My first day of attempting to go complaint free and I think I did okay. I did fall prey to one outburst while I was fixing dinner, however, and it's a telling one. Like the majority of my complaints these days, it had to do with living in my grandmother's house.

Don't get me wrong - I love the old bird. But she has that fatal Depression-survivor tic of keeping everything that she comes in contact with "in case someone can use it." Like old keys, the locks for which were probably in houses that have long since gone the way of the industrial waste dump. Like bendy straws the great-grandkids brought home from Sonic - last year (and which I doubt they ever use again). Like my Uncle Freddy's old game board pieces (he's over 50) and...well, you get the picture.

It's frustratiing to live and work around the clutter, especially when you prefer rather Zen-like aesthetics like I do, and I got fed up with trying to cook while the gravitationally-challenged mounds of stuff that hold down the kitchen in summer storms kept falling, sliding and catching on whatever I was doing. And before you can say "head's up for a flying bendy straw with 6 months of dust on it" I'm spouting anger and frustration like an ADHD stock trader on line at the DMV.

So what have I learned? That this subject is probably going to be my Achilles heel in this whole exercise. On the conscious level I know I should be very grateful to have a loving family who is willing to put me up (for free, no less, other than my own bills and whatever I can spare for the family larder). And I am, really. I mean, God, how can you not be?

But there is a layer of hair-trigger frustration just under the surface that probably has less to do with the actual booby-trapped clutter piles (although that's plenty by itself, believe me) and more to do with the fact that I don't really want to be here (in Missouri, specifically - nothing to do with gran herself) and I feel rather trapped - as if the mouldering detritus of a good number of lifetimes that surround me are a physical metaphor for this whole geographical-emotional place.

Lots of baggage here. Lots of memories, unfinished business and snippets of a past life I keep trying to get away from and never quite seem to manage to do so on any permanent basis. And all of which is has just been piled up inthe corners waiting for a fire or a really good round of twisters to clear it out of my head.

Stuff to think about. So far, I'd count that as a success.