Some people are “Keepers.” They find it very difficult to throw things away. By contrast, some people are “Tossers.” They believe that anything that hasn’t been looked at, touched, or smelled in a year can and should be tossed. Keepers, of course, inevitably run into a storage problem, which can only be managed by occasional tossing.

For Keepers, this is never an easy thing to do. I know; I tend to be a keeper, and I only toss things following an exchange of words that usually begins with something like, “Do you really need this shit? You haven’t touched this shit in years? I mean REALLY!” For example, I only recently and (and mostreluctantly) tossed a bunch of my college textbooks, many of which, I hated to concede, were seriously out-of-date. There is just no getting around it. Pavlov and the conditioned reflex really is old news.

I have several large containers of record albums and 45s (the small records with the big hole in them), which have not seen a turntable in years and may well never see one again. The same goes for reel-to-reel tapes. They sit in a box in a basement awaiting that “some day” when I get my hands on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I still have all my books and notebooks from Law School, and, at this point, tossing them is non-negotiable. So far, I have managed to successfully protect my collection of beer coasters from Germany that have been sitting in a box for decades awaiting the “some day” when I have a bar in the house.

Still, the basement remains a bit of a cluttered mess. It’s the sad lot of Keepers.

However, the Keepers with the most serious problems are the “Accumulator-Keepers.” Unlike the run-of-the-mill Keepers who accumulate things in the normal course of living, the “Accumulator-Keepers” are aggressive acquirers of things. They are the Home Shopping Network, QVC, eBay, and flea market junkies, who simply cannot go a day without buying stuff ““ and lots of it.

The Accumulator-Keepers face gargantuan storage problems, which often result in clutter that works its way up from of the chock-filled basement and spills out from the jam-packed garage into the house.

TigerHawk linked to a series of photos of a house that belongs to a World Class Accumulator-Keeper. It may be the worst case of clutter I have ever seen. Now I know that you are thinking, “Yo, Jimbo, I’m surfing blogs here, and I really don’t think I need to take up limited blog-surfing time to look at a cluttered house. What’s the big deal? It’s only a house with a bit too much random stuff in it, right?.”

WRONG. Go look.