FONTANA: My packrat manifesto

I’m taking a lesson from a Mr. Playswith Squirrels on this one. In the popular TV series “Boy Meets World,” Eric Matthews goes to great lengths to compile a compendium of all his knowledge into a single book.  His manifesto, entitled “The Secret of Life,” has a rather simple message: “Lose one friends, lose all friends, lose yourself.” While he has to give away all of his worldly possessions, renounce society and learn how to both purify and drink his own urine before he comes to this conclusion, I think he may have been onto something.

I am a self-proclaimed packrat. Despite years of denying this reality and countless arguments over the necessity of my boxes, piles and rampant “messes,” I have finally accepted this very simple fact. With this acceptance has come a much greater understanding of exactly why I behave this way.

Those who know my family might say that this condition was inherited from not just one, but both of my parents. While they are each “savers” in their own right, I am the beautiful product of their combined levels, a supreme packrat reaching perhaps some of the highest levels of packratism ever recorded. It certainly didn’t help that I was given the smallest room in the house on the grounds that the only boy of the family would get the room with the racecar wallpaper. There was no way for them to know they would be turning me into a monstrous beast.

It quickly got to the point where I could no longer actually live in my room, so it simply became the storage facility where I slept. And once that was filled, my “rat droppings” began flowing freely from my room, finding new homes among the rest of the house. As with any species, when a creature enters your territory, you began to lash out against the invasion. And when there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Well, in this case it was the exterminators, and instead of a call it was more like a transformation. Suddenly my parents and sisters became enemies of my precious piles. Out of frustration or simple ignorance, my carefully organized disheveled nests began to appear rearranged and would on occasion diminish in size or even completely disappear. It was like something out of “The Twilight Zone.” Parents and Sisters and Packrats, Oh My!

Having guests over was the worst because I had to strategically hide my messes without getting rid of them. This becomes the most important step for a packrat’s survival. You must learn to make your piles vitally crucial to everyone else’s happiness. You can do this in a few different ways: make your piles part of the décor of a room, something aesthetically pleasing such as modern art. Your piles can become the foundation for holding up other things, like books, other piles, even the house itself. Or if you’re really good, you can find ways to intricately weave others’ precious possessions into your own piles so they can remain in foreign territory, like passports for your treasures.

When I was just a young packrat, I attempted to rationalize my extreme habit by arguing that the reason I needed all of my homework assignments from the fourth grade was because I would need to brush up on those subjects when I took the classes later in life, like at college. But once I got to high school I stumbled upon a more revolutionizing answer. I began saving things for the sake of my own faculties. Essentially, I was preparing for the inevitability of Alzheimer’s, approximately 45 years early. It can never hurt to get a head start.

The other day, a fellow packratter hypothesized that our need to keep everything grows from our mutual love of writing. We see everything as some unlocked story waiting for us to let it out and so we store everything away, like a library that we can access when our creative engines seem low on fuel. She even admits to a separation anxiety that overwhelms her with the thoughts of letting go. As a writer, a friend and a human being, one of my greatest fears is forgetting, but only because my memory is one of my greatest assets.

Elephants may never forget but packrats will always remember. Friendships are formed through shared experience and the creation of memories. For me, those memories are stored in the objects that fill my life, the heaps and mountains of what some might call random junk. As the saying goes, “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.”

Although Mr. Squirrels may have seemed a little coo-coo for coconuts, his heart was in the right place. So color me insane and call me Mr. Packrats, Playswith Packrats.

David Fontana is a sophomore at the College of Arts and Sciences and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at fontad5@bu.edu.