Dave Barry: Homes And Other Black Holes

Also your children will gradually cause your brain to become damaged in such a way that you deliberately engage in acts of antihousekeeping. For example, I once, at my son’s insistence, spent perfectly good U.S. dollars at Toys Backwards “R” Us for a can of something called “Slime,” which I naturally assumed was a toy but which in fact turned out to be exactly what its name suggests, namely, slime. Of course my son got it all over everything, and of course it wouldn’t come off. My point being that, here we are living in a house that already seems to have a lifetime inexhaustible supply of natural dirt, and yet for some bone-headed parental reason I felt the need to go out and purchase more dirt.

An even worse example was the time my wife went out and bought mice. Of course the pet store people did not tell her they were mice. They are much too smart for that. They told her she was buying “gerbils,” which, according to the instruction manual they also sold her, are a kind of “small desert animal found in Asia and Africa.” But what they clearly are, when you look at them, is mice. I bet the folks over in Asia and Africa are tickled pink that we’re willing to purchase their surplus vermin. They’re probably wondering what kind of handsome price they might be able to get over here for their head lice.

I want to stress that my wife did not purchase merely the mice. No sir, because your mice also need food, and medical supplies, and of course exercise equipment, because God forbid that they should become out of shape! They might get sick! You probably do not appreciate the extreme irony dripping from my word processor here, because chances are you were not in bed with me the night my wife came racing in and announced that there was mouse poop among the cereal boxes, and consequently we had to make an urgent call to the Lethal Chemicals Man. We live in South Florida, and like everybody else down here, we pay a man to come around regularly and spray the interior of our house with massive quantities of chemicals of the type that, if they were accidentally sprayed on our house by a major corporation, we would sue it for $350 million.

We do this to keep nature from coming inside. There is a tremendous amount of nature down here in South Florida, and despite our efforts to control it by covering it up as much as possible with condominiums, it is still a constant threat. I am not talking about the warm, furry kind of nature with big brown eyes that gets featured in animated motion pictures, scampering around collecting nuts for the winter and talking in high, squeaky voices. That is not what we have down here. Down here we have toads that can kill a person. I am serious. This is one of the first possibilities the police consider when they arrive at a murder scene.

FIRST POLICEMAN: This looks like the work of toads.

SECOND POLICEMAN: Why do you say that?

FIRST POLICEMAN: The victim’s fly is missing!

SECOND POLICEMAN: Ha ha!

But it is no laughing matter, the nature problem down here. Even as I write these words, there is a spider right outside my house that could serve, all by itself, as our NATO forces. This spider has erected a web that covers most of our property and contains wrapped-up food bundles the size of missing neighborhood dogs.

So anyway, I find it highly ironic that we are paying the Lethal Chemicals Man to place deadly violent traps all around the Rice Krispies in hopes of sending one set of rodents to the Great Piece of Cheese in the Sky, while at the same time we are spending otherwise useful money on another set of rodents, so they can have toys and Ferris wheels and God knows what else. Technically we are doing this for Educational Purposes, because Robert is eager to learn the Secrets of the Animal Kingdom, but these rodents don’t know any secrets of the animal kingdom. All they know how to do is gnaw cardboard toilet paper tubes, which my son saves for them—heaven forbid I should throw one out—into 650,000 tiny pieces, which they then push out of their cage onto the floor. They do this very industriously, pretending they are engaging in the kind of serious life-or-death tasks that animals engage in on TV nature specials, but in fact they do it solely because they know it really frosts my shorts.

“Look,” they say to each other, in Rodent. “He’s cleaning it up again! Ha ha! This is a LOT more fun than Africa and Asia!”

They’ll change that tune when we get the Educational Cat.

Which reminds us of another important housekeeping rule ...

> Never Have a Dog <

Let’s not beat around the bush here: dogs are morons. Don’t get me wrong: I like dogs. We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as:

1. Peeing on everything.

2. When we’re driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles.

3. Trying to kill the Avon lady.

But despite their instinctive skills in these areas, dogs generally rank, on the Animal Kingdom IQ Scale, somewhere down in the paramecium range, and they above all do not grasp the concept of housekeeping. Show me a household with a dog in it, and I will show you a household with numerous low-altitude wall stains where the dog, rounding a corner at several hundred miles per hour in an effort to get to the front door and welcome the master home by knocking the master down, whammed into the wall and left a brownish smear of whatever repulsive substance it was rolling in earlier that day.

Discipline will not prevent this kind of thing. You can sit a dog down and explain to it very carefully that you just purchased a new oriental rug, and you don’t want the dog to go anywhere near it. You can point to the rug and go “NO!” a dozen times, and the dog will look at you with an extremely alert and intelligent expression, similar to the way Lassie always looked when she was piloting a helicopter somewhere to rescue her young cretin master Jeff, who had fallen into the quicksand again. Then your dog will go outside and sprint around in concentric circles until it has found a rancid, maggot-festooned sector of deceased raccoon. It will race back to your house with this prize as though the fate of the Free World depended on it, deposit it on your rug, and wander off to take a well-earned nap.

If your child draws pictures of cows on your woodwork with a felt-tipped marker, you can scrub them with a mixture of one part baking soda, one part lemon juice, and one part ammonia, but they won’t come off. The best way to clean a frying pan that has burned food cemented to the bottom is to let it soak in soapy water for several days and then, when nobody is looking, throw it in the garbage. If you ever find the person who invented “Slime,” call me and I will come over and plug up all the orifices in his head with a mixture of one part Tabasco sauce and one part Play-Doh. Many smart homemakers such as Cher and Queen Elizabeth have found that the best way to “stay ahead” of those pesky household “chores” is to have a

“staff.” Ever wonder how come the males in your household pee everywhere except into the actual toilet bowl? It’s because they are jerks.

One of our major responsibilities, as homeowners, is to become needlessly alarmed about home security. And with good reason. All we have to do is look at the front page of our newspaper, and we will see frightening headlines such as the following:

BOY RAISED BY CHICKENS ET SPACE ALIEN CURED MY ACNE GIRL, 2, GIVES BIRTH WHILE SKYDIVING

Okay, perhaps we should be reading a better class of newspaper. But the point is, there are grave threats all around us, and we need to be ready.