Dearest E.:
I keep my quarters feeling lived-in more than spotless. Which is to say: Spotful. I rarely vacuum, and entropically welcome the encroaching accumulation of dust and detritus as strataesque evidence of my existence, food for greedy foraging-through by unborn anthropologists from unknown species of future galactical millenniæ.
Years ago, when I had money to help feed the economy, I had a cleaning woman come by every couple of weeks. She was awesome, loved what she did, but ambitious enough that I should have seen it coming she’d just up and quit in favor of opening a bakery with her husband.
Cecilia.
More recently, for fuck’s sake, drunk at the wheel on a Sunday night, I hired a cleaning dude through Amazon. He was perfectly passable but not what I had in mind for what they said would be a “DEEP CLEANING”.
My father’s place underwent a DEEP CLEANING that took a full week to get the cigarette stink out of the walls, floors and, of course, the ceiling. The blood stain on the porch and remnants of his brain matter on the wall became kind of a comedy. It seemed nothing could be done to eradicate the blood stain. Getting rid of the brain matter only took some Clorox wipes. But the blood on the porch, on the astro-turf flooring and wood surface underneath, that took much more scrub-a-dub industry.
I must have told you already that I was warned not to look at it, not to look for for the blood stain. I did, of course, taking the admonitions and warnings as invitations.
It made me happy. That stain of my father’s blood, so bright and clarion red, is the last I ever saw of him. At our request he was closed-casket.
Anyway, the DEEP CLEANING of his place is what I thought I’d get through this last person but he did only the basics. I don’t really need a DEEP CLEANING, nor do I have an explanation for why I keep ALL-CAPSING it.
