The problem with never cleaning your room is that objects take on certain archaeological qualities, the passage of time haunts the most ordinary things. I don't really want to be reminded of time's inexorable march this way, in particular the way parts of your life are randomly left behind to be coated with dust while other elements escape that melancholy fate but for no discernible reason. Is my life really so passively arbitrary? Forgotten interests, stale evidences of formerly crucial activities that suggest the flitting of an unfocused mind. It doesn't take long for your recent past to look faded and shopworn, and for your meandering path through it to reveal its faintly ludicrous pattern, the discarded roadside debris on the most retarded road trip ever. This is the real reason many people succumb to the cleaning mania, this obsession with housekeeping. Doing so makes possible the fantasy of living in an eternal present, no history to haunt you. Here's a picture frame that's sitting right where I left it months ago, I'd put it down briefly with the intent of filling it with a particular photograph of someone close to me, someone important in my life, and then I got distracted and didn't do it right away and now I can't even remember whose picture was supposed to go in it. It's covered with dust and I can remember how important it was to me at the time, how meaningful it seemed, not just the picture but the act of framing the picture, a gesture of remembrance. Now, of course, the frame has a different meaning.