Many words.
Damn. Was that cathartic for you?
(Now, please excuse me while I go find some clothing, books, and magazines to get rid of. I'm suddenly feeling very gross.)
Very cathartic - I feel lighter now. Stupidest bit is, my mother has a borderline hoarder friend who's really messy and she tells me about her and how she has clothes all over her floor and whatever. But my mother can't see that just because it's stacked neatly in a cupboard, doesn't mean it's not borderline hoarding. They could remove half of everything in that house and still have an abundance of stuff. My brother has picked up the tendency to keep everything (messily, to boot) but I have slowly-accumulate-and-then-PURGE-PURGE-PURGE tendencies. I'm working on both sides of that...
The thing that really kills me is the eco shit. My mother was a Greenpeace activist in her twenties and is now a dedicated Green Party volunteer. But the amount of SHIT in that house could keep four or five families in stuff, easily. (Clothes, crockery, books, you name it. Children's toys (we're both grown up), old computers in the attic, a coat rack sagging with coats that haven't seen the light of day for years... ARGH!) She acts like she's such a fancypants green person, but what she's really doing is just switching her BUYING OF SHIT to "green" companies. HOW CAN SHE NOT SEE WHAT UTTER HYPOCRISY THIS IS?! How fucking dare she tell me to vote Green because the planet is going down the tubes when *I* am the one who is buying unpackaged food from local shops and being mostly vegetarian and making an effort not to buy PEPPERS in FEBRUARY. Voting Green ain't worth shit if you have the exact same plastic-packaged diet year-round.
Library at the bottom of the road (which they do use) - still buying dozens of books and DVDs a year
Weekly farmers market and local produce shop in walking distance - still getting everything delivered from a supermarket (both retired, so not like they don't have the time...)
Both retired - still have piles of totally redundant paperwork from their old jobs in filing cabinets
Each have a home office with a computer and high-speed internet - still get newspaper delivered every day (see newsflash in previous post) and still print out stuff for no fucking reason (and then keep the printouts forever)
Mother's gardening hobby - buys expensive potted plants from the garden centre and won't try growing fruits or vegetables
Dress like functional leisure-rich adults in the 21st Century - still have hideous 1980s power suits hanging around
Have wardrobes full of perfectly adequate clothes - order piles of new stuff from catalogues (yes, paper catalogues which they have delivered and then keep)
Don't own a functional cassette player - still own cassette tapes (and probably have the broken player hidden somewhere)
Won't fly to go on holiday - won't catch the bus to the train station
Amazingly, the one thing they haven't bought is an electric bike, despite talking about it for a decade. It's probably too late now, but they could have got a lot of use out of one if they'd bought one maybe five years ago.
Having thought through it, there is literally one thing in the entire house I would want to inherit. A small unfolding card table, which they inherited from my great-aunt. Which, to be honest, they might as well get rid of now because all it's doing is holding a pot plant and getting in the fucking way EVERY SINGLE TIME they want to draw the curtains. ARGH. FUCK. And it's not like they don't have the money to pay someone to come and sort stuff out or take it away. If they ever thought of it, they probably wouldn't do it because they're too ashamed, but equally they won't do anything about it themselves. And they sure as hell would never take advice from me, even if they asked for it. And I feel like the corner is turning now and their physical health will only go downhill from now on so soon they'll be too old to life stuff themselves and all hope will be lost forever until my brother and I are called upon to clean the place out.
OK, sorry, seems like I wasn't done. :) But it's only now I've left home that I can actually look at it all with fresh eyes and see the MOUNTAIN OF WASTE and CHOKING PILES OF CRAP. And every time I go back I'm horrified again.