A Thankless Job

Tidying up is never fun. There are many forms of procastrination, you can do things that are less tiresome like washing up, alligator wrestling, or visiting people that you have nothing better than mild indifference towards. You could just say, Hell with it, and watch TV whilst eating microwave meals and scratching your danglies. The downside is that you know, eventually, that things will get so bad that you'll be reduced to living in self-made post-apocalyptic squalor, complete with freezing urchins living under newspapers and rats picking at last night's pizza. Then comes the snapping point, where you realise things have got so bad that you begin to have nightmares about tentacles reaching out from under the bed, wrapping their oily tendrils around your arms and ribcage and crushing you against the mattress. That's the point I'm at now.

My bedroom is a testament to the amount of useless clutter a human being can reasonably gather in six months, compounded by a somewhat cavalier attitude to vermin and an unwillingness to throw almost anything away. I once found a chip butty under the computer desk, green with mould and tough as old boot nails. It had lingered, forgotten, growing in strength, until it was finally discovered just prior to metamorphosing into an interdimensional monster with a taste for human flesh. Such is price we have to pay for laziness.

So I began to clean today, somewhat reluctantly, discovering crushed bourbon creams, cruel spiked plastic frames and newspapers that I've hoarded for no discernible reason other than to, quite possibly, build a cocoon by tearing them into strips and stick them together using my own saliva. There are wires, hundreds and hundreds of wires which perform no function, kept in a box so that they can one day be used on electrical equipment that has long since been thrown away. There is, among other things, a broken Master System, a copy of the New King James Bible, a hot glue gun, sellotape, some candles, a fake rose, an "ANZAC special" of the war-comic "Commando" - which isn't mine, and postcards from France inside paper bag from Canada. There are five other draws which presumably house similar objects.

The floor is somewhere underneath the plates and clothes which must cover it, although I've not got any evidence for this hypothesis. It is loosely based on the concept of gravity, but I'm not sure such laws apply anymore. The room has become a pit of despair. It is a cave. The nest of some vast, predatory bird which was long thought extinct, but continues to live a miserable and lonely existence, bringing dark meats to nourish its skeletal offspring. There are things that live under the bed and hiss quietly during the night in dead languages that might never have been spoken by human beings. It is enough to give someone an almost sociopathic attitude to cleanliness.

So I've employed in desperation a scorched earth policy. The room has been divided to one square foot portions, and I am slowly churning my way through the detritus. It isn't tidying anymore. It has become purging. I've got to head back to the flat and initiate part II of the plan, which involves cleansing the walls and carpet with a flame-thrower before the priest arrives to perform an exorcism. After that, there is a break for coffee. Then using some rubber gloves, a hacksaw and some bin bags I'll scoop up whatever is left of the priest just before the second one arrives to - hopefully - succeed where the first inevitably failed.

The best part about this senseless all day tidying binge is that, in under a week the room will look exactly like it did before, and this whole sorry act will have to be repeated again. And again. And again. It is the age old struggle of man vs life, against which there can be no victory, only a lifetime servitude to cleaning up your own mess.