This is a terrible revelation. I only write to procrastinate the things that I should be doing. I have no idea what I’m going to do now.

This is a true story. In my senior year of high school, I became quite proficient at the piano. I’m talking the classics: Debussy,  Chopin, Beethoven, all those dead guys. I even entered in a couple of competitions. I could spend hours a day practicing, and got so good at it that when I miraculously attended a four-year school, three years later, after hearing me play, a music instructor at the school said I could consider minoring in music.

I’m assuming a major in music was limited to those who played because they had actually developed a passion for it. Not me. I became so good at the piano that I barely graduated from high school.

This is also true. The only reason why I’ve written as much as I have here is that I have a pile of dirty laundry on my floor.

No, there is not a pile of junk behind me in the living room!

I offer you today photographic evidence that with the right help, you too can clean your closet. (Take a look at the before shot!)

In our last episode, I wondered out loud if this transformation would really be possible, given my upbringing and genetic make up and all, even with the hired help of a true professional, Cori Roffler of Declutter with Cori.

To prove to myself that I could do it, and to try do as  much as possible before her arrival last Tuesday, I walked across the apartment, I put my hand on the door knob, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

I exhaled, closed the door, and walked back to my desk.

You may wonder how my closet ever reached that state. It’s very simple. To make my place look presentable to presentable guests, provided I had ample time to prepare, whatever I didn’t want guests to see I would stow in this closet, always with the mental footnote, “I will get to this.”

I never got to it. The closet became a metaphor for garbage I’ve stowed in the dusty cabinets of my mind. No amount of therapy can declutter a cobwebby brain. You can’t talk out the trash. You have to pick it up and hoist it to the garbage bins yourself.

Starting, that’s the hard part. Sometimes, you have to ask for help.

Wednesday morning, Cori arrived at 9am, right on time, armed with a box of garbage bags, and, as I think of it, not much else.

Following her advice, I did visualize throwing things out the night before, and didn’t lose too much sleep, as she said the less time spent deciding and more time acting would make the process happen much more quickly.

What happened next was all a big blur, but one by one, she began hauling objects large and small into different sections of my living room.

“Pay no mind to this,” she warned me. “This will look chaotic at first, but you’ll see how quickly it falls into place.”

So it turns out that this large box with crumpled up paper that I had saved for the last five years, I didn’t really need.

I mean, for example. Most of my closet ended up either in the trash, in the recycle bins, or on its way to Goodwill. Cori even provided its transportation!

Here’s what I did save:

• One set of Bilstein shocks for a Mazda MX-5. Who doesn’t need those?
• One set of springs to go around said shocks.
• Oil filters. Ladies, can a girl have enough oil filters?
• Bike parts, like extra seats, cog sets, blah blah.
• All of my sister’s and my childhood art that I had completely forgotten about.
• My friend Becki Reed’s and my musical that we wrote in highschool. It’s called Lapdog with a Vengeance, and actually I didn’t write it at all. I sat on a chair in her room and we’d throw out ideas, and everything I laughed at, she wrote down, and I laughed a lot. I guess you could call that a colloboration, but she did the actual writing, and the musical score is brilliant. It’s just too bad that she didn’t know how to write music, but I remember some of the melodies, and they are crazy! It’s a horror-musical flick about a brain swapped into the skull of a Ken doll, who then proceeds to go on a mad killing spree, destroying the entire town. It is an amazing work.
• Photos.

All of these are organized now into nice and tidy boxes.

The whole process took exactly two hours, which is only a fraction of what I expected. I ended up with a lot more closet space than I ever expected, too. I even hung up more clothes after this photo was taken, so this is no longer an accurate representation.

Now, I admit moments of weakness. There were times when I stared at my piles of junk and wondered, “How will I get through this?” and fought back a few tears, wondering if I might be trapped inside this dusty closet forever.

These moments did not last long, however, as I got wrapped up in the process. It helps that Cori is not one for small talk.

“Look,” I’d say. “My eight grade science project. I can’t believe it didn’t erode!”

Cori never wandered off task. She calmly kept me in line. 

 You just have to allow yourself the space, and clearly demark what you will save, recycle, and toss out. And then what you save, you organize into categories. You just keep going, cycling through the piles, moving items from one to another, until sooner or later, it almost starts to make sense, and then the next thing you know, you’re moving boxes and bags down into the garbage cans downstairs, and even when you don’t look at your closet, you feel lighter somehow, with less worries, like probably there isn’t anything you can’t do.

You’d think with this new found knowledge I should easily be able to tackle my “home office” on my own.

I work here.

