Kinsler: Organizing decades of "junk" maybe take some time

I, M Richard Kinsler, have too much junk. Always have, in fact. Because when you repair things, you never know when you’ll need a piece of scrap 2-by-4 for a soft hammer or spacer. Or 20 feet of old-fashioned telephone wire, or some departed guy’s coffee-can collection of screws and nuts, or a cut-off sheet of galvanized steel.

I’ve always been this way. I was perhaps five when the first piles of maybe-useful parts appeared—a discarded stove knob, a lead automobile wheel-balance weight, a long piece of wire, or a foot of gas pipe. These would accumulate in a corner until I was searching for some particular item amongst my stash. But by then it would have become impenetrable, a bundle of interesting artifacts inadvertently bound together with wire or string I’d picked up as I hunted and gathered.

The child is father to the man. Each of the institutions I’ve worked for since then have involuntarily hosted multiple M Kinsler supply dumps, established to supply material for science demonstrations. I had three at Ohio Dominican College and maybe five at COSI, where I was a volunteer. Hidden behind seldom used doors or in empty exhibit spaces they contained wire for demonstrating electromagnetism, an automobile jump starter for power, one of my goofy demonstration motors, carbon rods for producing the world’s brightest light, a sound demonstration that included a scrapped turntable, a 78 RPM phonograph record, and a piece of Styrofoam with a sewing needle stuck through it.

It all came home when I left COSI and now resides in the garage and our office. And I am determined to organize it or at least get it off the floor.

Now, please pay attention here:

My beloved is fond of peanut butter-filled pretzel nuggets. These are packed in large, squarish, wide-mouth clear plastic jars with screw-on lids. I preserve each one as it is emptied, for they are ideal for holding the weird parts I use, or hope to use, in clock repair and other finicky pursuits.

But there’s a limit to how many jars you can keep upon a shelf without some getting squeezed into anonymity behind the others. And that’s why I have ordered a 100-foot roll of yellow plastic chain. This will be cut into six-foot lengths and fastened such that each hangs vertically from various places on our ceiling. Pretzel jars will be stripped of their labels, filled with carefully curated Junk, labeled, and hung on a chain with others. The total number of these M Kinsler Junk totem poles is unknown at this time.

With luck the scheme should allow me to catalog and store all of the Junk that seems to sooth the disordered mind, but don’t ask me about the garage.

Until the End Times, when Natalie gets sick of all my stuff, Mark Kinsler, [email protected], will continue to live in our house in Lancaster under the surveillance of she and the two watchcats.

This article originally appeared on Lancaster Eagle-Gazette: Kinsler: Getting organized starts with a plan