Accelerated Decrepitude

Entropy, in case you didn’t know, is the default state of the universe. It means that, left to its own devices, any state will tend towards decay, randomness, and ultimately dissolution into the building blocks that formed it.

Ice will melt, the lettuce will rot, you’ll get fat.

Well, my kitchen has been hewing mightily to the entropic paradigm for nigh on thirteen years, and recently I decided to arrest its rapidly devolving development on multiple macromolecular fronts by clearing its entire innards to another similarly-afflicted entropic sinkhole of the house and just, well, starting the process all over again, this time from the Organized end of the spectrum.

That meant clearing every item out of every cabinet; every glass off every shelf; every decade-old box half-full of couscous; and then, the rampant, semi-vigilantic debridement of any physical object in the kitchen that I did not deem essential to its holistic welfare.

And boy, does that all feel good!

I cleared out all the cabinets. Amazing what piles up, and amazing what you think you will need someday. I found probably 50 hard taco shells in various forms of preservation, for one thing. It’s Old El Paso’s fault, not mine. Who eats 15 fucking taco shells at a sitting? And who eats tacos two nights in a row? Well, I do, but I vary it with flour tortillas the second night.

Then there were the pastas. Half-filled boxes of Barilla penne lisce and rigate, masking-taped incomplete boxes of spaghettini and linguine fini, soup macaronis, farfalles, rigatonis, manicottis, tortellinis. Most of which had only marginally seen the light of day since 1997. See, when I get a great culinary idea and the thought of using what's in the cupboard versus what's fresh at the store today comes up, guess which choice wins.

Then came the mismatched cutlery. This stuff is heavy in a garbage bag, but the crockery is worse. I threw out cups and glasses that I have been staring at every day, mutely, for ten years, without ever lifting one to my lips.

Oh, I could blame my ex-wife, but really, it’s me who just couldn’t deal with getting around to dealing with it.

But wonders never cease when entropy is repelled. Newly-wiped clean shelves are now lined with minty-fresh shelf padding. There are dark corners which never saw the light but are now pregnant with anticipation for what will be lined up in their parking spaces.

The kitchen has a new lemon-yellow coat of paint and ceiling-sunken halogens and screams Look At Me Now. I am whole again, I am new, and just watch me fry to the four corners of the universe.