The Cabinet, Actually

I get asked this more than I expected when I mention the site name out loud, is the cabinet a metaphor for something. It is not. There’s a real cabinet, it’s an old glass-front thing I got secondhand and refinished badly one winter, and it lives in the corner of the room where I keep games and books after I’ve actually finished them, not before. That’s the whole rule. You don’t get shelved in the cabinet on potential. You get shelved in the cabinet after you’ve earned it.

This sounds like a small thing and it turned into a bigger thing than I expected once I started enforcing it on myself. Before the cabinet, my books and games lived everywhere, half-read paperbacks stacked on the nightstand, shrink-wrapped Kickstarter boxes I hadn’t opened yet stacked next to the shelf like a guilt monument. The cabinet forced a decision. Finish it or it doesn’t get the good spot. I didn’t expect that to change how I read and play, but it kind of did, in a small way, I think I finish things more deliberately now than I used to, because there’s an actual physical reward waiting on the other side of finishing instead of just starting the next thing.

It’s not a big cabinet. Four shelves, glass doors that don’t quite close all the way anymore because I overstuffed it two years running. I’ve had to make some genuinely annoying decisions about what stays and what gets boxed up in the closet once it’s full, and I won’t pretend I’ve been perfectly consistent about it, there’s a copy of something in there right now I’m not totally sure earned its spot.

The refinishing job, since people ask about that too, happened one January a few winters back, one of those stretches where it’s dark by five and I needed a project that wasn’t a book or a game to fill the evenings with. Bought it off someone clearing out a relative’s house, water damage on the bottom shelf, a smell I never fully got out of the wood no matter how many coats of finish I put on it. Sanded it down over two weekends in the garage with the door cracked for ventilation despite the cold, which was miserable, and refinished it a shade darker than it started, which mostly hides the fact that I’m not actually very good at refinishing furniture.

I didn’t set out to make a rule about it. The rule kind of invented itself the first week I had it, when I went to put a book on the shelf that I was maybe two thirds through and just, stopped, hand halfway to the shelf, feeling weirdly like I’d be lying to the cabinet if I put it there early. I don’t know why that specific object triggered that specific instinct and a regular bookshelf never had. Something about it being new, and nice, and mine in a way the sagging particleboard shelf it replaced never quite was.

The rule about not shelving unfinished things has held completely, four years running now, no exceptions I can think of, even when I’ve been tempted.

People occasionally ask if I’d ever expand it, get a bigger cabinet, more shelves, solve the overstuffing problem properly instead of fighting it. I don’t think I will. Part of what makes the rule mean anything is that the space is finite and I have to actually choose what stays, and a bigger cabinet just delays that choice instead of removing the need for it. Four shelves, doors that don’t quite shut, a faint smell I never got out of the wood. That’s the cabinet. That’s the whole story behind the name, no deep metaphor, just an actual piece of furniture with actual rules I made up for myself and then, somehow, kept following for years.