Well it was clear. I wasn’t going to sidestep the dishwasher soap section and not pick up a box, mainly because I was down to my last tablet. It was somewhere lost among my cleansing products, and the dishes are beginning to take a lot of space. I had included with the other mental memos so thank God I went by because otherwise I would have had to face a threat of radiation leakage back in my kitchen.
In the past, but a chemical to scrub and buff your eating utensils was a pretty straightforward process. Before, you used to pick up a sensuous white bottle, squeeze a few squirts into the door of the appliance, slammed it shut and then got the whole thing rolling. Now, no ordinary detergent will do. It has become a fashionable product over the past few years, making cleaning your plates and glasses no longer a task for the simpleminded. Companies have gone over to packaging the doses individually with all sorts of powders and liquids. The colors are magnificently chosen and the design as sleek as you can get to ensure the gullible buyer absolute hygiene, unparalleled shine and the latest in design. So, what you choose could say a lot about you. If that were the case, it would say I was a thrifty cheap-o, because if there are things I am willing to splurge on, normally it’s not a detergent so fancy I could stick it on my walls next to some black and white photographs. I will splurge on other products, but I put my faith in the store’s brand products for their friendly prices and because they too individually wrap each dosage, making me feel that I am keeping my dignity to a realistic level.
My friend Julia told me the other day that I also needed to more and stronger cleansers. I told her I had a solid bottle of all-purpose which smelled of “pino”, which happens to be my favorite aroma to refreshen my house. I say this in case you are at a loss for what to get me for my birthday. But Julia was not convinced. As a Spanish mother, she ascribes to heavy-duty cleansers. No nice smells to hide the truth. Cough medicine has to be aggressive and kitchen cleaners have to feel toxic. They need burn the skin and all that.
“You mean,” I said just to make sure I knew what I had to get. “The kind you need to remove all signs of a corpse?”
“That’s right. It’s got hurt to breath. Ammonia!”
“Got it.” And that’s why, now that I was thinking along the lines of making my home as aseptic as humanly possible without burning the building to the ground, I stepped over to the next shelf and confronted a series of the most boring bottles a shopper could find. Dull, bland, no-frills. That was what crude cleaning is all about. The teemed with no-nonsense. The thing was I couldn’t quite recall in the moment just what she had suggested. Bleach or Ammonia? The both look lethal, enough to make any vermin recoil in their presence. And they were cheap too. I mean cheaper than water, which told me that for some reasons that they were the real stuff. I could not decide which of the two Julia was thinking of, and since I wanted to make sure I had all the products that a Spanish mother would find essential to a proper household, I took a major chance, swore in English out loud like a real macho, and picked up both.
No one, I said to myself, was ever going to say my house could not take on any unforeseen disaster.
