Homes And Other Black Holes

by Dave Barry

  a room that smells like corkboard. If you’re planning to paint a room, remember that “oil-based” paint is the kind that is supposed to come off with paint thinner, but does not; whereas “latex” is the kind that is supposed to come off with simple soap and water, but does not.

  Chapter 8. Good Housekeeping, Or Learning To Live With Filth

  Hardly a week goes by when you don’t read a newspaper article like this:

  LOS REDUNDOS, N.M.—Astronomers at the Institute for Wearing White Laboratory Coats here announced today that they have discovered a humongous dust cloud 237 skillion light-years from the earth. “This,” the scientists stated in unison, “could very well be the largest dust cloud we have discovered since the one we discovered last week, and we believe that it may provide us with valuable insights into the mystery of how we can obtain additional federal grants.”

  What scientists are learning, through these dramatic breakthrough discoveries, is something that many of us have suspected for a long time, namely that the universe is made up almost entirely of dirt. More and more, scientists are suspecting that the Big Bang was in fact the explosion of a small but very densely packed vacuum cleaner bag.

  So we must accept the fact that we live in a universe swarming with particles of filth that are ceaselessly trying to get into our homes and inflict themselves upon us, similar to insurance salespersons, but in some cases even more distasteful. Hard to believe? I thought so, too, until a short while back, when the people who publish the Allergy Relief Newsletter were thoughtful enough to send me, at their own expense, a piece of junk mail stating that my entire household was teeming with tiny dirt creatures named “dust mites,” which sound like harmless and friendly commercially licensed characters such as might have their own Saturday morning cartoon show sponsored by the sugar industry, until you look at the photograph showing a dust mite enlarged several thousand times, and it looks exactly like the kind of hostile giant mutant insect that was always destroying Tokyo in those movies that the Japanese used to make before they figured out how to do cars. According to the folks at the Allergy Relief Newsletter, these dust mites are swarming everywhere, including inside your nose, millions of them per nostril. And although they are, fortunately, a peaceful species, not generally known to attack humans except during mating season, we need to be aware of them, because they serve as a constant nasal reminder of our central point, which, as best we can remember, is: There is a lot of dirt around.

  What this means is that you, as a homeowner, have to make a decision: Are you going to let the dirt overcome you, so that you live your life encrusted by a permanent layer of greasy yellowish filth, so that you are no better than slugs writhing in their own putrid slime? Or are you going to make the commitment, in time, in effort, to fighting back—to really trying to keep your new home neat and tidy?

  I have tried it both ways, and trust me, the writhing slug approach is better. You don’t think important people, such as members of the U.S. Supreme Court, waste time cleaning, do you? Of course not! Their homes are filthy. They are filthy. That’s why they wear those robes: they have whole tribes of dust mites under there. Because they have learned, like so many other people, that if you really, seriously try to keep your house clean, you gradually turn into one of those TV commercial housewives who are always frowning with grave concern at their bathroom bowls and having conversations like this with their friends:

  FIRST HOUSEWIFE: Whatever is the matter, Sue?

  SECOND HOUSEWIFE: Oh, Betty, I am so very upset because Waxy Yellow Buildup has caused my kitchen floor to look like some kind of gigantic nasal discharge!

  FIRST HOUSEWIFE: Lordy yes, it does.

  SECOND HOUSEWIFE: And Bob is bringing home the archbishop tonight!! Whatever shall I do?

  FIRST HOUSEWIFE: If it was me, I would take a major credit card and fly to the Caribbean island of Antigua and drink for days with strange men.

  SECOND HOUSEWIFE: That is what I was thinking.

  So we see that it can lead to bad things, this obsession some people have with housecleaning. What you want to do, in your household, is adopt the cleaning system my wife and I use, which is based on the old philosophical question: “If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make any sound?” (The answer, by the way, is yes; the tree goes: “Moo.”) Our theory is, if there is nobody besides ourselves around to see the dirt, then the dirt isn’t really there. So Rule Number One of successful housecleaning is:

  > Never Let Anybody into Your House <

  Not even your mother. Especially not your mother. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this rule. Even if you know some really nice people who have had you over to their house thirty-seven times for dinner, you must not weaken and invite them to your house. You must give them plausible excuses, such as: “We sincerely intend to have you folks over one of these days, but right now we’re all in a dither because our housekeeper has been killed by radon gas.”

  Rule Number Two of successful housecleaning, of course, is:

  > Never Have Children of Any Kind <

  Each of us, as a human being, has an important choice to make: We can either experience the trials, the joys, the tragedies, and the triumphs of that most sacred of human institutions, parenthood; or we can have a house where we do not regularly find gerbil poop in our sofa. But we cannot have both of these things. Because small children have no concept whatsoever of cleanliness. A small child’s concept of housekeeping is to lick spilled pudding off the living room carpet. And it does not get better as they get older. For example, my son, now age seven, is in the phase where he likes to play with educational “construction” toys, designed by escaped Nazis, that consist of 363,000,000,000,000 tiny plastic pieces in a box. The way you play with these toys is, you strew the pieces all over the living room floor, and then you go outside to play. And when your mother yells: “Robert! Come in here and pick up your construction set!” you yell back: “I’m still using them!” And then late that night, you lie awake in bed, waiting for the moment when your father, heading for the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice, wanders out into the darkened living room and steps, barefooted, on the plastic pieces, which is the cue for him to perform the comically entertaining Midnight Dance of the Bozo Father, a rapid series of hopping, skating movements across the floor accompanied by whimpering, followed by very bad words. This is a good time for you to look like you are Sound Asleep.

