Photo credit: Ethan Hill for The New York Times
I laughed out loud several times while reading this essay by Jonathan Ames (amateur hoarder and creator of the TV series ‘Bored to Death’):
So, what is kipple, and why did it cause me to lose my fork? I learned about kipple from the Philip K. Dick novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Here is an exchange between a man named J. R. Isidore and a character named Pris Stratton.
This building, except for my apartment, is completely kipple-ized.
“Kipple-ized?” She did not comprehend.
Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers. … When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more. …
The entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.
Like Dick, I am in firm agreement that everyone in the universe — including those of us on Earth — struggles, in varying degrees, with kipple. Who doesn’t have a medicine cabinet teeming with rusted nostril-hair clippers, congealed unguents and empty bottles of Motrin, or a bedside table drawer frothing with old, forlorn, hastily ripped condom wrappers, bar mitzvah yarmulkes and 13 tangled, airline-issued eye masks?
Seriously, who doesn’t?