Yesterday, I received a
memo from
my landlord informing me that my
apartment was for sale.
To paraphrase said memo:
"No worries, dear tenant, your binding legal agreement guaranteeing your soul will not be affected by this transaction. However, tomorrow a group of interested investors will be touring the slum in which you live."
Okay, I thought. No problem. Then I looked around the old homestead.
I saw:
- Dishes and counters encrusted with days' worth of food, grease, and some unidentified substance that resembled the byproducts of methamphetamine manufacturing.
- Piles of laundry. Two, to be specific. One clean, one dirty, and no immediately apparent indications of which was which. And the last thing I wanted to do was bury my nose in the wrong pile. I'm talkin' russian roulette, here.
- Nearly all available surface area covered with bits of cigarette ash, the tide of which was only stemmed by:
- The area taken up by empty beer bottles and four overflowing ashtrays. Said ashtrays all had a thick layer of that thick ash residue, indicating that it was time for a thorough cleaning.
- A general and overwhelming clutter composed of papers, empty cigarette boxes, bottle caps, and other sundry items.
So what's a boy to do when his landlord and a group of out-of-towner capitalist types are coming to survey his little prefecture? Well, this boy decided immediately to leave the mess as it was and post a list of all the reasons his apartment should be condemned (i.e., the apparent inability of the builders to produce a right angle).
And then he started thinking...and strange emotions arose.
He began to feel as though these were people he had somehow to impress. This was, of course, ridiculous. And he had made up his mind to suppress these emotions, beat them mercilessly into submission, break out the mace and tazer gun if necessary. And then the unthinkable happened.
Or, actually the highly thinkable, not to mention regular and predictable. The inexorable weekly need to clean. It strikes me roughly every Friday, although on some particularly filthy weeks it'll come as frequently as every day.
So I decided to compromise.
I would clean the fuck out of the house, right down to the sink fixtures and the little place at the bottom of the toilet bowl that collects the piss of my drunken friends. (Sidebar: I don't piss on the rim, even when I'm drunk. I've got a...thing about it.) I'd clean the walls, where that strange brown stuff has been leaching out from under the paint since I moved in. I'd clean up my nodes with special attention to spelling and grammar, in case they looked there.
But...
I would answer the door in the oldest, filthiest, most beat clothes I could. Unbathed. Hair in a sloppy, half-assed pony tail. Beer in hand. Cigarette punctuating a lopsided, goofy, stoned-looking smile. And the wallpaper on my computer would read:
¡Viva Guevara! Death to the Capitalist Pigs! Death to the Bourgeoisie!
Of course, my lazy ass didn't get up until 2:30 today. I barely had time to clean up before the appointed time of arrival. And then...the bastards never showed. I waited and waited, and it just never happened. So I sat around, drank the beer that would never be seen by disapproving eyes, smoked cigarettes, and admired the immaculate state of my dwelling.
Oh well. I guess the revolution will have to wait 'til tomorrow.