  Also your children will gradually cause your brain to become damaged in such a way that you deliberately engage in acts of antihousekeeping. For example, I once, at my son’s insistence, spent perfectly good U.S. dollars at Toys Backwards “R” Us for a can of something called “Slime,” which I naturally assumed was a toy but which in fact turned out to be exactly what its name suggests, namely, slime. Of course my son got it all over everything, and of course it wouldn’t come off. My point being that, here we are living in a house that already seems to have a lifetime inexhaustible supply of natural dirt, and yet for some bone-headed parental reason I felt the need to go out and purchase more dirt.

  An even worse example was the time my wife went out and bought mice. Of course the pet store people did not tell her they were mice. They are much too smart for that. They told her she was buying “gerbils,” which, according to the instruction manual they also sold her, are a kind of “small desert animal found in Asia and Africa.” But what they clearly are, when you look at them, is mice. I bet the folks over in Asia and Africa are tickled pink that we’re willing to purchase their surplus vermin. They’re probably wondering what kind of handsome price they might be able to get over here for their head lice.

  I want to stress that my wife did not purchase merely the mice. No sir, because your mice also need food, and medical supplies, and of course exercise equipment, because God forbid that they should become out of shape! They might get sick! You probably do not appreciate the extreme irony dripping from my word processor here, because chances are you were n
ot in bed with me the night my wife came racing in and announced that there was mouse poop among the cereal boxes, and consequently we had to make an urgent call to the Lethal Chemicals Man. We live in South Florida, and like everybody else down here, we pay a man to come around regularly and spray the interior of our house with massive quantities of chemicals of the type that, if they were accidentally sprayed on our house by a major corporation, we would sue it for $350 million.

  We do this to keep nature from coming inside. There is a tremendous amount of nature down here in South Florida, and despite our efforts to control it by covering it up as much as possible with condominiums, it is still a constant threat. I am not talking about the warm, furry kind of nature with big brown eyes that gets featured in animated motion pictures, scampering around collecting nuts for the winter and talking in high, squeaky voices. That is not what we have down here. Down here we have toads that can kill a person. I am serious. This is one of the first possibilities the police consider when they arrive at a murder scene.

  FIRST POLICEMAN: This looks like the work of toads.

  SECOND POLICEMAN: Why do you say that?

  FIRST POLICEMAN: The victim’s fly is missing!

  SECOND POLICEMAN: Ha ha!

  But it is no laughing matter, the nature problem down here. Even as I write these words, there is a spider right outside my house that could serve, all by itself, as our NATO forces. This spider has erected a web that covers most of our property and contains wrapped-up food bundles the size of missing neighborhood dogs.

  So anyway, I find it highly ironic that we are paying the Lethal Chemicals Man to place deadly violent traps all around the Rice Krispies in hopes of sending one set of rodents to the Great Piece of Cheese in the Sky, while at the same time we are spending otherwise useful money on another set of rodents, so they can have toys and Ferris wheels and God knows what else. Technically we are doing this for Educational Purposes, because Robert is eager to learn the Secrets of the Animal Kingdom, but these rodents don’t know any secrets of the animal kingdom. All they know how to do is gnaw cardboard toilet paper tubes, which my son saves for them—heaven forbid I should throw one out—into 650,000 tiny pieces, which they then push out of their cage onto the floor. They do this very industriously, pretending they are engaging in the kind of serious life-or-death tasks that animals engage in on TV nature specials, but in fact they do it solely because they know it really frosts my shorts.

  “Look,” they say to each other, in Rodent. “He’s cleaning it up again! Ha ha! This is a LOT more fun than Africa and Asia!”

  They’ll change that tune when we get the Educational Cat.

  Which reminds us of another important housekeeping rule ...

  > Never Have a Dog <

  Let’s not beat around the bush here: dogs are morons. Don’t get me wrong: I like dogs. We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as:

  1. Peeing on everything.

  2. When we’re driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles.

  3. Trying to kill the Avon lady.

  But despite their instinctive skills in these areas, dogs generally rank, on the Animal Kingdom IQ Scale, somewhere down in the paramecium range, and they above all do not grasp the concept of housekeeping. Show me a household with a dog in it, and I will show you a household with numerous low-altitude wall stains where the dog, rounding a corner at several hundred miles per hour in an effort to get to the front door and welcome the master home by knocking the master down, whammed into the wall and left a brownish smear of whatever repulsive substance it was rolling in earlier that day.

