What Drawers Are For

Every three months I need to buy new headphones—the wired ones that plug into an iPhone. I’m not sure exactly why they’re breaking, maybe I’m being punished for listening to nothing but guilty pleasures, forcing me to engage the “private listening session” option on Spotify, lest I be caught enjoying Chandelier by Sia on repeat for an entire afternoon. 

Out of nowhere they’ll stop playing in one ear, pause and play the music at random, or at their worst trigger Siri, causing me to go ballistic, enveloping me in fits of rage that have mothers covering the ears of their children. Once the headphones have sent me into enough manic episodes I will order a new pair and banish the broken ones to my desk drawer. This drawer is a sanctuary for my bullshit: a yearbook, receipts, a pencil sharpener, all my important documents, napkins, letters about taxes I can’t decipher, and roughly 9 pairs of busted headphones. I keep them for the same reason a child keeps the tube from the Christmas wrapping paper, or a white guy keeps his iPhone box. Because it’s a material that feels substantial. There’s a belief, when holding such a material, that somehow, someway, it will be used for a project.

I had kept my pile of wired headphones for years until about a month ago as I was organizing my drawer I decided there would be no project and threw them all away. It felt mature, like I had finally grappled with a fundamental truth: that while it’s true I had dreams of artistic grandeur, a dream is all it would ever be. This idea of using the headphones for a project, where they would be taken out of the drawer and crafted into a work of art alongside glue, glitter, maybe a poster board, some pipe cleaners perhaps, was nothing but a fantasy. 

That is until three weeks laters I had an idea for the broken headphones and a rueful thought crossed my mind: I wish I still had those headphones. Now, I will not be disclosing what the idea was, that’s not the point of the story. The point is I regretted throwing away broken headphones. Regret, coupled with the dreadful realization that if I wanted to pursue this project, which of course is a fleeting muse, a desperate attempt to distract myself from the six or seven real issues I need to face (I’m still unemployed, for instance), I’ll have to wait like, two years before I get enough headphones to accomplish it. 

So let this be a reminder to anybody that has a pile of shit tucked away in a drawer: keep it—you might just come up with an idea. Whether it be the scraps of denim from the jeans you cut into shorts or the tin boxes of empty Altoids, keep it. That’s exactly what those drawers are for, a refuge for the eclectic mix of trinkets and knick knacks that may one day work as building blocks towards creative inspiration. They need not be tampered with, and whatever you do, don’t go in there and try to organize it. Why organize drawers? You’ve already organized—the stuff is in a drawer. Organizing a drawer is like cleaning soap. It is clean. Soap is the essence of cleanliness. A drawer is organization. It is its very nature. 

Now a shelf, sure, organize that. A counter top—of course things must be stacked, arranged, finessed. But a drawer, now that’s Thunderdome, a lawless hellscape specifically designed to house bits of yarn, old credit cards, and candy. A hideaway for degeneracies: condoms, a pack of cigarettes, a diary where you write bad stuff about your friends. A drawer is for paperclips and your old phone and a letter you never had the courage to send or (more likely) the envelope for a letter you never had the willpower to write in the first place. 

To attempt to put order to a drawer is an attempt to harness the wind, to manipulate a law of the universe. Let it be, let it simply exist, because the minute you try to control the continents of a drawer you’ll end up ditching a mangled pile of broken headphones then realize a month later that they would have looked kinda neat hanging from a corkboard or something.