Rack'em Up

..And seven months later, I at last figure out how to get this image of two conjoined Spongebob kiddie bath towels up on my blog. God, I really fold easily. But not as easily --or as satisfying-- as these towels fold. Here’s the big reveal, Flap nation: I feel like I’m finally starting to get on top of things (things=terrifying piles of laundry, sacks of junk I’ve painfully sorted and have destined for the dump, my friend’s kids, the thrift store, only to have my kids discover the contents and blow it all over the house AGAIN. Talk about recycling. OK, Let’s not.)

Anyway, this image is the poster child of my insanity about having a clean house. Every time I freak out and think I can’t handle my filthy house for another second I always start the road to a neater house by folding these two towels to make this goofy face complete. There. That’s better. The house will be organized in no time now!

That's how bad it is: I’m so awful at housecleaning that I actually feel like I’m well on my way once I get those towels folded. Yeah, go ahead, put me in your prayer chain, dedicate your next yoga practice to me, run it past your analyst and let me know what they think. It can’t hurt.

No wonder I can’t get this place clean, if my standard for turning this crap-barge around is beginning with matching up two novelty towels “Mad Magazine style”, was there ever any hope?

Ah, the eternal refrain. No, not hope, but my desolate, shit hole of a house. Will it ever end? Actually it will, at least at this current location. I can’t say it’s the main reason, but I’ve often joked this house is so disgusting that I would rather just start over and buy a new one. And that’s what we did. Our new pile started out as a chicken coop and used to belong to a New York Harbor Tug Boat Captain and it looks like the set of Wes Anderson movie that never got made. Gene Hackman would make a great ex-tug boat captain living in land-locked Vermont, right? The hall closet games include Columbo and The Godfather.

Who the hell would play a "The Godfather" board game? “You iced a member of a rival Family, move three spaces.” “If you draw this card, you can help move the Godfather from his hospital room at any time and earn 50 pts.” I requested that the seller leave those games EXACTLY WHERE THEY ARE. Gonna play me some Godfather and Columbo in m’new chicken coop house!

But we haven’t moved in yet, so let’s return to our sub-cellars of crazy tour at the current Flap locale. Now that you've seen the towel rack, let us move to exhibit B, which, if you are up on your anglophile detritus you will correctly ID as a toast rack.

A ratty little toast rack I acquired possibly at our registry, (how did that get past Flap dude, though?) possibly at that pretty big thrift store at 19th and Mission when we lived in The City. I have lugged this pathetic toast rack around for years and years. What kind of world did I think I would be living in where a toast rack would be required? Yet I still cling to all that I believe a toast rack can offer Or rather, the kind of life I suspect I will have for me and my family if I was of the toast racking utilizing sort.

What’s a toast rack for, you wonder. Well, bread gets toasted, cut in half, (diagonally) and the pieces go in the toast rack. Then your butler puts the toast-laden rack, the London Times Literary supplement, a pot of coffee and a fresh daffodil in a Wedgwood vase and brings it to you in your study. You eat the toast, drink the coffee, grab your bowler and bumpershoot

and scoot off to an afternoon at the Reading Room at the British Museum or the Bodleian,

depending.

You see, I have a theory that all this housework we are drowning in can be vanished away if we dial it back to the toast-rack using days. A time when a breakfast table was set the night before. And the children were tucked in bed with hot milk and a biscuit. After reading a chapter of

The Secret Garden to them. Just like you can reconstruct a skeleton with a chip of a femur bone, I suspect that if I just start with one thing--in this case the fucking toast rack--we will be on a road to security, sanity, and sanitary conditions.

And I know that I am referencing a world where maybe this pleasant life was only possible because the household ran on a set schedule. And it was enforced by a Head housekeeper, valet, butler, stable boy, and chauffeur. And I know that all those positions don’t exist anymore. Well, they do, but it’s all rolled into one.

And I know it’s me.

And now we know the feed-back loop is complete, and this rant will never, never end.

Happy New Year.

Prelude to a Flap

There’s a new policy in the Flap Household, effective immediately:

“When you find pulsating mouse, it’s time to clean the house.”

It’s kinda my new mantra. Want some advice, Flap Nation? If you smell something bad, keep searching for the reason. Don’t let the Flap dude tell you," Oh, that’s just your sensitive nose again." Well, yeah it is, and it’s my goddamn super power so why not take advantage. It’s not every time you come flying in at the finish line of a road race I dismiss it with a “Oh, that’s just because you are a gifted runner” So don’t go all Cassandra on me with my uncanny gift of sniffing (and complaining!) about bad odors. My ability to sniff out trouble just might save this Flap family one day. It certainly saved us from having a dead mouse join our household long term.

I keep thinking about how long it must have taken that mouse to rot -- and it was more or less in sight. We have this couch that splits into two pieces. Naturally my kids take full advantage of this fact, always moving the pieces around. One section had found it’s way about ten inches away from the wall. Our dumb cat must have had her shit together one night, or maybe the mouse was drunk or something, because she got a rare notch on her Mouse Kill belt some time in early June, I’m guessing. Left its toyed-with carcass right behind the couch. One glance to the left upon walking in the room would have revealed all. But this family does precious little glancing. It does mostly guitar noodling, face book gazing and repeatedly asking for Popsicles. Leaves precious little time for checking for dead rodents behind couches.

