Last night, for some reason, I decided to unplug and remove all of my electronics from my entertainment center (a nice two-shelf IKEA stand with a center divider and frosted glass doors) and then reorganize them and try to get some declutter action going on. Here is a complete list of what I had:

A Comcast cable box.
A 5-disc DVD player.
A DVD player that hasn’t worked since May because of lens cleaning issues (if you want it, it’s yours).
A laserdisc player that plays the 2nd Terminator II disc lodged inside but hasn’t been capable of opening the disc tray for four years.
A Playstation 2.
A Nintendo GameCube.
A Nintendo 64.
An original Nintendo that doesn’t even work (and yet is plugged in).

In addition, there were some cables (power cords, A/V stuff) that were at one point connected to something, but apparently, when I removed whatever it was they’d been connected to, I left the cords instead of trying to figure out which ones they were.

It took about fifteen minutes to unscrew, unplug, disconnect, blah-blah-blah, and remove everything from the unit. I found some chap stick from last year (or maybe the year before last) and am a little unsure as to whether or not it is safe to use (so for the time being, I put it somewhere safe, and have already forgotten where that is). After deciding to permanently remove the laserdisc player and the original Nintendo from the unit (I mean, it doesn’t work, so what’d be the effin’ point?), and cleaning out the dusty inside of the cabinet, I was able to put all the game systems on the lower left-shelf, and the cable box and DVD player on the upper left, freeing up the right-hand side for DVD and game storage.

All this took about an hour, and I had some fun screwing the cable connections back into place. When I had sound working for the cable, but no picture, I experimented for about ten minutes (thinking I’d screwed one of the cables into the wrong place) before I remembered that some times, when the cable box has been turned on, I’ll get sound but have to change the channel to get the picture up. Sure enough, I’d had it right the first time and couldn’t just hit Channel Up or Channel Down.

Long story short: the cabinet is a lot fuller, the remaining cords, while fewer, are still a cluttered clusterfuck mess, and, with the doors closed, everything looks exactly as it did before I decided to start messing with stuff. Now, if I can just find someone to fix the damn laserdisc player …