Hoarding is in, sort of. Now the lucrative subject of reality TV and also a career opportunity for professional organizers who help others turn their personal chaos into soul-satisfying order, hoarding, nonetheless, is considered to be anathema, in short, a no-no. One of the causes (I say just one, because I can think of others, right off), is procrastination, which I have been fooling around with all my life. Procrastination, of course, affects mending and dusting and phoning for appointments and all the things you don't feel like doing. But with other activities, I should say non-activities, procrastination leads to accumulation by default which leads to collections not only of detritus and debris but also of "valuable" junk. Value is in the eye of the collector. I knew someone who collected postcards and who eventually made his acquisition pay off with the publication of a coffee table book of them.

Remember that old joke: "My psychiatrist thinks I'm crazy because I like pancakes." "That's not crazy, I like pancakes, too." "You do? You must come home with me to see mine. I have a whole trunk full of them" Some things are more collectable than others. One must learn to identify differences Discrimination, not procrastination, is the key.

Well, so ---blogs. I have just spent a half hour reading the contents of a folder labelled Blogs. It's full of clippings, columns, tear sheets and squibs.

(Squib: a small firework that burns with a hissing sound before exploding; a short piece of satirical writing; a short news item or filler in a newspaper - that's the meaning I want.)

This folder, I fear, is the first of many that will follow, bits and pieces of randomly selected ideas, facts, fancies, notions and what-have-yous that may never develop into a blog of my own, but that will clutter up my filing cabinet and my mind in the years to come. You got it: it's an embryonic dumpster. At least it doesn't smell.