Lately I've gotten sucked into the decorating-show vortex. Maybe you've watched some yourself: Clean House and Sell This House! and the ubiquitous Queer Eye. This is what strikes me over and over when I watch those shows: Rooms look good with nothing in them. Well, a few things -- six or eight fat candles, a zebra-striped throw rug, and a bitsy couch that seats about a butt and a half. No TV, no sagging bookcases, and good God, no cat furniture.

And knickknacks? Don't even talk about knickknacks. So not cool.

I've had a lifelong fear of knickknacks. My mom didn't have any, except for some salt-and-pepper shakers that spent their lives hermetically sealed inside a glass-fronted hutch, where they never needed dusting. Dust, that was the thing: Knickknacks got dusty. Not in my mom's house, they didn't.

So it came as a surprise to me, after watching those Spartan decorating shows and surveying my own disastrous house -- a Superfund site of mismatched furniture -- to find that the single nastiest area in my house is my desk. My desk is where I write and use the Internet and play computer games and otherwise occupy hours and hours of my life. And it's infested with knickknacks.

But these are no ordinary knickknacks. They're not unicorns; they're not dolls or plush mice or ceramic picture frames with fat little bears hugging the mugshots of my loved ones. No, these are souvenirs -- an entirely different animal.

Okay, so I love souvenirs. They have to be a certain size (about 2 by 2 inches), and I don't like primary colors, glitter, or anything depicting cute children. Kitsch is fine; kitsch is good. Kitsch is my right and privilege, and they can't take that away from me without a constitutional amendment. But cute -- cute is the enemy. Cute is the end of civilization. Cute is the absence of satire, the blank nothingness of space devoid of intelligent planets. Cute must be dismembered and shipped back to where it came from, thereby discouraging its kind from ever coming here again.

So on every trip I take, I have to make embarrassing stops at tourist traps to look for kitschy -- not cute -- souvenirs. I especially love the gift shops that you can't avoid -- the ones that are at the end of the copper-mine tour, or between you and the churro stand. So I take a little detour through the shop, feeling silly, and I have to look at everything -- dishtowels stamped with "Mystery Moaning Caves!" and earrings shaped like armadillos and license-plate holders that say "Utah: Gateway to Nevada."

And somehow, God help me, all the souvenirs I've ever bought have ended up on my desk. And I'm not parting with them. No way. You will have to pry that tiny brass Eiffel Tower out of my dead fingers.

So there I am, looking at Queer Eye -- the "after" part of the show, where the poor schlub comes home to his living room that only yesterday looked like the basement at St. Vincent de Paul's. And now it's transformed: The gay guys have thrown out all of his furniture, painted stripes on his walls, lit a half-dozen fat candles, and bought him some impossibly expensive ottomans. And I'm sitting there, thinking, "Where is his Nomar Garciaparra bobblehead from Fenway? Where is his Kansas Tornado-in-a-Can? Where is his personality?"

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for change. I'm all for elegance. I'm anti-futon and pro-accent wall. I wish there were a show called Queer Eye for the Dorky Middle-Aged Woman, just so they could come here and throw out all my old magazines.

But they'd better keep their hands off my Agrodome paperweight, the one with the rams' heads and sheepdogs. And my Indiana University beer stein -- give me that. My copper spray-painted Cologne Cathedral, my teeny-tiny lunar lander (okay, I didn't actually go there) -- out of the question. And now that I think of it, my dumpy record shelves came from the warehouse at Guitar Player magazine, where I used to work. Sentimental value; I'm not parting with those. And the scratched teak table was my first piece of furniture; that's a no-toss zone. Ditto on the one-ton bed, the lone bar stool, and the storage cabinet I made myself.

All right -- it won't be much of a makeover. Maybe they could just rearrange my stuff so it doesn't look so cluttered. Maybe they could buy me a house the size of a Howard Johnson's, so we could cut it down to just four or five souvenirs per room. But my apartment -- hey, I like my apartment. It took me a year to find it. It reminds me of the bad old days, my last big breakup and sad Peter Gabriel songs, and come on, guys, that's part of my history. You can't come in here and crack the landmarks of my life over your knee like so much kindling. In fact, I think it would be better if you waited outside.

You don't want to get me riled up. There are so many things in here I could throw.

Amy Miller can be reached at amymca@earthlink.net. She's discovered that cat whiskers look just like electrical wires.