I kept thinking the pee-pee smell was just that sharp twang a house can acquire when the weather’s been damp. Kinda like how a lake house rental smells: a blend of water-logged James Patterson paperbacks, brown-speckled ceramic mugs from the 1970s and lacquered pine paneled walls. It's not without its charms, I find.

But yesterday morning was endgame for the pee pee smell. I got backup on the “lake house effect” funk from the flappette. She walks in the living room and bam, claims she’s smelling something bad. Thank fucking god, someone else smells it, too. I was so sick of sniffing sofa cushions. I was beginning to fall prey to a whole different form of gas-lighting, if you will.

And I was getting really sidetracked with odor detection. Because the living room window had been left open the night before the morning of the big pee pee smell reveal, I had become convinced that the smell was connected to the spilled gallon of paint in the garage that the house painters discovered upon showing up for work that morning. I was envisioning a rampaging family of skunks, trashing the garage then moving on into the living room for a group spray or something. Turns out the Flap dude just slammed the garage door on the bucket and tipped it over. I think he also shattered Occam’s Razor when he pulled the door down. How the hell could I think one event had anything to do with the other?

Here’s why I didn’t just stop at There Must Be a Dead Animal in this Room when the smell wouldn’t go away. Are you ready to find out why? It’s a really sad reason. I thought I already knew what that smelled like because sadly, this isn’t our first PME (pulsating mouse event. )

A few years ago I was trying to finish both grad school AND The Deathly Hallows. A tricky combination of objectives. I would find myself on the couch reading about the final battle instead of say, writing a paper about sexual tension between Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny or whatever the hell it was I did to get my degree. But my Potter joy kept getting disturbed by a smell that made me think the gas was left on the stove. I kept checking, but even though the stove was always fine the smell wouldn’t go away. Cue to my calling Bob and insisting we lift the couch. And now cue The Blowing Curtain.

So now I know, and now everyone in the Flap nation knows: sometimes a rotting mouse smells like propane gas, other times, it kinda has a pee pee twang.

Why the two distinctly different smells of the same dead species? Does this mean there are other possible odors on the rotting mouse odor spectrum? Could be. But I think the Flap household has contributed plenty to this small arena of Rancid Home Science already. We’re all done here.

Which leads me to the positive side of this PME. That is, if you like deep rants. From this an irresistible urge to purge all my Needing a Tidy House demons has surfaced. So this long mouse rant, I can now reveal, was merely a prelude. An instigating event that benefits anyone in the Flap Nation who likes their Flaps in Deep Rant mode. It’s coming. Strap yourselves in and slap on your spelunking lamp and be warned: a little part of you ain’t coming back.

GET YOUR MONEY BACK! The briefest of Flaps in which I share My Latest Fantasy

GET YOUR MONEY BACK!

That’s the name of my new pretend food column that, if it were real, would be in Sunday Circulars. Right next to those ads of pull-on polyester pants in a range of pastel shades. It would focus on ways to use up all the weird horseradish, mint jelly and plum vinegar's rotting in all our cabinets and fridge doors. It includes ways to combine the questionable condiments with shit like random grains you bought on a health kick. I’m talking Red Curry Quinoa. Every recipe closes with “Eat it and...GET YOUR MONEY BACK! This column was surely borne of my sick game I call “Takin’ it down to the mustard” in which I refuse to buy anything at the store save milk for my kids until I am satisfied I've used up enough foodstuffs in the freezer, fridge and pantry.

The “mustard mood” strikes without warning. It certainly never surfaces as an actual budgeting need. I just get sick of going to the store sometimes. If it keeps up this week, I’ll be serving lasagna pasta shards with dried mango and withered (not on purpose) endive. With radish garnish. Ever wonder who’s buying all the damn radishes in the store? Why they even put them there? Thank the Flap dude. He doesn’t shop much, but when he comes back, there’s always radishes in the sack. WHY??

But anyway, back to GET YOUR MONEY BACK! People will see me in the supermarket and chant the phrase back to me and I will pretend that it’s the first time I’ve heard it. At least that day. Also, if this column were real my photo would show me with my head cocked to one side, can’t figure out if I am looking at the reader accusingly over my glasses, or if my glasses are dangling from my hand, which is resting on my chin.

Also the column would be full of hot food tips like: “Store your flour in the freezer to keep rats from chewing through the bag, because if rats eat your flour they stole from you and you won’t GET YOUR MONEY BACK.

This thing won’t stay a Sunday Circular Column for long. People are tired of rats chewing through their flour bags. And though we may have no one but ourselves to blame for that bottle of white truffle oil, liquid smoke or vegetable biranyi paste, when has that ever stopped an American from ranting? This thing’s gonna take off like it’s got Thai Chili Paste on its ass.

In closing, I would like to offer this food-related anecdote that Flappette just told me: “Whenever I fart I feel like the food inside me is yelling EARTHQUAKE!!!”

Yeah, Red Curry Quinoa will do that to ya.