Anatomy of a Junk Drawer

The Junk Drawer

As the holiday season approaches each year, and we all gear up for the national custom of giving thanks to Native Americans for showing us how to grow corn with a dead fish followed by the celebration of the birth of our Savior by weeks of unfettered consumerism, I embrace the self imposed task of sorting out the junk drawer. The junk drawer is the catch all bin of things that are never discarded right away, but instead held in stasis until a later time.

Admittedly, I have two junk drawers, one in the kitchen, the main junk drawer, and another in the laundry room, the auxiliary junk drawer. The main one usually goes critical first, being located in the high traffic region of the house near the refrigerator and the microwave. This year I decided when I clean out the junk drawer, I would attempt to categorize the contents to understand why this on deck refuse exists at all. I surmise that we are all collectively too busy to make decisions about discarding something potentially important so in true procrastinator fashion we place the object in a drawer until there is so much shit in there, it won’t close. We all do it. The first level of dissection of the junk drawer follows the taxonomic categorization of “garabage” versus "non garbage items."

Non Garbage Items, NGI

The main junk drawer is the keep safe for the “good scissors," which aren't meant to be discarded. They rightfully belong in the junk drawer. I also store my car keys, wallet and sometimes my phone in there as well. Scotch tape is also a non garbage item. These things are what the drawer is really for.

Chitter Chatter
Scissors

When I was a kid, our junk drawer had, along with the good scissors, the bulky zigzag scissors which, to this day, I haven’t a clue what they are used for. As kids, we called them “chitter chatter scissors." No one ever used them in our house. Not once, but they resided in the junk drawer where they attained a lofty status by their association with the good scissors.

There are a lot of NGI chords in the junk drawer all varying in length, color and purpose. Each year when I clean out the junk drawer, my wife, Christine, peruses the contents then exclaims,

“There’s that thing. I was looking for that.”

Christine uses a whole host of electronic gadgets that require tethers for juice including two cell phones, one for work and one for personal use. Although a pain to remember two mobile phones, it's less hardware, and way less legal consequences than having your own personal email server. Christine is forever looking for a charging cord for things like old iPods and something called an "exercise FOB." You’d think by now she would know to check in the junk drawer, but that is another oddity about the practice of temporal crap hoarding.

There’s too much shit in there.

There's so much stuff in that drawer that actually looking through it is impractical. It might as well be a stuff black hole in which everything including light cannot escape. That would speed up this yearly housekeeping for sure.

Assorted Crap

Coins

There was money in the junk drawer. Why a fair amount of coins was in there is beyond me. It’s not like a decision about discarding money needs to be postponed. Besides, money can be used right away to buy more stuff. I found a 1946 nickel and a wheat penny in there, both of which went into a shoebox in my desk full of old coins.

Hardware

There was plenty of hardware in the junk drawer. Screws, nuts, bolts, nails, cotter pins, washers. Quite the assortment of important metal fasteners. I have jars full of these things in my workshop. When I die, an auctioneer will dump all of them in the garbage.

Assorted Crap Keepers

There were several free ride tokens for the flying horse carousel located at the local beach in the junk drawer. This past summer our youngest, Willy, won them for snagging the brass ring. He claimed all of them for his personal junk drawer in his desk. There was a fair amount of crayons, pencils and pens as well as erasers and a bottle of white out. There were two padlocks with no keys. There was a box of ear plugs, some Nerf darts, wire nuts, and several garden hose quick connects. There were Legos, buttons and grommets, game pieces to Trouble, four micro glass cleaning clothes, a protractor, two magnets, five partially used ChapSticks and three pocket knives. All these things are keepers.

Obvious Junk (Garbage)

A calculator with a broken display, dead batteries, expired membership cards, (the oldest dated to 2013), old iPhones, coupons from last year were all found in the junk drawer.

Unknown

There’s some unidentifiable things in there as well. No one in my immediate family knew what any of these items went to or were for. That’s probably how they got in there in the first place. Sometimes, I ask Christine obtuse things like,

“Have you seen that little piece of plastic?”

To which, she responds,

“You got to give me more to go on than that.”

So I add,

“It’s red.”

That’s the kind of thing that ends up in the junk drawer, a little red, important piece of plastic. I would never be able to find an item like that because there’s too much crap and money in the junk drawer. Come to think of it, all the stuff just ends up in another less filled, more well defined container than the junk drawer. The money goes in the change bucket. After I sorted the contents, everyone took the stuff they valued and put it in their private junk drawer inside their personal space. In a few days, all that crap will migrate back to the main junk drawer while my family wanders around aimlessly looking for their important shit.

In conclusion, nothing of real value is ever in the junk drawer. The best items are some useful, everyday thing, but mostly the drawer is full of crap. You never find in there some precious metal, bones of a saint or a lost work of art. Mostly assorted would be jetsam that should be placed in the trash straight away.

Not everything of course. Certainly not the good scissors.

Editor's Note: Originally published on November 6, 2018.