(Howell Creek Radio address for July 22, 2012 -- ) # Cave Swept Clean We had our garage sale last weekend, and it was *really* hot out. I think we made probably forty dollars in one and a half days. Growing up, there were a few years where my dad would keep these three-word slogans in his back pocket, applicable to any situation. One year it was "Deal With It." No matter what the situation -- say you weren't sure how you were going to get a ride back from somewhere, or perhaps your back hurt -- he would say, "Deal With It", just like that, with the first letters capitalised, as though that were the beginning and end of the matter. Then the next year, the magic words were "Make It Happen." Just as brusque, but a bit more constructive this time around. Last Saturday, that phrase turned up in my thoughts again, like a bad penny. I was sitting out on the front porch, sweating, looking over the garage sale's remaining, meagre stock. Waiting for the next customer to come and make it all worthwhile, and at the same hoping everyone would just let me be and give me an excuse to go inside early. * * * My house, as you know if you've been listening for awhile, was a three-year do-it-yourself project. I'll tell you what, when you move into a house you've just spent three years building yourself, it's not like moving into a model home; it's more like moving into an old shed. The garage and the basement are already full, you have to pick paths around awkward piles to get through certain areas, and there's nowhere to put anything. Now, I have a horror of clutter, but unfortunately...we still have clutter. How does that work? Well, it works because there are actually two kinds of horror -- let's take spiders as our example, shall we? Some people have a horror of spiders that drives them to kill every spider they see as soon as they see it; but others have a horror of the spiders that keeps them even from getting close to it; end result, the spider lives on -- but also, the horror never quite goes away. Even so is my initial horror of clutter; contain it somewhere you don't need to see it, close the door, and try not to think about it. That was the way it was for half a year. And long after we'd conquered the living areas, the garage remained full, cluttered, and dusty, looking for all who dared inside like an abandoned shrine to the whole extended project. Tools in scattered piles, pieces of trim and bags of grout everywhere. A thick film of sawdust remained over everything like a layer of volcanic ash -- and in the center, right in the way of everything, stood the great, dormant volcano itself: the old cast-iron tablesaw that had taken me half a day just to transport from my Dad's shed only a couple of blocks away. * * * So since forever we've been saying we need to have a garage sale as part of the critical path towards getting anything else done around here. Someday when it's warm out and all the stars align. Then, suddenly, the date we kept talking about was only a week away. How would I get ready in time? What if nobody showed up? That phrase again. "Make It Happen." Bang out a craigslist ad on Tuesday, copy and paste it in again on Thursday. Pick up some signs and some stakes from the hardware store. Knock off work early on Friday, get home at 11:30 and scramble to shove all my stuff out on the driveway by the appointed start time of high noon. No price tags, no cash box, no coloured penants. All the built-up leftover tools, materials, and impedimento of every phase of house-building, whoosh. A garage sale is born. But after it was all out on the driveway, in the bright light of the sun, it actually didn't look like very much stuff. I'd imagined my home bursting with saleable leftover goods, and now that I'd actually brought it out and hung out my shingle, it was only enough to fill up half of my short driveway. Under the influence of the weirdest feeling of faux-guilt, as though I were some kind of fraud compared with the multi-family extravaganzas going on in the rest of the neighborhood, I began to wish I had more clutter -- twice, three times as much -- just so I could put it out for sale. More than a few shoppers drove by, frowning out of their air-conditioned minivans, before deciding they weren't shoppers after all. "Them's the goods," I mentally projected at them. "Deal with it." * * * At four o'clock on Saturday, then, I decided I'd had enough of being outside. I pulled up the signs and went inside an hour early, not even bothering to roll up what was left of the merchandise on the driveway. Someone could back up their station wagon and just take it all away, for all I cared. The interior of a soul is a cave, a wild cave. The mouth of the cave is open and unguarded, and breezes and beasts and rains and people flow or creep into it freely and unchecked, perhaps taking up residence for a time, and then leaving. No one can actually see the inside of the soul, not even the eyes of its owner which are accustomed to it through long looking. A person's home may be cleaned, clipped and manicured, but the soul is always a cave, and in every season of life it remains as primal and mysterious as the New World. Our futile attempts to sweep the cave clean only make it dirtier. [[When you cease trying to sweep it, it becomes the cleanest possible dwelling, for it will never again need sweeping.]] When do we stop using the word "virgin" to describe a wilderness? When it has been ravaged by centuries of fires and storms? When its soil is host to dynasties' worth of the buried blood and bones of every creature? No, a wilderness ceases to be virgin only when we start cleaning it up. * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. You can follow this podcast, and send me feedback feedback, at `HowellCreek` on facebook and on twitter, and if you use iTunes, you can have new episodes downloaded to your computer or your iPod automatically. As you may have noticed, I'm slowing down a little during the summer, but I still aim to get a podcast released every Saturday if possible. I'm also working on a redesign of our website at jdueck.net, which will coincide with a few possible book projects and some music-related projects as well. Stay tuned, hopefully the results of that effort will be ready early this fall. The text of this podcast is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. Synopsis: --------- Radio address for July 22, 2012. The garage having remained a dusty shrine to the long construction project, we conceived of the idea of hosting a garage sale in the hottest weather of the year as a way of cleaning it out. Music is [_Babar_][1] by Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussein, Edgar Meyer; [_Stay in the Shade_][2] by Jose Gonzalez; and [_The Ground Plan/La Rotta_][3] played by William Coulter and friends. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002LBCA36/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002LBCA36&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [2]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0045NQH1Y/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0045NQH1Y&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20 [3]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010ZOLSG/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0010ZOLSG&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20