Mr. Clean

I clean the bathrooms at my house. I'd rather not, to be completely honest. I'd much rather be the quintessential 50s head-of-household, clad in my smoking jacket, sitting in the study as I puff away on my pipe and read the newspaper. But then that would mean driving an Edsel and only having three TV channels, none in HD.

So I clean the bathrooms at my house.

It's been a dangerous endeavor as of late. The toilet scrubbing goes smoothly enough. It's the shower stall and bathtub that have proved hazardous to my health. You see, I'm not a fan of old-school scrubbing. Scouring with Comet and brush? No thanks. That smacks of work, and I'll have none of that, thank you very much. Instead, I subscribe to the new theology of bathroom cleaning; I use products that promise thorough sanitizing without any of the laborious scrubbing. In other words, I spray the crap out of stuff. It works and I don't have to. Scrub Free eats up that pesky soap residue like Takeru Kobayashi in a hot dog factory. When all is said and done, the bathrooms look and smell clean.

But maybe Scrub Free doesn't work as well as promised because I have to spray like half the bottle into the shower before it disintegrates the soap residue. Meanwhile, a toxic cloud fills the entire bathroom, sending me fleeing, coughing and gagging. No joke, I can actually feel it searing lung tissue. Chemical weapons in Iraq? Bush need look no farther than my bathroom cupboard for some off-the-shelf WMD. Seriously, no one can go back in there for a good half hour until the air has cleared. I guess I could try using less Scrub Free and actually pick up a scrubbing brush. Instead, I think I'll look into military surplus and see if I can't score some sort of gas mask.