  Discipline will not prevent this kind of thing. You can sit a dog down and explain to it very carefully that you just purchased a new oriental rug, and you don’t want the dog to go anywhere near it. You can point to the rug and go “NO!” a dozen times, and the dog will look at you with an extremely alert and intelligent expression, similar to the way Lassie always looked when she was piloting a helicopter somewhere to rescue her young cretin master Jeff, who had fallen into the quicksand again. Then your dog will go outside and sprint around in concentric circles until it has found a rancid, maggot-festooned sector of deceased raccoon. It will race back to your house with this prize as though the fate of the Free World depended on it, deposit it on your rug, and wander off to take a well-earned nap.

  Useful Home-Cleaning Hints

  If your child draws pictures of cows on your woodwork with a felt-tipped marker, you can scrub them with a mixture of one part baking soda, one part lemon juice, and one part ammonia, but they won’t come off. The best way to clean a frying pan that has burned food cemented to the bottom is to let it soak in soapy water for several days and then, when nobody is looking, throw it in the garbage. If you ever find the person who invented “Slime,” call me and I will come over and plug up all the orifices in his head with a mixture of one part Tabasco sauce and one part Play-Doh. Many smart homemakers such as Cher and Queen Elizabeth have found that the best way to “stay ahead” of those pesky household “chores” is to have a

  “staff.” Ever wonder how come the males in your household pee everywhere except into the actual toilet bowl? It’s because they are jerks.

  Chapter 9. Practical Home Weapons Systems

  One of our major responsibilities, as homeowners, is to become needlessly alarmed about home security. And with good reason. All we have to do is look at the front page of our newspaper, and we will see frightening headlines such as the following:

  BOY RAISED BY CHICKENS ET SPACE ALIEN CURED MY ACNE GIRL, 2, GIVES BIRTH WHILE SKYDIVING

  Okay, perhaps we should be reading a better class of newspaper. But the point is, there are grave threats all around us, and we need to be ready.

  I happen to be an expert in the area of home security, because I live in South Florida, home of Miami Vice, where guns are extremely easy to obtain. Down here they give you a free revolver when you buy a Big Gulp at the 7-Eleven. So you have a lot of people walking around armed, the result being that a lot of homeowners feel that they, too, need to arm themselves in self-defense. Of course your bleeding—heart—liberal secular-humanist left-wing communists will tell you that it’s a bad thing to own a gun, but as any knowledgeable gun nut will tell you, there are countless factual anecdotes concerning alert gun-toting homeowners who have thwarted the forces of evil.

  For example, we recently had a case here where a homeowner woke up at 2:30 A.M. because he thought he had heard a noise in the family room. Grabbing his revolver, he slowly opened his bedroom door and crept stealthily into the darkened hallway, where he stepped barefooted onto a cockroach—down here we get cockroaches large enough to derail trains—causing him (the homeowner) to leap straight into the air and shoot his gun, the bullet from which went through the wall and into the garage, where it hit the circuit breaker box and cut off the electrical power to the house, thus shutting down the videocassette recorder in the family room, where the homeowner’s eleven-year-old son had been watching Debbie Does Dallas. So don’t try to tell me that guns have no place in the home. Don’t try to tell it to the Founding Fathers of this nation, either. For one thing, they are dead. For another thing, they specifically considered the question of guns when they wrote the Constitution, and after much debate, they agreed on the following unequivocal wording regarding the right of the people to keep and bear arms:

  ARTICLE XMZXMZBX: If guns were outlaws, then outlaws would be guns..lm-10

  So you can play it any way you want it, but this is one homeowner whose motto is: “You can have my gun when you threaten to pry one of my fingers off the trigger.”

  Of course, if you do get a gun, you need to follow certain basic safety procedures, such as:

  1. Don’t keep it loaded.

  2. Don’t even have the proper caliber of bullet for it.

  3. Keep it someplace safe, such as a safe-deposit
box in Switzerland.

  What other steps can you take to protect yourself? One approach that combines the advantage of costing a lot of money with the advantage of really ticking off your neighbors is ...

  The Electronic Burglar Alarm System

  Essentially, this is a complex system of modern, sophisticated, state-of-the-art, fully computerized components, costing no more than several semesters at Stanford University graduate school, yet giving you the sense of security and well-being that comes from knowing that everyone in your neighborhood will be instantly alerted by a horrible ear-splitting noise whenever lightning strikes anywhere within 137 miles of your home. Invariably this will happen at night when you’re out of town, so that your neighbors will get to lie in bed, listening to the piercing sound, which is only fair because it makes up for all the nights when you had to listen to their burglar alarm systems.

  I do not mean to suggest that burglar alarm systems go off only when lightning strikes. No, they also go off when the electric company has problems, or when homeowners forget to turn them off upon returning. Sometimes birds set them off. “Let’s go set off some burglar alarms!” is a cry frequently heard among adolescent finches. Even air molecules, which are plentiful in the suburbs, can set off burglar alarm systems. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t set them off, as far as we can tell, is burglars. Nobody can explain this phenomenon, but police rely on it when they go on their patrols. They’ll drive through a neighborhood at 4 A.M., listening to three or four home security systems electronically whooping and shrieking into the night, and they’ll say to each other, using hand signals so they can be understood over the din: