When I am getting ready to go out I more often than not end up forgetting something important that I then need to find. Wallet, keys, phone, something very useful and detrimental to survival. If I were clever I would tie these things to a string and then affix them to my person. I would never lose them.

Trying to find them is where I go terribly wrong, I start by just scanning the visible surface of things, the counters, my bed (often used as a table for clothes and anything else I throw on it). I check the visible surfaces because they are where I would expect to find my lost item.

After an unsuccessful search I move to phase two. The second phase requires me to move things out of the way so I can get a better look. I call this phase “mess management”. I push clothes piles around and look in drawers and pull things out of closets and look under things like the pillows on the couch and check all the places I think I may have left my missing object. At the end of the second phase there are piles of mess everywhere.

The panic stage is the last stage; I become a blur. I am a panicked fear-filled mess machine. I tear things off the wall and tip over anything that comes across my path. I through clothes and dump bags out onto the floor. I do all this while muttering cuss to myself and kicking anything that gets in my way. Sometimes I think that I resemble a caged mouse uselessly pushing wood chips around the cage in a futile attempt to restore order.

In a state of total frustration I inevitably end up in the dark moment where I look around my apartment and it looks like after an act of divine intervention where an all- powerful being physically lifted up my apartment and shook it like a snow-globe. Everything I will be scattered about and every surface covered with everything I own. I will then think that I am failing at life and at that moment of frustration, failure and clarity I will find my missing keys, wallet, or phone. I will then leave my apartment in this hideous state of catastrophic disaster only to return to it at a later point in time and clean it up so I can do this all over again the next time I go out.

-the end-