by Tom Pantera
Columnist

I have a guilty pleasure that probably will cause some of my more high-tone friends to disown me. I got to wallow in it Sunday night when TLC ran three straight episodes of “Hoarding: Buried Alive.”

TLC, which began life as The Learning Channel, gets a deservedly bad rap for running what is probably the most distasteful lineup of programs on cable. The current crown jewel, of course, is “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” In case you’ve been living in a cave, pop-culture-wise, it’s a spin-off of one of the channel’s more horrifying shows, “Toddlers and Tiaras,” which is itself about the kind of truly horrible (by definition) parents who put their kids in kiddie beauty pageants. The new show focuses on one of those families in particular, folks who make the Clampetts look like the Gateses. TLC is previewing another show about two young women in Minneapolis who share a single body from the shoulders down.

I haven’t watched a second of “Honey Boo Boo,” nor do I plan to watch the new one. I’m simply not interested in the former and when it comes to the latter, I actually know a fair amount about such cases (don’t ask) and thus think it probably would be a waste of time.

“Hoarding,” however, is different, for personal reasons.

The people on it are obviously in the grip of fierce mental illness. I have warned Karon, in all seriousness, that if I ever go off the rails, that’s probably how it will come out. I’ve always been a bit of a pack rat and there really isn’t a huge psychological distance between pack rattery and hoarding. The show carries for me the slightest twinge of “what could have been,” hopefully not “what will be.”

Of course, it’s a TV reality show, so you can’t be sure of how much reality it contains. Such shows are notorious for being deftly edited to make whatever point the people who make them want to stress.

And it always raises a few questions I have yet to see answered. For example, it would seem that most of the show’s subjects are good candidates for some kind of involuntary mental commitment. The bar for that usually is pretty high, but from what I’ve seen, hoarders by definition can’t take care of themselves. They often live in physically hazardous situations.

The other thing I’ve noticed, and this is a much smaller but still curious point, is that some of the folks have a lot of shelving in their houses. That almost indicates some degree of planning; they had to buy the shelves and put them up before they could cram them with huge piles of useless things. In other words, for some of them hoarding didn’t just happen. It required some planning.

But still, if these peoples’ living situations are half as bad as they appear to be, they’re bad. At best, people are living amid dangerous clutter. At worst, they’re literally living in sewage.

One wonders if the problem is worse here in America, where materialism is king, than it is in other parts of the world. To be sure, in much of the world people have neither the space nor the time nor the income to load up at garage sales. When most of your day is spent just trying to find food, you generally don’t have time to accumulate purses and teddy bears.

Part of the process of moving to Missouri involved cleaning out a storage garage I’d had for some time. It was a very weird experience; renting that garage was the closest I’ve come to being a hoarder. There were things in there I’d carted around for three decades. It was like an archaeological dig. In the end, most of it went. It had to, because I moved down here with only what I could fit in a 1993 Buck LeSabre and it was packed with the necessary stuff. By the time it was loaded, I don’t think I would have had room left for a single sheet of typing paper.

The surprise was that throwing stuff out was a tremendously liberating experience. I took a quick glance at the memories and then they went in the Dumpster. I probably still kept too much, but I got rid of a lot.

It also was an adventure in confirming something I already knew: that stuff can be a millstone around your neck. I remember when the drive to Missouri was completed, and I had moved into an efficiency apartment, looking around and thinking, “Wow. This is everything I own in the world.” But I quickly realized that it also was everything I really needed and if I needed anything else it was available within a short drive.

Still, the experience was daunting enough that it gave me some insight into the hoarder’s life. I simply didn’t have the luxury of keeping stuff. But if it’s at all possible, and you’ve got some kinks in your psyche, the temptation to do so can be enormous. The past is, for most of us, a foreign country; if you accumulate stuff, it holds the illusory promise of letting you touch that past, revisit that country, and take whatever comfort it can provide.

That comfort is, of course, a chimera. I have yet to meet anyone who was able to fill a real hole in their soul with stuff. We all try that sometimes, but none of us ever succeeds.

So, guilty pleasure or not, I’ll continue watching “Hoarding: Buried Alive.” Yeah, it’s grotesque and depressing and creepy. But if you’ve ever held onto something for too long, it’s a good object lesson.