The pictures on these magazines crack me up.  You know, if my closet only had to store twelve items or less, it might look so picturesque too.  Yeah, all I need to store is a pair of antique tennis rackets, a cyan volleyball, the world’s cleanest baseball, and a basket that has no use and serves no purpose.

Sorry, but my closet is not a shallow set of cubbyholes designed to hold yellow galoshes in singles.  Mine is more like the Black Hole of Calcutta.  The area behind where those coats are hanging?  Astronomers call that the Event Horizon; beyond that point, nothing can escape, not even light.

The bare bulb is actuated by a pull string so worn and frayed that it quietly sobs “kill me” whenever you grasp it.  No effort has been made to conceal those exposed wires, or insulate them, or even bring them up to code.  There is no code in the Closet of Doom, only a deep, eternal blackness that smells like dog pee and cigarette smoke.

The pitted backside of the paneling is what rubs up against whatever clothes you deem fit to hide in here.  You don’t store things in this oubliette as much as you just forget about them.

Definitely a tripping hazard.

Reluctantly, daylight creeps through the various cracks and holes from the outside, but the deeper down it goes, the darker it gets.  The unwritten horror stories of HP Lovecraft are down there somewhere.  I should seal it off for the safety of us all.

I’ve been staring at these awful stairs for years now, and the time has finally come for a little remodeling.  Out with the paneling, in with new drywall.  This is going to be a lot of work in a small tight space and it may not turn out like the front cover of anyone’s magazine, but anything will be an improvement.