Today's Project . . .
is to clean my apartment. If I accomplish this, I may have to take photos and post them here, because honestly, it doesn’t happen very often. Most of the time, my apartment looks a disaster area and I’m kinda okay with that. I half-clean when I have company, and even then I tend to just tidy-up the living room and throw all my junk into my bedroom. I do dishes once every three weeks, maybe, and by the time I get around to doing laundry I usually have to wear either formal wear or scrubs to the laundromat, because I have absolutely nothing else that’s clean.
I used to think my inability to keep a clean apartment was an unconscious, childish rebellion against an anachronistic notion that women are natural nesters and housekeepers. But no, I’m not really that deep. I’m just messy.
In defense of my messiness, I reference Bukowski’s Too Sensitive, where he says “often, the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind, confused and unsure men, pliable men are the thinkers. their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. at times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal deities and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation …” and “the man with the every-orderly kitchen is the freak, however. beware of him … if you listen to him for ten minutes you will know that anything he says in a lifetime will be essentially meaningless and always dull. he is a cement man. there are more cement men than other kinds of men. so if you are looking for a living man, first check his kitchen and save yourself time.”
So see, my messy kitchen (and entire apartment) can be explained by my impure, cluttered, creative mind … or entropy. ha.
Of course, the next paragraph in the story is about how that maxim doesn’t apply to women, because Bukowski is an a**hole and quite possible/definitely/maybe a misogynist (it’s so hard to tell how much of him to take seriously), so I don’t know why I listen to him anyway. I love/hate him.
Now I have that Modest Mouse song in my head:
“Woke up this morning and it seemed to me,
that every night turns out to be
A little more like Bukowski.
And yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read.
But God who’d wanna be?
God who’d wanna be such an asshole?”