Cranky Old Weekend

This past weekend Ralph and I seem to have never stopped driving, and—for me, at least—I felt like I was driving through my slow decline into old age. Actually, Ralph drove and I held my eye, claiming that my contacts were too dried out to drive— and then I promptly fell asleep. On Saturday morning Ralph was in the city at some music convention and since he confirmed that neither Prince nor Cher would be there, I politely declined.

“Why would you even go?”

“Why would you assume Prince or Cher would be there?”

“This is a huge let down.”

“I’m sorry I’m going to a convention full of powerful music execs giving seminars on the industry and not a half time show.”

“Sounds like yawns. Have fun. I’ll stay here and clean stuff.”

I didn’t clean shit.

I made shortcakes and then I walked around in my underwear for four hours with the radio turned up as loud as I could get away with. I’m a converted clean person. It’s kind of like how nuns used to beat the left-handedness out of people by making them write with their right hands and smacking them when they did it wrong. I’ve had the dirty chased out of me by my mother who is, hands down, the cleanest woman alive. At this very moment there is an 80% chance she bleaching something within an inch of its life. She’s not OCD or anything. She’s old school Polish. And she didn’t beat me with a ruler, but she did make me feel—in the nicest way possible—that dust will send me to hell. My favorite quote from her is, “No one will ever notice if your house is clean, but they will always notice if it’s dirty.” That’s such a Twilight Zone mind fuck. I think about it almost every day when I look at my apartment. It’s been eating at my brains slowly for years and one day I will drop dead from an aneurism and the paramedics who come to pick me up won’t even notice how clean my place is.

 So I try to be as clean as possible, but inside I’m still really dirty. I mean, I don’t like to be a slob, but I think my brain’s a mess and suddenly so is everything else. Then My Strange Obsession is on TV and before I know it Ralph’s home and the only time I moved in six hours was to make a bean bag chair out of the un-washed laundry. But I have cleaning bipolar disorder, because one minute the place looks like one of the underground tunnels that homeless people and rat kings live in (never Google “rat king” NEVER), and other days I hit my turbo charge button (a coffee followed quickly by a diet coke) and then I hit the apartment like Rosie from The Jetsons and Iron Man had a baby.

Rosie is a cougar.

It stays clean for like, twenty minutes.  

But it looks SO GOOD in those twenty minutes.

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