The Cleaner

First of all, let me announce that we will be at tables P-13 & P-14 in Artist’s Alley at the Emerald City Comicon! Come see new art for Wayfarer’s Moon and Capes & Heels!  Thrill to see the cover for Art the Wanderer! And if you ask nicely (or at all), I’ll tell you the latest news about Wayfarer’s coming back!

With that being said, I cleaned a bit today. Well, actually, I cleaned a lot. I have this problem when it comes to cleaning. I hate doing it, so I put it off until the carpet gets crunchy. However, once I start cleaning, I tend to go a little (more) nuts and clean everything. I will even rearrange closets, just because I happened to open a door.

Anyway, it all started because of taxes. I had a whole stack of tax forms on my desk that was starting to overlap with other stacks of important things and I was worried that they would form one huge, massive stack that would gain sentience and make me buy it binders and ice-cream.

Therefore, during lunch I stopped by Staples and bought one of those rack thingies that you put papers in. Actually, after glancing at the receipt, they’re called ‘sorters.’ Anyhow, I bought a sorter, took it home, and put it on my desk. I then spent a few minutes putting my papers into the discrete lanes of the sorter, just in case an IRS commando team infiltrated my department and demanded to see my W-2 ‘or else.’

With that done, I noticed that I had a whole stack of old mail on my desk as well, so of course now I had to go through that and make sure that nothing in there needed sorting. That’s actually a lie. I looked carefully at the first ten-ish envelopes and then decided that if I hadn’t dealt with it yet, it probably wasn’t important. The whole stack then went into the garbage.

And that’s when the cleaning started. There were some pieces of paper that had random notes on them. Into the garbage they went. Old Comic-Con brochures? Garbage. Anything that didn’t have an immediately obvious purpose? Garbage.

And I was off, cleaning everything. I rearranged my bookshelf. I moved stuff out from under my desk and into a new place. New stuff then went under my desk. I then happened to wander into my bedroom and started to rearrange the bookshelf in there. And then I looked in the closet and started putting things on hangers. Then I arranged the stuff on hangers by type. 

I knew I had a problem, but I just couldn’t stop. Boxes were moved. Comics were alphabetized. I found things I didn’t know I owned. Why did I have a 1947 yearbook and a porcelain clown with no head? I have no idea.

NOTE: Headless porcelain clowns make really good pen jars. Plus, you get the enjoyment of metaphorically stabbing a clown every time you put a pen in it.

Three hours later and I was shirtless in the kitchen with a machete in one hand and a jar of Vicks VapoRub in the other, yelling incoherently as I tried to kill the thing in the freezer. It was then that I knew I had to stop, as the thing I was so desperately fighting turned out to be a really old bag of frozen peas. I don’t even think it was animate in the first place.

So, now the apartment is half-clean, which I’m now okay with. The freezer isn’t looking too good, but that’s what renter’s insurance is for.

Cheers,

-Jason