I don’t think so.

Yes. This is my closet. Do you have a problem with this?

Anyone who follows my blog with any regularity, or better, anyone who’s known me for five minutes, knows that I have issues with clutter. It’s not because I’m a bad person. I just can’t tell the difference between neat and messy.

So many of my friends have offered to help. Their offers sound wonderful as I fantasize my studio apartment being as beautiful as their homes, with their modern Scandinavian furniture and book shelving, acccents from Pier One Imports and candles from Cost Plus World Market.

This image lasts for only a few seconds, until I’m flashed backwards to the 3rd grade, and the sound of my mom crunching through my toys on the floor of my room, admonishing me as she attempts to organize the piles, and I’m forced to sit through it.

“Do you need this?” she says, waving my Electrosketch. Of course I need my Electrosketch. I use it like all the time.

“What about this?” she says, slamming my Barbi Corvette into the ground.

“And these?” she says, scraping all my Matchbox cars off the table into the garbage can.

I shudder as I come back to the present moment, I look my girlfriends in the eye, and I say, “No way.” 

I’ve considered hypnosis, to reprogram myself to hate clutter, but then I would be miserable, because I still wouldn’t know what to do with it.

So, I went online and found professional help. Her name is Cori Roffler, and she is a Professional Declutterer.

As I weighed in my mind the pros and cons of actually paying someone to do something that women were just supposed to know how to do, inherently, I played back and forth the sound reel of my mother stepping on and breaking my belongings, all to make some kind of point, the sighs, the strained silence, the grunts of pain as she stubbed her toes, the extrapolated and imagined conversations of my girlfriends screaming as they dig through my closets, one comforting sentence Cori wrote on her webpage compelled me to click Send. That sentence was:

Believe me I have seen it all and I want to help. I offer a fresh eye and no judgement. Once we’ve started I promise the anxiety and embarrassment will disappear.

Today Cori came for my free consultation, arriving at my abode at precisely 11 o’clock from her home, which I can only imagine is immaculately maintained, in San Francisco.

Her eyes didn’t bulge out of their sockets. She didn’t run for the door. She said, “I think I can work with this.”

Her suggested plan of attack, since I’m tackling my entire apartment, and not just a room — because that would be impossible — would be work in waves, on a weekly basis. Phase One: my walk-in closet, which I offer to you to scrutinize all you want, because by Wednesday of next week, it’s going to look totally different. Like, you’re going to be so way jealous and wish you had a closet like mine.

I’m in one of those arguing kinds of moods.

From Swimming World:

During the past 10 years, 36 out of 36,000 member-coaches of USA Swimming, or .1 percent, have been reported and banned for life from USA Swimming – a punishment that USA Swimming Executive Director Chuck Wielgus calls its death penalty. These numbers are according to Wielgus.

Does banning someone once he’s already been incarcerated really count?

One big bone of contention, apparently, is 20/20′s comparison of USA Swimming with the Catholic Church.

“I think there is a huge distinction between USA Swimming and the Catholic Church that has been missed so far [in reporting],” Wielgus told Swimming World. “That distinction is that USA Swimming has never done anything to try to hide or shield coaches who have conducted themselves inappropriately. To the contrary, we have asked that coaches be reported. When they are reported, we immediately turn that information over to our legal counsel and seek to banish these coaches from the sport. That’s not what the catholic priests have done. They have hidden, transferred and protected [sexual offenders].”

So, I guess that parents are supposed to feel better that USA Swimming is nothing like the Catholic Church. Oh, okay. But  I just want someone to directly react to my “lost” complaint to Pacific Swimming. Since they apparently have such open channels, it doesn’t make sense that it was “lost.” Even the board member who told it me it was lost put “lost” into quotation marks. What the. 

And now that same board member, the only one who even remembers the complaint, is saying that it’s not what I’m saying it’s about, that it was only about excessive yardage and yelling. 

Okay, now why would that be. He was so supportive of me of going to the police when Andy King was arrested. Now he’s saying my complaint was about something else?

Don’t you find that, I don’t know, weird?

It’s like this: you either apologize for your organization losing the complaint, or we know it’s a cover up. If you deny that I sent it, if you deny what it was about, it’s a cover up.

Or maybe USA Swimming isn’t covering anything up, but you might want to talk to Pacific Swimming, because apparently, they didn’t get the memo.

My word. Who am I. I’m not a coach, I’m not a parent, I swim three times a week, I participate in masters open water swims. I love swimming. It’s the best sport in the world. I don’t want kids to quit swimming. I don’t want kids to be abused. 

