The Old Blog in the Desert

Many people have their own quirks due to their excesses and wastefulness. I didn’t arrive at that conclusion through deep study or a documentary. I figured it out standing in my kitchen at midnight, holding a half-eaten yogurt I didn’t remember opening, staring into a refrigerator that looked like a crime scene of good intentions.

The fridge was full. Not “we’re prepared for the week” full, but “we’ve been lying to ourselves for months” full.

A wilted bundle of spinach behind jars of expensive sauces. A bag of lemons hardened into yellow paperweights, and three kinds of mustard.

None of it is salvageable. I stood there barefoot, chewing yogurt, thinking, “This is who I am. A man who buys food for a version of himself that never shows up.”

That’s when it hit me: everyone does this, not just with food, but with everything. We stockpile dreams, clutter our days, and leak energy like broken faucets. Our weirdness isn’t some charming quirk; it’s the residue of excess and waste, left out in the open.

Take my neighbor, Carl. Nicest guy you’ll ever meet.

Waves every morning. Brings packages to your door if you’re not home. Carl also owns four leaf blowers. Four. I know this because one day Carl’s garage was open, and it looked like a small-scale landscaping store.

I asked him about it, casually, like a journalist pretending not to judge.

“Well,” he said, scratching his chin, “this one’s gas, this one’s electric, this one’s lighter, and that one… I don’t know. It just felt right at the time.”

That last sentence should be engraved somewhere.

We buy things for specific scenarios that never happen. We keep clothes for bodies we used to have or bodies we’re convinced we’ll have again if we get serious after the holidays.

We save boxes because they’re “good boxes.” We keep emails, grudges, and half-finished thoughts. Then we wonder why we’re tired.

My own excess shows up in notebooks. I love notebooks.

Hardcovers, softcovers, dotted pages, blank pages, pages that promise they’ll change my life if I start on page one. I have a box full of them, most with a few pages used, which seems to be my limit before I realize discipline is more than optimism.

Each notebook represents a version of me that was very confident on a Tuesday afternoon.

And the waste isn’t always physical. I waste conversations by half-listening while planning what I’ll say next.

I waste quiet moments by filling them with noise. I waste time worrying about things that never happen, which is especially impressive because I’m very thorough about it.

When I look around, I see the same patterns everywhere. People with calendars so full they complain about being busy, yet they don’t remember what they actually did last week. And opinions shared too often, apologies shared too rarely.

The strange thing is, our excesses usually start as hopeful acts. Buying groceries means we plan to cook. Buying notebooks means we plan to think. Buying another leaf blower means we are prepared. The waste comes later, quietly, when life doesn’t follow the script we wrote while standing in a store aisle or scrolling late at night.

I cleaned out our fridge the next morning. Threw away the spinach, the lemons, the yogurt. It felt both responsible and slightly tragic, like saying goodbye to good intentions that had gone stale.

I promised myself I’d buy less, plan better, and remain honest about who I actually am. By the afternoon, I had ordered takeout and added a new notebook to my online shopping cart.

Progress is complicated.

I don’t think the goal should be to eliminate all excess waste. That might make us efficient, but probably not human.

The goal, maybe, is to notice it. To laugh at it when we can. To recognize that our weirdness isn’t a personal failure, it’s a shared condition.

We are all surrounded by evidence of our best intentions and our worst follow-through. We trip over it daily.

And that’s okay. Maybe the waste is pretending we’re not strange in the same way.

I closed the fridge door, finally, and went to bed. The kitchen was cleaner.

I was still me. And tomorrow, inevitably, I would open something I didn’t fully need, hoping it might turn into something I did.