Yes, I am a mess… an unmitigated, ten-year-old-tuna-salad-sandwich-on-the-floor sort of mess. Cleaning is difficult. I have arthritis which makes movement difficult. I have diabetes which saps my energy and makes me constantly ill. I have four other incurable diseases as well, hypertension, BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia), psoriasis, and COPD (chronic obstructed pulmonary disorder). I can’t move. I can’t breathe. And there are long periods of time when I can’t even think. I do have a great deal of free time, however, because I was forced to retire from teaching for physical reasons, and having 31 years of experience in the books gives me a full pension negotiated back in the eighties when teachers weren’t universally reviled as money-sponge parasites the way they are now. (Texas Education has always run on the philosophy that teachers can achieve way more for far less money if you are properly mean to them and bully them and make them worry about being fired for low test scores enough that they won’t stop to think and possibly remember that they also have rights as a human being). So my bedroom art-and-writing studio is total chaos. And I am beginning to believe that I must clean it before some part of the biomass absorbs enough magical energy to become sentient and eats me in the night.
I made a resolution to clean it. Of course, wifey won’t help me. She unreasonably points out that since I can no longer share a room because of my chronic pain and numerous ailments, the mess is all made by me and she has no guilt or shame coming to her from not cleaning it for me. She has her own mess and her own ailments to worry about. And I live with two of my three children still in the house, but both, unfortunately teenagers now, and both making twice or three times the mess that I do. They too unreasonably refuse to clean up any messes they didn’t specifically (and provably) make themselves. The dog actually helped with the old tuna sandwich thingy. I think she killed it and ate it while it was contemplating growing legs. But she has been little use to me for putting books back on shelves, picking up smelly socks (without eating them), and folding clean laundry.
So, it all boils down to me getting up the stiff resolve to do ten or fifteen minutes of cleaning at a time as many times a day as I can manage and cleaning it myself. Of course, I found a mysterious old bottle with some kind of imp in it. I have been rubbing it really, really hard and trying to make a genii appear. I can wish the room clean… right after the wish for a bazillion dollars and a brand-new teenage body… um, how many wishes do I get? I might like to turn wifey into a Jessica Alba clone. And I could use a new car… I need to keep looking under the bed. Maybe there are TWO bottles like that!
Maybe I shouldn’t be revealing what my inner sanctum looks like at the moment. Yes, that might be a huge mistake. But I am old and ill and nothing much really seems that big a deal any more. And, besides, I am looking forward to posting post-cleaning-frenzy pictures to impress you with how much everything has changed. (Yeah, that will happen.)
Catch a Falling Star 