Bipolar Housecleaning

I used to live behind a couch. My drinking had gotten to the point where I had nearly maxed out all of my credit, and could not bring my tip money from waiting tables home. Reason: The bar was closer to home. So I came to live behind the couch of two crackhead sweethearts and a Yorkhsire terrier. The female occupant says she can only clean the house unless she is coked up. Wonderful. Two crackheads, a Yorkie, and the back of a ratted couch for which I have the privilege of paying $50 to endure. I have never seen them use anything for cooking except a bent, burnt spoon. This is funny to me since one of them is a cook. I am frightened, but amused somewhere in my head.

I hate the Yorkie breed. It should be used as a slingshot, not a pet. I love terriers; I was the owner of a pit and now live next to one. I have a Jack Russell, who acts more like a porpoise with tiny legs than he does a dog, and if left alone will shred my house and still be chewing on the last bits of the door frames when I get home. I never believed in the idea that you should crate train a dog until I got this thing. Remember those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where they kept the Tasmanian devil in a nailed up crate with a few eyeholes?

This is what you do with a Jack Russell. Open the crate outside and let it terrorize the squirrels. This breed fears nothing; a few days ago the young pit dug under my fence and was loping in my back yard. There was nothing I could do about it; every damn time I put the pit back in his yard the dumb animal would reappear in my yard. Fuck it, I thought-it’s a one year old pit, and they do not know the meaning of “kill” unless you show it how. The pit-bull heart overflows with love if you do not abuse it. This is why I cannot understand why everyone runs away from them. All they want to do in life is knock you over and lick your facial features off. We could all use some of that kind of love. The Jack Russell is not afraid of any dog’s pedigree, though. I let it out with the pit bull. I come outside a little later and the Jack Russell is in his face, barking at the pit bull, and the pit bull would like nothing more than to get this maniacal dog off of his head. He’s done playing, but the Jack Russell is just getting started.

But Yorkies, damn, what an embarrassment to the breed. It appears very happy, but I know deep down inside that it would like that fur to be shorn down so it can be a dog instead of some bored person’s lap warmer. But enough of that. I have housecleaning to do today.

The hampers are full, and the dish sink looks like it should have a tiny mountaineer hammering pitons into it. I can’t even get into the sink to wash them. The eight-year old plays with “K’Nex” and will not put it away. The Jack Russell often helps by eating the playset, but it is not enough. The eight year old stares at the mess, hoping it will put itself away. This never happens no matter how many times he stares at it. It whines to me, “I am a messy kid and I’m sorry I am such a bad person”. Minutes later I come to check on his progress and he is deep into a computer game, the kind of free game that spams the bejabbers out of your computer. You hope you can contain the mess through the router. That seems to work OK. Kaspersky may not have the absolute best of the best when comes to walking the line between performance loss and detection, but it is the best damn AV I can think of. Besides, they’re working on digging up the source of the Stuxnet virus which strangely enough is designed only to attack Iranian nuclear technology. I think everyone knows by now that either Israel or the United States would do such a jacked-off thing, the kind of thing that makes a Persian boil with broths of revenge. So Kaspersky gets my business because they produce quality while researching electronic warfare. I wish I could do that.

So the kids rooms are fucked. I look into my bedroom, that place where people sleep but is no longer a home for winky whacking. It’s shot to shit. I get the feeling I am headed for that all familiar place in marriage when the wife no longer wants much to do with the God-Damned Idiot anymore in the sex realm. Chances are, this is my fault, but I dress the way I dress and that is that. I wouldn’t even know how to dress myself in a manner that says “come hither and let me slap you with my sidearm”, so fuck it. I also forget to shake after using the toilet, so I can imagine that pee-mottled boxer briefs do not a sexy hunk make. It probably does in a douchebag realm I am not familiar with, so I’m comforted by this. They will get tract infections and hopefully die. I pick up dirty clothes, wishing for a bigger hamper.

Off to the bathroom. My bipolar self says that it is a must to pattern my cleaning so that each successive room I clean is further into the house. This ensures that I haven’t missed a room.

There is another problem, however. If I clean a surface and something is in that room that doesn’t belong there, I take it to the proper room and begin rearranging that room. This actually gets things done quickly, but the upshot for all of your efforts in the last hour is guilting an innocent child, looking balefully at a room where you used to get blown, and a clean medicine cabinet. The pile of laundry has not gotten any smaller. I vow that it is next on my list of obsessions.

The living room is disaster personified. Some evil relative has put a Wii in my house. I no longer have the extension jack that will help me play records that make cops upset. All I can do is add the spent coffee cups to the mountain, which probably makes the tiny mountaineer happy, but does not allow you to even put water into your coffee cup. I am now a Communist; I belong at the Fourth International drinking their coffee instead. But, all I am doing is housecleaning during a med change.

Maybe I do belong there, I thought. Socialists are my kind of people. We don’t win elections, though, so that is out. What I should be doing is taking down Christmas, but I don’t want to be the God-Damned Idiot who breaks any valuables on the tree. I use valuable loosely, but my wife is nostalgic and I have to deal, or go live in my father in law’s’ tools shed. Great, now I have Karl Marx in my head and the notion that Christmas time has come and gone and I’m still looking at this shit. At this point, I wonder if I could even hiccup correctly. Papers are everywhere due to the aforementioned router that could pull the clothes off of people in Spain if they were carrying a short-wave radio. Fuck it.

My desk is a mess. Fuck that shit. I arrange the papers so that they look like the mountaineers’ next conquest. However, nothing is actually done about it, but I now have an ash-strewn surface where I can smoke and drink coffee.

I have arrived where I belong. Nothing has been done, and I am writing until I am yelled at, or for.

I’m going to get more coffee. A Black and Decker coffee maker can make a better cup of coffee than any of your faggoty “Krups” drippers. I do not want Starbucks-if I did, I could just eat sugar and spray whipped cream in my mouth to get it down.

So fuck this mess. Fuck you too.