Oh, oh my gosh—I think I forgot the very best part of one of my favorite Hoarders episodes—the part that was so ironic and yet probably not intended to be ironic, and sad and funny all at once. Did you see the episode where the older woman lives in New Orleans, and her adult children come back to help her clean all the garbage out of her house, but she really doesn’t want to part with the garbage, and they are so mad at her? This is the episode, the preview of which had dead, flat cats in it and scared my friend Shannon into insomnia. It really was very terrifying to see the state of the inside of her house, but what really got to me was one of the exterior shots, clearly just added by the editors to establish that she lives in a decent neighborhood and the rest of the block isn’t that run-down, and that she needs to pull herself together.
So, they get a shot of her outside, and what activity do they catch her in the midst of doing? Is she gardening, or playing with the dog (clearly not, since all the animals inside her house are buried under years of accumulated crap), or perhaps even sitting on the porch waving at her neighbors?
Nope. The one shot of her outside her house is of her taking a garbage bag out—to the garbage. This leads me to simply ask:
What’s in that bag? What qualifies as actual garbage that gets thrown away when you live in a HOUSE MADE OF GARBAGE? What does this woman look at and go "oh no, I have to throw that away– that's really gross!"
Seriously, people. She's living with dead cats in her house, so I really have no idea what's in that trashbag. Also, trashmen come by her house, and they pick up the trash, and do they just have no idea of what is lurking inside the house? Yiiiiiiikes.
In other Hoarders news, we have now made four trips to Goodwill and thrown out countless bags of garbage ourselves. I do still have a fair amount of storage boxes containing my mother’s old things and stuff from my childhood, but they are clean, labeled, and well-organized and does not contain any dead cats. Operation Cleanout continues to go well, I am up to my eyeballs in work and writing, and yes, tomorrow is my birthday. So there you go!