Couldn’t someone say, “Katie Kelly, we are sorry, from the bottoms of our hearts, that we failed to act upon your complaint, and that we lost it. In the future, such complaints will be referred to the highest channels and treated with the upmost respect. We have learned from this mistake.”

If you can’t say that, well, then maybe you could say a couple of Hail Marys.

I’m sad to say that if you think what I described earlier today sounds bad, it’s nothing compared to what the true victims have suffered. So as 20/20 investigated, more victims nationwide came out of the woodwork. What I’ve seen and read is appalling and makes me want to throw up. 

Avni was apologetic, but that this is in the national news is good enough for me, and also, let us not forget that I have a powerful blog, and I have seventeen readers.* If seventeen readers tell seventeen friends, and they tell seventeen friends, then seventeen times three people will know about this (that was easier to say than actually doing the math).

On the 20/20 webpage, there is an ABC News report that gives some background into the story. As of this typing, there are 66 comments. One of them is from Chuck Wielgus, President of USA Swimming. He doesn’t seem to be very happy with the report.

I mean, I can understand why. We have to remember that 36 coaches have been banned from coaching for USA Swimming for life. They’re taking a stand. One of banned coaches is Andy King, for example. Way to go, USA  Swimming, banning him now that he’s been sentenced to forty years in prison. That sends a very strong message that convicted child molesters living in prisons will not be tolerated in the program.

I’m posting in full Chuck Wielgus’ comment to the ABC News item on this, so he can’t accuse me of taking anything out of context, but with one particular sentence that I have put into bold, because I have something to say about that.

He writes:

I understand and appreciate the sentiment, and even the outrage, that some people might have over my comments about apologizing, or not apologizing, to the victims of these terrible crimes. While the quotes are accurate, they fail to take into account the context in which they were given during my interview with Brian Ross. I agreed to participate in the interview with Mr, Ross because I saw this as an opportunity to openly discuss what is a major societal issue and global problem. The issue of inappropriate behavior by adults with underage youth is something that every youth-serving organization must face; including all youth sports programs, schools, camps, clubs, religious youth groups, etc. While no organization has a child protection system that is fool proof, USA Swimming has safeguards that are constantly being reviewed and improved upon. When Mr. Ross agressively asked me if I owed an apology to the victims, I confess to taking umbrage to what I at first interpreted as a personal attack. Having worked with the volunteer and staff leaders of USA Swimming for more than a dozen years, I knew first-hand how committed these people were to constantly finding ways to improve every aspect of the organization’s programs and services and my comments were a reflex reaction to what I perceived as an unfair attack. My heart breaks for these poor kids who lost so much of their innocence when they put their trust and faith in a coach who then used his position of trust and authority to take advantage of them. I’m incredibly sorry these awful things happened, but the reality is that I also believe USA Swimming was doing everything it reasonably could to have appropriate safeguards in place; and we will continue to evaluate and implement whatever additional safeguards we can to help our member clubs provide as safe and healthy an environment as possible for the hundreds of thousands of kids who have chosen to participate in sport of swimming.

Mr. Wielgus, what you’re supposed to say is, “I’m incredibly sorry that we failed you.”

*I might not even have seventeen readers.

I know I talked about my swim coach in a prior blog post here, describing a special one-on-one workout in which he proceeded to emotionally abuse me for an hour straight because I did not perform up to his expectations.

But this coach, Andy King, did far more worse things than that.

More than twenty years later, I am still so angry.

Here’s what he did to me.

I’m 19 years old, my two years swimming for Chabot Junior College in Hayward, CA, are done, but I’m still swimming with Andy King’s age group team, Chabot Aquatics, because he says my swim team in Pleasanton let me down, that they didn’t recognize my talent, and only he sees it.

It’s the summer time. No one really wants to swim today. We’d rather lounge about in the sun.

Andy says that if I kiss so-and-so for thirty seconds, we can get out of swim practice for the day.

There are twenty of us there, probably. Nineteen are in hysterics. They are shrieking. This is awesome, maybe one of the funniest things they’d ever seen.

I say no way. No way are you going to make me do this.

This isn’t the first time he’s wanted me to do this, and I can’t figure out what’s so funny about it. Why are the others okay with this? How is this funny? Why isn’t anyone backing me up? Why am I going this alone?

My teammattes, from as young as twelve and as old as 23, are not just okay with it, they’re demanding I do it, because now he’s upping the stakes. This time, if I don’t do it, we’ll all have to do 10 x 400 IMs, which is possibly the worst set ever invented. It’s not a set. It’s what lazy coaches concoct because they can’t think of anything more creative or challenging. There’s no goal behind it, no point. It’s punitive.

