HOARDERS

I have been staying up every night this week. I moved my bad away from the wall and my head is where my feet should be. I have done this because I am obsessed with watching Hoarders. I will watch it on A&E, TLC and sometimes its even on Discovery Channel. From time to time you might even catch an episode of Animal Hoarders on Animal Planet.

I don’t usually get into the sheets I usually just lay on top of the quilt that I got as a part of my Target set a few years ago. I move the pillows down to the edge of the bed turn up the AC and switch on the TV. I say that I will go to bed at ten and then Hoarders comes on and it’s a freight train all the way into early dawn.


I watched this one last night where this woman in Kansas basically had a land fill in her living room, the glass in the house was brown and the trash had decomposed so much that it just looked like a brown mass from floor to ceiling. When the cleaning crew came to help her, they found in the rubble 13 dead cats that had cannibalized each other. They said they must have been dead for over ten years. She had this old wood hutch in her ‘living room’ that was filled with ceramics from her mother who had gotten them from her father who was in the war. I can’t be too sure which war.

I get up for a glass of water. I look around at the dishes I didn’t do at dinner and the litter box I really should have scooped before going to bed and I start to wonder am I a hoarder? I then turn on all the lights and begin to clean the dishes and wipe off the counters. Robin in Kansas looks down at her front lawn from her greasy red bangs. As the crew moves further into her house they make another alarming discovery. The stairwell is filled from floor to ceiling with grocery bags. Robin has been using the bages as her toilet for the last ten years. The bags are filled with human excrement. They begin to pull the bags out from the stairs, if they used a shovel they would just break and fall apart. Her daughter has started to cry and the psychologist has run out of ideas. I guess it got bad when Robins mother died, the loss was too much to handle and then the trash couldn’t get picked up and the pipes broke and now she is using her stairs as the toilet. She claims that the house now belongs to the cats. An empty can of Nine Lives cat food found is sitting in a pile of cat poop and and cat remains.

I look at Robin and she has the look of someone who has either been extremely addicted to drugs or lived on the street for a long time. I start to think about my dad at home with his furniture from Goodwill and his 15 coffee pots. I imagine the walls caving in around him and the rooms in the back of the house molding shut. I imagine the water getting turned off. I imagine him laying on his bed surrounded by animals. 120 dogs and, 240 eyeballs looking at him.

They get to the top of Robins house and they discover that the house is basically falling down around the trash and it is unsafe for the workers to get up to the second level. They have to call off the cleaning efforts. The house must be demolished. Forty years of family history is lost.

Its 2 am and I need to get up but I would rather wonder about the eyeballs on the other side of the world.


If you want to check out Robins Episode of Hoarders- http://www.aetv.com/hoarders/video/?bcpid=44241147001&bclid=605799158001&bctid=606337257001