My Personal Mediterranean

I had to go to the bathroom the other day, which I am grateful to say is not ordinarily a noteworthy event. In this case, I was all set to walk through the laundry room to the toilet when I encountered a wide, unnavigable azure-blue sea, a veritable Mediterranean, where none had been observed before.

Not a problem. We have two doors to that bathroom, which has occasionally led to embarrassment when we have company, but which now seemed like an excellent design feature. I went around.

Still. This new development wasn't something that should be ignored for long.

I recognized the new feature as the entire contents of a brand-new vat of Arm & Hammer Laundry Detergent, set free, and I paused to admire the levelness of the floor. No pooling was observed: the floor was able to accommodate the detergent over the broadest possible expanse given its native viscosity and local conditions of temperature. In other words, it was every the fuck where.

No real mystery as to what happened. My washing machine attains supersonic spin speeds and could rattle the dingleballs off a passing dog, and I'm used to it, but my new tub of detergent must have been terrified, and leapt off the dryer. My washing machine, in fact, is tectonically walking across the floor at a rate of about two inches a month. Next year this time we'll be able to load 'er up without getting out of bed.

I'm sure there are better ways of contending with this, but the only thing I could think of was to scoop all the detergent I could into a dustpan and dribble it back in the container. Sure, there will be dirt and dust in there, but it's detergent. It should be fine. Then I sopped up the remainder with towels and old sheets. It worked passably well. I took the towels and sheets out to the yard to hose them off, but it soon became clear that soap was going to keep coming out of them until the end of time. You don't need much High-Efficiency detergent to clean a load. It's packed with soapy goodness. My towels are now soap bombs. My new plan is to dry them on the garden wall and then snip them into tiny squares like panes of LSD. Pop one in every laundry load and hope for the best.

But there's still a film of soap on the floor. Soap is slippery stuff, and has been ever since it was made from dead fires and animal fat. Slipperiness is sort of the point of it. HE detergent just amps it up. That stuff is slipperier'n a goose's gut.

How do you clean up soap?

"Why is soap so slippery?" I asked the internet. The internet replied that soap is slippery due to a lack of friction. Also? The sky is blue from a lack of orangeness. I still don't know how to clean it up. And half the floor is now stained slightly blue. I don't know why they had to add that much dye unless the original concoction is the color of baby diarrhea.

The clothes dryer has no opinion. I fired that appliance years ago. It's just there as a companion animal to the washer.

HAPPY 38TH ANNIVERSARY TO DAVE! OH, AND ME TOO!