May 13, 2006

keep the dirt you love while creating more garbage than ever

It's incredible. I am currently dealing with a dirty floor emergency / phenomenon. Other people's dirt. Though, technically, now it's mine. The dirt, having originated from the past, comes like a gift with this, the present-day apartment. It's very much like an apartment I looked at years ago. That apartment came with a piano. A big useless piano. It was wedged into a corner of an alcove that the landlord kept calling the dining room. And wedged in such a way that the keyboard sort of spilled into the kitchen. It was a big piano that no one wanted to talk about. But I did bring it up. Finally. The big piano. And it was then that the big piano was spun in the best possible light to me by the landlord ..Yes! Yes! This apartment comes with a big piano (that you don't need) ..Did I forget to mention that? Oh. I see. So, now, after having moved into this apartment, I admit, I did not immediately mop the floors. I did sweep a little bit. But there were bigger problems for me to attend to right then. Especially as the prior tenants hadn't moved all the way out of the apartment, but something like 50% of the way out of the apartment. That was week one. The whole time I was thinking I had medium dark wood floors. And, as I had never had dark floors before, but the blandest, most boring of light wood floors, I was kind of excited about this turn of events in my life (floor-wise). But I learned, finally, that the dark floors were a misunderstanding based on assumption. It appears that the people who used to live here (and how many people they were is unclear, even to the landlord) used nothing but a dry variety Swiffer for the duration of their lease. I know this based on instinct via the data collected (per the evidence of my soap and water excavation). The floors were, underneath a layer of filth, honey colored. So, swiffing, which sounds just as half-assed as it is (onomatopoeia, still blowing my mind on a daily basis), had to be the extent of the prior tenants floor cleaning regime. And, as I had to move quite a bit of their stuff for them (as it became clear that they were never coming back) I found the offending Swiffer. Their stuff being another story for another time (and these treasures, from the house of beer-bongs, for young transplants from farming communities, who don't clean until the procure proper wives/cleaners from local big-city watering holes, only to move back to said farming communities, as, at the end of the day, the city is so dirty, included everything from the broom closet). So, it was affirmative. They, the prior tenants, were dry variety Swiffer types. Where a quick, occasional dusting off of their floors (literally just pushing around the exterior top layer of debris) without the employment of so much as a broom bristle, or anything like water, was good enough for them. Swiffer. There was an arsenal of this sort of thing. Every kind of disposable wipe that there is (disposed elsewhere, a far away, very possibly mythical location). Magnetic duster bullshit magic mittens. A spray to remove wrinkles without an iron. A spray to remove odors without washing. Drops that eat spills on carpets. Dryer sheets that stop one dead in their tracks with their insanely horrible floral infusion. Making one's happy new apartment smell like A Billion Chemical Roses Brought To You From The Wonderful People At Clorox. Or Dupont. Or 3M. As well, a room spray that does not need to be sprayed, nor in any way released from it's bottle, to make a space smell like lemons. Lots of lemons. Laboratory lemons. In what I can only assume will be the sad future of lemons. In my closet. Now in the garbage. Out of here. Disposed to elsewhere. A far away place that smells like garbage. And also lemons. It lingers oh so slightly around my kitchen, this odor. The lemoniest ever scent that there ever was. But it's going. Going slowly away. I did keep the found freezer bags, though. I will admit that.

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