The stakes are: if I don’t do it, everyone’s going to hate me. They’re telling me how much they’ll hate me. They’re screaming at me to do it. These are my friends, my world. I have to do it. This kid I’m supposed to kiss says I have to do it.

I feel my face burning in humiliation, and this kid sits right next to me. Our lips touch, and I watch from the corner of my eye, all my friends, jumping, clapping and laughing.

One minute and seven seconds later, I have an afterglow, they say. This was good for me. I’ve always been too much of a prude, you see. I need to break out of my chains.

Andy says he had no idea that I had it in me, that he’s so proud of me. He says he lost track of the time, because it was so exciting to watch.

We go back to the locker room to change and go home and enjoy the sunshine of the day.

Thirteen years later, I sent an email to Pacific Swimming describing this, because I had heard rumors about him and young girls, I heard coaches complain about him and young girls, but he was still coaching. I was 33 years old by then, as only then was there enough distance to see that what he had done to me was so wrong.

So, here, let me send this to you, Pacific Swimming. Here’s what he did to me.

Pacific Swimming lost the complaint.

Andy King will spend the rest of his life prison now, because while he was training his swimmers to laugh at others’ humiliation, while he was prescribing marathon sets to get everyone out of his hair, he was molesting his much younger female swimmers. You know, having sex with them. Buying them birth control. Proposing marriage to 15 year olds, when he was over 40.

He did this for thirty years, moving from state to state when it appeared he might get caught, leaving his past behind him.

USA Swimming is saying that sometimes things like this just slip through the cracks.

Cracks. What about this gaping black hole called an Inbox.

What changed. Why would it take so long for his reign of abuse to come to an end?

Because a fifteen year old girl in San Jose had the courage to speak up, and adults had the courage to listen.

These were magical times. We would pile into a friend’s car and go to downtown Bakersfield basements to see amazing bands like Jumping Trains and Rain on Jade, and this one band called Spike 1000 that almost made it big in San Francisco years later, but not quite. Then we would go through the Taco Bell drive-thru.

I have no idea where any of these people are now.

When I say computer print out, I mean, from one of those printers that used a lot of dots. Remember those? My computer came from Radio Shack.

None of us could pronounce Micael without using a Russian accent, which is weird, because Micael is from Sweden. So we called him Swede.

I wonder where he is sometimes.  I hope he doesn’t mind me putting this on my blog, but I like it.

"The Four Man Mosh Pit" in its original Radio Shack printer format.

To Katie in memory of the Four Man Mosh Pit:

The other day I went to a concert in downtown Bakersfield because everybody else was going. When my friends and I reached the entrance, I could hear a ghastly noise flowing from within. “Oh,” my friend said. “The band has already started.” “Yeah, right,” I said, “when did bands start to sound like a jumbo jet at take off.”  I hesitated to go inside since I think my hearing is a very precious thing which I want to keep. But, my friends said that they had been to so many concerts and they do not have any hearing problems. So I followed inside.

I rushed towards the jumbo jet sound, but got caught in a strong grip. It was the bouncer. “You’d better pay you little ferret, or the skies will fall down on you,” he said.

“I’m going to CSUB,” I said. “I shouldn’t have to pay.”

“All right, I sneaked in when I was your age, so I’ll let you sneak in, too,” the bouncer said. He let go of me and I ran inside. My friends were gone, so I bought some popcorn to stuff my ears with since they were still playing that awful music. My friends used to say thatI should give the music a chance and I will start to like it. That might be true for them, but not for me.

I sat down. Suddenly, four people walked up in front of the band to start a mosh pit. The point of mosh pitting is to turn around hitting each other and avoid listening to the music. Everybody thinks that is fun. But these guys were only four people, and that could not be fun. However, they started to move to the music. The four man mosh pit went on for about five or six seconds when one of them kicked up his knee in the face of his buddy, so his glasses flew fifteen seat rows up in the audience.

At the same time another mosh pitter got ready for a stage dive. Unfortunately, he forgot that there were only three people in the mosh pit of which one was seriously hurt with a slight concussion and another one calling 911. The fourth one, himself, bravely threw himself out over the assumed sea of mosh pitters. If you ever have dropped an egg on concrete you will know the destiny of this young maniac. I was just about to run for help when a piece of popcorn that was in my ear penetrated my ear drum. I sank to the floor in pain.

With this story I want to prevent anybody from ever starting a mosh pit with less than five people, and do not ever use popcorn as ear plugs.

Swede.