For those of you who don’t know me very well, I’m just going to tell you that one of the things I dread most in this world is cleaning. Perhaps I’m a slob, or just extremely lazy, but I believe there is an underlying issue that the world just doesn’t consider.

When it comes to religion, I’m an agnostic theist, as best. If you don’t know what that means, don’t ask me… look it up (I think I’ve said before that I do believe in the value in obtaining new knowledge on your own). And while I can sit there and debate the likeliness that there are no gods, I can also sit there and debate the likeliness that there are gods. It is the latter that I base my cleaning difficulties on.

You see, my apartment is a breeding ground for all kinds of cultures. No, not cultures like Egyptian or Roman or something like that. Cultures like bacteria cultures. And, really, what gives me the right to destroy these breeding grounds? What gives me the right to decide which living creature survives and which ones are wiped off the face of the Earth with nothing more than some Scrubbing Bubbles and a scouring pad? It’s just not fair, if you ask me.

So I’m supposed to have my apartment clean for tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow. I’ve known this for several weeks now and it’s been an effort that I have been failing miserably at. Truth be told, I haven’t been home that much anyway so cleaning it has been rather difficult from afar. However, even when I am home I just can’t seem to bring myself to do it.

It was a bright sunny day in June 1913 and I was but a wee pup. My mother, the late great Melinda Johansonn-Adams, had decided that my chores should not only include branding the pigs, but also cleaning out the bathrooms in the boarding house my family owned.

With solvent in hand and a bucket of hot water, I made my way to the first community bathroom and began to work. As suds sloshed about the tiled floor, I heard a man clear his throat in the doorway behind me. The boarders at the house often gave me the creeps, but this man was one I had only witnessed on rare occasion. He was Chinese. A medicine man, the rumors had it.

He stood silently observing me for a moment, smoothing out the right side of his thin, but long, mustache between the pads of his forefinger and thumb.

Finally, he spoke.

“Is it wise to kill the creatures set forth upon this world by a being more powerful and knowledgeable than the entire human race put together?” he asked.

I paused what I was doing, confused.

“But I kill nothing, kind sir,” I stated.

Suddenly the man was on me in a flash, pinning me to the floor with strength I would not have been able to guess he possessed. He smeared my cheek through the runny mixture of soapy water and reconstituted urine that had missed its mark during the drunken spraying of several boarders. I gagged as some of the fluid glazed my lower lip.

“There are creatures alive in there so small you cannot see them with the naked eye,” the man said as he continued to slide my face over the mixture. “God put them there. What right do you have to take them away from this world?”

I do not remember much after that, other than a new realization that cleaning, quite frankly, equals death. Just look at a can of Lysol! It states that is kills 99.9 percent of the bacteria it comes in contact with! Entire populations destroyed by the push of a button and the wipe of a cloth!

That wise old Chinaman taught me a valuable lesson that day. Do not kill when killing is not needed.

Which basically translates to I don’t feel like cleaning my apartment. So I make shit up to get out of it.

Hey, don’t judge me! If you think my place should be cleaned so badly, why don’t you come over and do it?

Yeah… that’s what I thought.