Cycles of House Rot

My wife and I have a serious problem. In addition to my body morphing into the shape of a pregnant woman’s, we both tend to go through dark, dangerous cycles of housekeeping and grocery purchasing. Each cycle is the same…we spend a day, usually towards the beginning of the month, telling each other how we need to clean the house and keep the house clean. In addition, we need to stop eating at restaurants so often. We then spend the day cleaning the house, sometimes in good moods, sometimes in argumentative “I can’t believe the other one destroyed the house so quickly” moods. While we bask in the afterglow of a clean, disease free home, we create a grocery list consisting of healthy foods neither one of us enjoy eating. We drive to our mood-lit grocery store, purchase fresh vegetables, some fruit, various soy products, fat-free Pringles, and a variety of other clean-living foods that expire roughly four hours after we leave the grocery store.

Upon returning home I bring the groceries inside; Kelsey puts the groceries away. This system works for me because my job lasts roughly forty seconds while her job lasts roughly twenty minutes. By the time the groceries are put away, the two of us are famished from a long day of cleaning and buying food. We talk for about fifteen minutes, both of us convincing the other we really have nothing to eat in the house. Everything we just bought requires preparation, and we’re hungry now. We switch gears and talk about what restaurants we’re craving. We convince ourselves that we should reward ourselves for our hard day’s work. We want French fries, pizza, or Chinese food…or a cheese pizza covered with sesame fried French fries.

To our credit, we do make one or two dishes during the first week after House Cleaning Day Zero. The first dish is generally some sort of noodle concoction Kelsey creates. It’s always delicious, but we make far too much. We then put the noodle concoction into a large Tupperware container and put it in the fridge next to the slowly deteriorating vegetables and fruit. We may eat from the container once more, but generally it sits there alone and angry. The second dish we create is baked in your standard eight by twenty-four inch pan. We don’t even eat half of whatever casserole—egg, tuna, etc—before putting tin foil on the pan and shutting it in the fridge to die.

If it stopped at the food, that would be okay. It doesn’t. After roughly three days of a clean kitchen, we both start to place dishes in the sink versus taking the time to unload the dishwasher. I blame poor parenting. It starts innocently enough. One half of the sink starts to collect bowls and silverware (since the only food consistently consumed at our home is cereal). Then a mysterious pan works its way in there. Then we’ll get McDonalds or Burger King and a plate I used too much ketchup on and didn’t rinse is placed in the sink—generally with an errant chunk of McRib. Then Kelsey decides to whip up a strange, spicy cheese dip. She eats four bites before being distracted by a pretty flower or an HGTV television show. She puts the full bowl of cheese dip in the sink, disregarding the common fact cheese dip congeals and hardens to cement when not regularly attacked by digestive acids.

At the same time, our garbage starts to fill because in a short-sighted attempt to be trendy I bought a shiny silver garbage can that holds approximately three paper towels and one discarded package of Carl Buddig lunch meat. Fortunately for us, fast food and pizza restaurants come with large enough bags to properly dispose of trash. Unfortunately for us, the pizza boxes and large Wendy’s bags do not fit in my petite but sexy garbage can. Thus we place the garbage on top of the garbage can until Physics steps in and says, “Wait a damn minute! What you honkies are doing is impossible.” Physics then knocks our discarded trash all over the kitchen floor (roughly two square feet in area), so we are forced to put trash on the counter. Don’t worry though, we have an unspoken agreement that trash only sits to the left of the sink. We never, ever place trash on both sides of the sink unless we have no other room. We’re not savages.

At the same time our kitchen compiles trash and expired food, the rest of the house becomes caught in disarray. With the trash overflowing, we stop throwing away mail. This results in small pockets of mail collecting throughout the house. These piles then grow larger. In addition, our dog catches on to the fact we have no control and takes out eighty-three toys. Kelsey, who has a strange mental block when it comes to throwing dirty clothes down the laundry chute and/or hanging clean clothes in the closet, starts to throw clothing everywhere. There is nothing like sitting at the kitchen table working on a blog, looking to left, and discovering a misplaced bra.

