On clutter panic.

Right after hitting "publish" on the last one an idea occurred to me: I wonder if I'll undergo some kind of "clutter panic" as a result of all this streamlining.

I've been a slob all my life, as my mother will assure you, though I have a very good memory for which random spot I left whichever random object on my way to making a mess bigger than any sane person would live with. Whenever I do clean up my space, the difference is phenomenal: everything becomes much more clear, visually and otherwise. But I never work to make that be the case all the time; I'm used to clutter, and embrace it by default, by not doing anything about it.

I could pretty easily see the one-in-one-out method to objects (physical or otherwise) beyond music driving me to some kind of stir craziness. When you buy lots of records as an afterthought for more than half your life, it's not simply a habit. There's something psychological at hand, surely, and while what exactly that might be isn't the point here, taking it away is very likely to provoke some kind of reaction. The fact that I even thought of this wrinkle should tell you something. Greil Marcus once described an R. Crumb comic as being "about the disease of record collecting"; maybe it's something akin to that.