In March of 1947, police were called to a dilapidated brownstone in Harlem. Someone had called in a tip that there was a dead body in the house.

This wasn’t the first time the police had been called to the premises. Five years earlier, the bank that held the note on the brownstone began foreclosure on the house for delinquent payment. After a confrontation with the police, the owner paid the remaining balance of the mortgage and vanished back into his house.

This was no ordinary house. The people who resided within were called The Ghosty Men by neighbors. By the time they died in 1947, the Collyer Brothers were a local legend.

When the police were finally able to enter the house, by dislodging several tons of collected effluvia, they discovered Homer, the older of the two brothers, dead. The younger brother, Langley, was missing.

Over the next few months, the police removed tons and tons of newspapers, baby carriages, fourteen grand pianos — and even a Model T — from the residence. In all, over 100 TONS of well, crap, was removed from the house. A month into the process, Langley’s rat-eaten corpse was unearthed.

The Collyer brothers suffered from Disposophobia — or compulsive hoarding. It’s one of the Obsessive/Compulsive disorders. It prevents people from throwing things away to the point where it begins to interfere with their lives.

Recently, a crematory operator in Georgia had stockpiled 339 corpses, never getting around to the job of cremating them. There were also trucks and cars filled with garbage. His office was almost impassible from the piles of clutter. The investigators on the case don’t believe that malfeasance was involved. He just got overwhelmed.

Maybe I’m wacky, but I’m pretty sure at some point I might have popped a few of those corpses into the fire. You know, run a mop on the floor, filed a few papers.

Stories like those of the crematory operator and the Collyer Brothers fill me with dread. I have some of that hoarding instinct. I think we all do. I know The Dude does.

We have roughly 13,000 books in the house. We’re out of wall space. The book shelves are doubled up and have begun to sag. There are some books we’ve packed up and put in storage – though far fewer than I would like. Then there’s the game collection, the car magazines, the back issues of The New Yorker, the guitars, and the tchatckes from other obsessions like basketball, cartoons, and game projects, to name a few.

I don’t hate any of these things. They make The Dude who he is. But I confess, I have many, many moments when I feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we have. (Not my stuff. My stuff is necessary. Of course.)

The other day, The Dude showed me an interview with an “anti-anti-clutter” author. The premise is that disorder is a good thing. It supposedly helps the creative process. I can’t really argue too much with that. I’m a piler myself and I find that I have lots of bits and pieces of whatever I’m working on floating around the work area.

My problem comes when you can’t find what you need because there’s so much other stuff in the way. And failing to discern between, say, garbage and something of real value.

Those little tags that come with socks, throw those away. I promise you don’t need them. Credit card receipts from the gas you bought two months ago, toss ‘em. Ticket stubs from events that have passed into obscurity and you don’t remember anything about them – let it go. That lime in the back of the fridge — and you don’t buy limes — throw it out.

I’m just saying that it’s not the stuff you need, or want, or can use that is cluttering your life. It’s all that other crap. And not knowing the difference between the two is the problem.

And for Cripe’s sake, if you have more than four corpses in your shed, find someplace for them to go. They are definitely bad clutter.