I don’t make the situation any better. I hate washing my pants regularly because they tend to shrink a little each dry cycle. Every time I take off my pants I spread them out on the spare bed to air out. Before putting on my pants each morning I take a giant whiff of the assal area. This is known as the smell test. It’s an unfortunate test to conduct upon failure. After two weeks, the spare bedroom has five to six pairs of pants strewn about. In addition, I too stop throwing dirty laundry down the chute and start throwing it around the house. I often find my pajama pants in the living room or in the basement, discarded some random evening for my patented naked dancing.

About three weeks after House Cleaning Day Zero our house appears to be the innards of a hobo’s satchel.

We start to become increasingly frustrated with the house situation but cleaning it seems like it would take too long. We start to tell the other one, “I’ve been too busy lately to do dishes.” “That’s okay,” we respond.

Eventually when one of us finds something we’re looking for—like an iPod—in a pile of trash, we decide to clean the house before we accidentally throw away a laptop or a TV and the process repeats itself.

Unfortunately this week, before we got around to cleaning the house, we hit rock bottom. On Monday night, with a full fridge but “no groceries” we decided we needed sustenance. I told Kelsey the next restaurant she named will be where we eat. She mockingly answered the Golden Corral—a trashy little diner across the street from Target. Having an innate sense of assholery, I drove us there. Once we paid the quiet man with an eye patch we sat at a table next to people who needed much larger pants than they wore. What we did not know was the Golden Corral was a buffet that consisted of cold, poorly cooked meat, lettuce that tasted mysteriously like fish, and gummy bears.

They say that lovers can communicate without words. Upon my third plate of rough roast beef I looked at my wife. She looked up from her dessert plate of jelly beans and peanuts. Telepathically I said, “We will never eat here again.” Telepathically she said, “How did I get so lucky to marry a man with a penie the size of miniature tree?”

Upon returning home that night (Monday) we agreed we needed to clean our house. Unfortunately it was too late already to clean that night. And we couldn’t very well clean on election night (Tuesday, natch). Wednesday we were too busy buying Panera Bread and avoiding chores to clean the house. Finally last night (Thursday) we deep cleaned the house.

When we started, our fridge literally overflowed with food—various leftovers, pans, and empty soda boxes. If you weren’t careful, you couldn’t even close the damn thing. Since my wife was cursed with a weak stomach that instantly vomits when confronted with rancid odors, I agreed to clean the kitchen in turn for her cleaning the bathroom and the living room.

My birthday is October 15th. Yesterday was November 6th. My birthday cake was the mysterious object in the large pan covered by tin foil. I didn’t realize delicious cake hardened to be a rock-like substance. The pink frosting faded. It was rather nostalgic. In addition, the spaghetti sauce originally used with my spaghetti birthday dinner sat in a small container. I emptied out the empty A+W Root Beer box, as it had not held cans for two weeks. I removed all the expired cheeses—mozzarella, cottage, AND cheddar. Worst, the last strange noodle concoction Kelsey made consisted of spicy noodles and beef. While delicious, it began to fester and ferment trapped in its Tupperware. The food became angry as it wallowed in its own stink. When I opened the Tupperware, I immediately dry heaved into the sink, causing severe heartache. To make matters worse, the noodles latched onto the Tupperware in one last act of, “If you want me out of here, you’re going to have to scrape me,” defiance. I dry heaved again, only not so dry.

After cleaning out the kitchen and the fridge (and the freezer that consisted of a year old bag of freezer burned chicken breasts, five separate bags of one hamburger bun, and something that appeared to be a combination of gravy, brains, and gasoline), I compiled five bags of trash. Five. Think about that for a minute. In addition, our fridge now looks like its owned by a scientist moving to Siberia in three hours so he/she got rid of all his/her people food:


If you look closely, you can see two jars of salsa, two jars of applesauce, a nearly expired gallon of milk, some pudding, some jello, cans of Hawaiian Punch that are awful, a bag of decaying grapes, and two delicious Hungry Hobo sandwiches purchased two hours prior.

On the plus side…our house is now immaculate, our laundry is done, and we’ve decided we’re going to eat healthy from here on out. In fact we plan to buy fresh vegetables and fruit tomorrow morning. We’d do it tonight, but we have to reward ourselves for our hard work with margaritas and tacos.