I hate cleaning and don’t own a cellphone, so found this prompt difficult to write about. After fiddling with a story for weeks with no real progress, I pretty much gave up and just starting rambling.

The way I look at it, writing something is always better than writing nothing. Then again, if I had written nothing it would have avoided the embarrassing admissions below so maybe I need to rethink that philosophy.

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When it comes to cleaning my house, there’s not a lot about it that I like. I’m not very good at it and don’t aspire to be. The time that it takes to complete can be better spent doing something else. Anything else, for that matter. As a result of my antipathy towards cleaning, I only do it once each year, or if a visitor refers to my house as a pig sty, whichever comes first.

When my father made a few oinking sounds the last time he stopped by, I knew the time had come to clean the place. I busied myself with all the competency that a half hearted effort was able to muster. I knew the finished result wouldn’t be good but it would be good enough.

Towards the end of the cleaning session, right before vacuuming, I always crawl into both dog cages.

Sorting through them is like a treasure hunt, only without a map. Greyhounds are hoarders by nature so a variety of items are always found stored away. Aside from the traditional items, like tennis balls and plush toys, a few odd things have been found over the years. Once I found my cordless razor. I guess Manny, my first dog, figured his whiskers needed a trim.

I don’t sort through their cages on a regular basis. The way I look at it, that is their personal space, no different from a teenager’s bedroom. I don’t have children other than my dogs, and Charcoal and Propane are eleven and twelve years old respectively. In human years that means I have an eighty four year old child still living at home.

I’m probably not the best person to weigh in on that subject since I lived with my parents until my early thirties. I knew it was time to move out when they sold the house and moved into a one bedroom home. At least they never kept me in a cage, aside from a crib when I was an infant. I don’t think that can be considered child abuse, though. Maybe if I was in my twenties and still confined to a crib, but that never happened.

If I was going to file abuse charges, it would be based upon a dream I once had. In the dream, I was walking along the bottom of the Hudson River and came upon a stickball game. Someone said something to me about visiting the “old neighborhood”. When I woke up, I called my parents and asked if we ever lived on the bottom of the Hudson. They claimed we did not but I’m still not sure. It might just be one of those family secrets that everyone is aware of but no one talks about.

Interesting side note about that dream. I knew it was the Hudson River because after the stickball game ended, I walked over and visited my girlfriend; The Statue Of Liberty. We were the same height and she was quite randy that evening. After we gyrated a bit, I broke up with her. Gotta admit, since then I’ve been a little afraid to visit Liberty Island, NYC. There’s no worse fury than a woman scorned.