Mess has expanded to four desks

How is it possible for one man to have so many messy desks?

That’s the question before us today.

It may not be earth-shattering, but at least it doesn’t involve Donald Trump, Robert Mueller, Brett Kavanaugh or any thing about hurricanes.

For some reason, I have four desks, all of them messy.

Two of them are on the second floor of the newspaper offices in Portland.

One desk, the big one, was acquired from Berne’s Dunbar Furniture as a cast-off. It’s beautiful and huge, and it’s probably the least messy of the four.

That’s because, instead of just random clutter and empty peanut wrappers, it features a mountain range of stacks of papers.

What kind of papers? How should I know?

About once every six months — OK, once a year — I edit those stacks and send several reams of paper to recycling. At the top of the stacks are things that are more or less timely and things that shouldn’t be forgotten but probably have been. At the bottom, it’s anybody’s guess.

The other desk, where my Macbook laptop resides, is smaller but has a much cooler back story. It was originally a clerk’s desk at Peoples Bank in the early 20th century. Destined for the kindling, it was instead donated to the Graphic Printing Company back about 1949.

Then it went through an ink-stained period when it was used by the late great Quentin Imel when the Graphic was located behind what is now J&P Custom Plating. So much ink covered it, one would have thought it had been painted black.

At some point, it ended up on the third floor of the company’s building at 309 W. Main St., pretty much forgotten.

But Quentin hadn’t forgotten it. And before he retired, he restored the piece. Cleaning off the ink and grime, refinishing the wood, taking it completely apart and putting it back together again. It is a gem.

Except for one thing: The mess that covers most of its surface.

Most of the clutter is reporter’s notebooks. Going on 45 years now, one of those hip-pocket-sized notebooks has been within reach — usually in my hip pocket. But they tend to stack up like a kind of journalistic firewood.

My third desk at the office is on the first floor. It’s where I park when I’m helping out in the newsroom, and it’s pretty much a disaster area. Notebooks, school board agendas, scribbles to myself that I can no longer begin to decipher, it’s all there.

I keep saying to myself that I’m going to clean it up, but the nearest wastebasket is full and that provides just enough of an impediment for me to procrastinate.

The fourth desk is the one at home, in my study, the place where I’m writing this column.

And it’s not much better than the others.

In front of me at the moment, I can see two boxes of business cards, a little notebook full of addresses and computer passwords I keep forgetting, a phone, a modem, a weather radio, a calculator, at least one highlighter, a Golem that I picked up in Prague and a nifty little thing that holds nine different flashdrives.

What’s on those flashdrives? Your guess is as good as mine.

I’m hoping that on one of them there’s a file that gives detailed instructions on how to organize this mess.

But what are the chances of that?

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Editor’s note: The wastebasket nearby the first-floor desk is now empty. We will see if that sparks a cleaning spree.