Stuff: all the undefined, unnecessary flotsam of our lives that collects in the eddies of our existence.
Clutter: said gatherings of flotsam in the eddies.
Martha Stewart: a person who has merged OCD and too much time in the craft tent at summer camp into a multi-billion dollar empire dependent upon stuff and clutter.
We need the Martha Stewarts of the world to validate our stuff by un-cluttering. Old newspapers and magazines are clutter when they lounge lackadaisically littering the floor and table, but nestled neatly in nooks and nimbly knotted with string they are acceptable, even praiseworthy trophies of triumph over clutter.
Collections are exceptions to the rules of keep and toss,
if it's pretty or unique put it on display,
but piling and compiling leads to nothing but dismay.
If you frame it, you can keep it, if it's shelved, well it may stay,
but never let a loose leaf linger, nor a baby bauble stray,
from the careful decoration of deliberate display.
For a hair out of alignment, or a post left long to lay,
upon a kitchen counter or the foyer will betray,
that you live not in palace immune from life's decay.
This immutable intolerance of entropic interlude that is foisted off on the masses as fashionable, up-scale, and proper is brilliant. That the masses buy into it is bizarre. Meanwhile, we continue to hoard crap and then display it in the products of the industry of display, spawn from the need to have more and better ways to show off how much flotsam we have in our eddies, and that we have more eddies than anyone else, and that they are prettier than anyone else’s.