This is a totally personal, self-indulgent rant with no point other than to bitch.

It’s no wonder why I’m kind of a slob. I don’t blame my wife, not really, though it’d be easy because she’s just got way too much stuff to deal with. (I swear the moving sale is going to be astounding; if you live in the Tri-State area, in a few months you’re going to get a great heads-up on all manner of weird collectable junk.) Nope, I blame my dad.

I wouldn’t say he’s a neat freak, I’d say he has issues. Perhaps it comes from his years in the Navy, where everything was kept ship-shape, hence the phrase. But in the privacy of one’s own domain, some 40ish years hence, you’d think that he’d relax a bit. Not a chance. Subsequently, I have issues too. Opposite inverse of his, though.

His house is so clean you could eat off of the bathroom floor. You could probably eat off of the toilet seat. It’s amazing, the level of sterility he lives among. I don’t visit him much, mostly due to the distance, but I must admit that a little piece of it is because dammit, it’s impossible to relax and unwind there. You have to clean everything as you go. At 36 years old, I’m still paranoid if I leave one black hair in the guest room sink in the morning because I’ll get a word about it. Ever see Matchstick Men? My pop’s only a few clicks down from Nicolas Cage’s neurotic character; I once got screamed at for hanging a coat backwards in a closet.

He regularly empties drawers and arranges the items in them so it’s orderly. His garage is cleaner and more organized than most people’s kitchens. He’s got three shop-vac’s at my last count. One for dry, one for wet, and one for wet or dry. Beats me as to the redundancy, but I assume just having it gives him a sense of comfort.

Particularly amazing is that, even with this lifestyle, and the fact that both he and his wife are retired/work from home, they still have two cleaning ladies that service the house once per week. I’m dumbfounded as to what they might actually have to do, outside of vacuuming the living room (which is never really dirty anyway; you have to take your shoes off when you come in the house).

He flies out from Wisconsin to NYC several times a year, and often, when traveling alone, he stays with us. That’s when I get my sick little kick. Oh, we pick up a little, here and there. I make sure that there’s no midget porn lying around, for example, and I’ll wipe the coffee stains off of the counters, little once-over shit like that. Might vacuum if it needs it. But other than that, piss on it; he’s under my roof, and it’s kick back with your shoes on the table time. Even my wife plays ball now, she’s gotten over the cleaning up for the in-laws thing as far as he’s concerned. She realizes that, even pushing 40, I still feel some queer need to rebel; maybe it’s a testament to my youthful disposition. Or my immaturity, more like it.

I used to be a neat freak for many years, particularly when I lived alone. I was falling into the same kind of paranoia my old man seems to exhibit if anything was smudged, out of place, or in any other way in a non-pristine state. Then I got married. Big difference, it was like achieving autonomy for the first time in a way, a real sense of coming into my own as a grown-up capable of making my own choices; one of which was to let go of the psychological need to be totally fastidious.

It’s been three years down that road, and I think both Xtine and I are both about ready to stop being comfy pigs. I know she’d like it a lot. We don’t live in squalor, and as evidenced by my earlier post on hiring maids, I do like living in a clean place, but I sure as hell don’t ever want to become anal about it; there’s living clean, and there’s obsessive.