Fighting flat surface disorder (FSD)

Otherwise known as clutter...on tables, counters, floors, bookshelves, pianos, microwave ovens...FSD is a plague.
I'm willing to believe that people's inability to cope with FSD is partly responsible for their going into debt for houses they can't afford and for garages filling up with junk as cars get pushed by necessity to the curbside. Yard sales are a natural outgrowth of FSD, but they do nothing to relieve the problem since the same people who unload stuff at them also frequent them looking for different stuff.
FSD strains marriages sending spouses into rants over the whereabouts of car keys and purses. "I left them right on the coffee table." You look at the coffee table and reach a sobering conclusion. Even it's true (which you doubt...blame and suspicion are part and parcel of FSD) there's no guarantee you'll find them anytime soon. Every time you disturb a pile which you've watched grow with the detached interest of a geologist observing an emergent cinder cone, you risk upsetting the angle of repose and sending catalogs, unopened mail, checkbooks, and tape dispensers cascading to the floor. Worse, if you move things, you lose them. Those of us who live cheek by jowl with FSD know how comfortable we become with knowing that things are buried in plain view....security through obscurity they call it.
FSD stresses entire families by creating chronic crises at home...where are my socks, where's my favorite toy, where's the telephone, the electric bill... How many times have you reconsidered inviting people over dinner after estimating how long it would take to put away everything "temporarily" stored on the dining room table? Isn't kind of quaint to keep calling it a dining table?
Periodically, Beth and I declare war on FSD, employ a kind of scorched earth campaign, get most of the table and counter tops visible for a day or two and then watch morbidly as it all reverts back to its natural state....entropy....clutter.
The solution?...for the denialists like us it is simple. More shelves.
So here's what I did this weekend...Beth drew it and I built it. See the clutter on the desk (reduced greatly by our need to install the shelf unit). See the empty shelves above. Imagine the transformation.



















Beth's genius is to turn our improvised and shoestring projects into opportunities for transformations of other kinds. It's never just about function. Some flat surfaces are not a field upon which our neuroses inevitably play themselves out. Some surfaces become the tabla rasa upon which we envision and project a more beautiful world...



















it helps when they are vertical surfaces, of course.
K
ps. among the flamingo's many attributes are it's long and graceful legs (not unlike Beth's I might add) with enable it to step lightly and precisely over the clutter below in search of whatever it imagines it is looking for at the moment.