. Clean. I do not dust my house every week. I have held onto old notes from grade school. I made a mirror frame out trident gum wrappers (note: this was done in 1993). I sleep with my baby blanket under my pillow. I collect pens and markers. I keep things past the expiry date in the fridge and sometimes, I even consume them (after a visual/smell test of course). Yogurt usually passes the test by a week.

But what concerns me, is that these people are seemingly unable to make decisions about the value of things. I would love to offer my brutally honest opinion of the value of their belongings but I have a feeling there isn't a thing someone could say that would clue them into reality. Cleaning up a Hoarder's environment would not be easy. This wouldn't just involve grabbing some bins, marking them A and B and organizing. This wouldn't be a matter of tossing the useless stuff to the curb. Why? Because everything is simply precious.

There is no way that someone who squeezes their body through passageways narrowed by piled boxes will be open for a discussion on the value of a tidy home. Someone whose clothes for daily use are draped on boxes on the floor will not want to hear about that closet organizer on sale at Walmart.  Someone who becomes too embarrassed to entertain friends in their disaster of a house loses that outside objectivity and soon, their clutter becomes their only 'friend'. There wouldn't be a square inch for anyone to sit, anyway. God this is depressing.

 







One of the 'hoarder therapists' that tried to make sense of the mess these hoarders call their lives once suggested that a crumpled hamburger wrapper is no different than a box of diamonds to these people. To them, everything has value, or potential for future use, even if it's broken or trash. So they keep everything. My newest mission is to locate some hoarders and propose a burger-diamond tradesies. I can easily round up a few whoppers and quarter pounders to part with. To make it even more appealing, I will even throw in a burger along with the wrapper!


I sincerely hope these hoarders have blind partners lacking olfactory glands and having had a prior lobotomy, because otherwise they are looking at a lonely existence. No one with their sight, smell, and of their right mind would consider subjecting themselves to a life of utter filth.