An ongoing inquiry
gumpf (n) - a collection of reflections on bewildering stuff
Welcome to the external processings of Mostly Bewildered, packaged in a variety of vomital dumps.
Every household contains at least one drawer whose contents cannot be explained. Not individually — each item has a history, a provenance, a reason it was placed there — but collectively, as an ensemble, they form something that defies categorisation. This is the drawer. It is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be understood.
Read it →At some point — no one can say exactly when — the bags began to accumulate. Carrier bags, paper bags, bags from shops that no longer exist, bags that came inside other bags. The bag of bags is not a solution to the bag problem. It is the bag problem, concentrated.
Read it →There is a category of object — small, usually plastic, occasionally metal — whose purpose was once known and has since been forgotten. It is not broken. It is not decorative. It is simply there, in the drawer, waiting for the moment when its function will become clear again. That moment has not yet arrived.
Read it →The problem is not sentimentality, exactly. It is more a kind of epistemological caution. One cannot be certain, at the moment of disposal, that the thing being disposed of will not be needed. This uncertainty is, in practice, infinite. The bin remains empty. The drawer does not.
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