Clearing Clutter
A mental health exercise par excellence.
The startup has eaten my time, all day every day, and conditions around here really show that. There’s a serious mental health benefit to house cleaning. Let’s discuss.
My desk is really starting to look a lot like Rabe, the Martian crater that graces my first desktop panel. The light stuff right here by my keyboard, the heavier stuff further back, temporal clues hidden in the layers of debris.
Contrast this with the only slightly staged view of when I had much more room and more time on my hands.
This was the day before I fled the flood and black mold last spring.
It, too, was relatively orderly most of the time …
And an intermediate stop immediate after being ousted by fungus, long since vacated, after at least one day & night.
While I’ve been writing this, some three hours now, I’ve been clearing the pile of paperwork to my left, and grooming file systems on the screen in front of me. Part of that paperwork is a round of overdue diagnostics. I took a tumble at the end of September, another in mid-October, and my wrist should not hurt when I apply the force required to slice a green apple, but that remains the case despite weeks of wearing the brace …
Hours pass …
This feels much better. I didn’t know the name of this particular bit of Mars that’s on my second desktop, so I asked Claude, and it’s quite apropos - that’s Aram Chaos. I found my decoder ring (center) and the pill bottle contains the mortal remains of my old friend, Ms. Mantis.
Here she is, just before her interment in the empty pill bottle.
The colorful bit on the Mac’s display to the left should be immediately recognizable to Mars watchers - that’s the delta in Jezero crater. The Perseverance rover has been wandering that terrain for coming up on five years, but like Ms. Mantis and I, its flying companion, Ingenuity, never recovered from a hard landing.
Hours pass …
I am a bit like a magpie, in that I’ll pick up stuff I encounter in my travels. The lug nut in the first photo? A random encounter at a crosswalk somewhere in the East Bay. Things like this join the flow, linger until I grow bored with them, and then I return them to the wild. A fidget object catch & release program, if you will.
Here’s an object that caught my eye last week on the train. There was no child in the vicinity, and yet I found a children’s book, Press Here, just sitting in the green disabled seats by the door. The big concentric button looking thing above it is NOT a crater, that’s the Eye of Richat, a hydrothermal feature in the Sahara.
The book will be here long enough for me to read it, then I think I’ll deposit it at our local library.
Even more time passes … about six and a half hours, actually
I was not sure what the colors here denoted in this image of jezero crater, so I asked ChatGPT.
Green → Carbonates and sometimes olivine-rich sands
These minerals were one reason Jezero was chosen; carbonates preserve biosignatures.Purple / Lavender → Phyllosilicates (clays)
These form in long-standing water. They appear in the layered delta deposits.Orange / Brown / Red → Basaltic rocks, oxidized materials, general sediment.
Typical of the crater floor and volcanic units.Blue / Cyan → Silica-rich materials, or areas with strong hydration signatures.
Often shows erosion-resistant or fine-grained sediments.
During those six and a half hours I spent a lot of time asking various AI models (Gemini3, Sonnet4.5, ChatGPT5.1) questions about Postgres. My SQL experience is really limited - I’m a hosting admin of such things, able to backup and restore, establish and secure network connectivity, but little more.
But having made room, both on my desk, and in my life, I have the time and space to do more in this area.
Conclusion:
Mars eye candy and 865 rambling words about cleaning. You just got a peek into the sausage factory. Sometimes I will sit down and just tap tap tap tappity tap and there’s an article, but more often it happens in three phases.
Seed crystal, perhaps nothing more than a catchy title, and I’ll lay down the first hundred words just so I don’t forget the context.
Back and forth during the work day, pop in, write a section, pop out and back to work. Often there’s an overnight break and I will maybe take in some additional material, typically via YouTube, while I’m unwinding in bed.
Wake up, yawn, stretch, open the editor and grimace at the mess I made. If it’s promising, I grind off rough edges. If it’s a muddle, I clarify. If I was just angry, bored, etc, it’s likely to get round filed. When it’s truly terrible, I interview Fluff Warrior, and transcribe whatever’s on her furry little mind in the moment.
Are you looking around your environment, thinking about things that should be sorted, put away, and in some cases discarded? If so, then this post has achieved the desired effect.
Clear the way