Sunday, October 14, 2007

House Cleaning/Late Night with Walmart

I'm kindof a neat freak. I don't really like people to touch my stuff. It doesn't even need to be my stuff. If I organize or clean it, you are not allowed to touch it, unless I have given specific notice that it has been deemed unclean or unorganized. Hence, I'm single and live alone.

I love my dog. He is cute. He is my bestest little buddy. He sheds like a prom dress. I own a HEPA filter vacuum. I use it. 3 times a week. Problem solved. All the other problems can be solved with my good friends Windex, Dawn, Clorox, and Febreze. The dresser drawers of shirts are organized not only by color, but by frequency of wear. The jeans are hung in the closet with care. "Careful!" "Don't put that with the hooded sweatshirts!" "That is a zippered hooded sweatshirt!" "No, no, no, I'll do the dishes!" "Can't you shower at your place?" "Can't you see that fork is a little bigger then this fork?" "Don't you vacuum your bed?" Single.

So...

During my late night cleaning of the castle, I made a midnight run into the Wal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hate big-corporate-rape-the-little-guy-business, but, there is something great about Walmart in the middle of the night. There is only a couple other people in the store. Two 19 year old college roommates in PJs, one guy with an elastic waisted leather jacket and a comb-over searching through the wall of batteries, the dude with the giant floor cleaner/waxer, a cashier staring at the "you know you want this useless shit" section of shit they put next to the till, and me....buying $26.67 of household cleaning supplies.

Picture this. Some dogshit Nickleback song is playing on the hanging TV sets, while the lighting is reminiscent of 2001 Space Odyssey. If Kubrick were filming me pushing the cart down an aisle, the frame would include the 60 different kinds of dish soap and the 60 year old man stocking happy-faced cans of Mountain Dew. "HAL?" "HAL?, Where are the air freshener sprays, HAL?" "Why are you trying to leave, Travis?, HAL wants you to look at the DVDs..." Then the hero shot of me having a nervous break down, the camera on a crane, panning out to discover me trapped in the middle of the paper-towel-toilet-paper-Kleenex-Brawny-Hitchcockesque-Hell...fade to a spinning smiley face, The End?, Roll Credits.

Now I'm done cleaning, until tomorrow. I'm now going to light a smokeless-clean-burning-macadamia-nut-watermelon candle, sit in my Resolve-fresh-Laz-y-Boy recliner, petting my recently Dirt-Devil-bagless-vacuumed dog, basking in the glory of the FiestaWear drying in the stainless steel lexan Ikea dish drying rack, while watching a 2-disc-special-edition-bonus-feature-multi-angled-widescreen-high-definition-uncut DVD of "The Royal Tenenbaums", with the director's commentary on.

Did I mentioned that I vacuum my dog?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am BEGGING you to make sure your place is properly ventilated next time you go on a cleaning binge.

Travis the Great said...

The next time? You mean 2 more times this week?

Anonymous said...

That's right, freak show.

Anonymous said...

This was fun, but what I'd really like to read about is 10 weird, random, things, facts, habits or goals about yourself.

Anonymous said...

seriously. marry me.

Travis the Great said...

Marriage proposals are welcome and needed.