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Thursday, April 1, 2004

Unpleasantries.

There's a decidedly "dead mouse" odor in the office today. I noted this on my way to the garbage can in the kitchen, after I discovered the fuzzy white blueberry in my fruit salad. So not only my mouth and hands but also my nose were in concert, all saying, "Germs, germs, germs." The odor is new; I've been spending plenty of time here, so I'm pretty familiar with its ordinary smells and stinks.

Yes, I'm still around. I've just been doing some unpleasant tasks lately on all fronts of my life. I have quite a few of them still to do.

The smallest of these tasks was cleaning fecal matter out of my shoes. I'd left them to sit and dry out on our public back porch, and was somewhat surprised to find no one had stolen them. (I'm not sure if the feces acts as a security device, or perhaps the poop just holds the tent wher it is.) As I discovered while trying not to inhale tiny airborne particles of it, dried feces is actually harder to clean out of shoe treads than the wet variety. Chalk it up to life lessons I didn't really want to learn. (I also discovered that Skechers slip-resistant soles have a great number of little grooves in them, but that's more technical than revelatory.)

I am particularly paranoid about stepping in excrement. I always walk fearfully through parks and open fields, sure that I am traversing a fecal minefield; I'm convinced that there is fresh dog shit lying in wait in the long grass, ready to leap out in front of me in some kind of kamakazi attack on my shoes. But this was street poop, so I had no reason to see it coming. And because I live in the neighborhood I do, I can't tell you for sure whether it was of animal or human origin. Frankly, I was already more intimate with it than I wanted to be, and was trying not to get any closer.

As for the rest of it, yes, a couple of my work projects have been somewhat fecal as well, the difference being I have neither the option nor the ability to wear rubber gloves on my brain while handling those. I did shame myself into undecorating Christmas, which was the sole purpose of the previous post, so at least I've cleaned that shit up. Nice to know that public self-ridicule is a motivator for me. But I hope to not turn this into a litany of my forgotten tasks: I might be able to shame myself into going to the dentist, but I'm not sure how to phrase the rather more expansive but still unpleasant task of taking control of and responsibility for my life's direction into something you could point at and ask, "Well, did you do this yet?"

Oh wait; I can summarize it in four words: "get my shit together." And now I know not to sit and wait for it to dry.

06:25 PM PST (link)