To Heck and Back in Five Easy Steps

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Non-Fiction

To Heck and Back in Five Easy Steps
Non-fiction Essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson III

     The darkness snakes around you as you step through the door preparing to meet your doom. Your doom is of course the tedious and wonderful experience of cleaning the bathroom. This is a bad thing for both you and the bathroom. You do not want to clean the bathroom and the bathroom, acting like a seven year old avoiding a bath, does not want to be cleaned.
    But it must be done. The Great Gods of cleaning have given you this lovely, graceful, fantastic job. Plus your mom is making you. If it weren’t for moms, the bathroom would never be cleaned, because who would tell you? All your dad would say is “Get me the number for Pizza Hut,” which sounds nothing like “clean the bathroom,” so you’re probably screwed.
    The very first thing you must do in cleaning the bathroom is to turn on the light. As soon as you complete this task then the real fun kicks in. When the light has been turned on you must now take a look at what you need to do. Clean the mirror, clean the sink, clean the counter, clean the toilet, clean the shower, clean the floor, clean that certain spot on your back that is just barely out of your reach. Oh. Sorry.
    The mirror is the first thing you must attend to. Water bottle sprays gone array, and the little things between your teeth that have been flicked out with floss cover the mirror. Hey that happens with everyone right? Anyway you must get out the Windex and spray the mirror in several different places. You also must have exactly three paper towels with you. Then guess what you do? You take the paper towels, stick them up your nose, and lick the mirror clean. Of course if this doesn’t work you could always try using the paper towels to clean the mirror, but I think my way is better.
    And there you have it. Your bathroom is clean. Unfortunately your mom will probably take you by the ear, kicking and screaming, back into the bathroom to actually finish cleaning it. So you take a deep sigh and move onto the next task. This next act of cleanliness is actually two things in one. You can clean the sink and the counter at the same time. Who knew? Well me. And maybe you. And Mr. Clean most likely knows. You can use a towel at this point. You can probably use a cleaning product too, but I find good old H2O works just as good. Here’s what you do. Take towel. Dip half of towel in water. Rub the sink and counter with wet part of towel. Use the dry part of the towel to go back over the wet spots and tada. You have yourself a nice green bean casserole. And a clean counter.
    You have now reached a point in your journey with no turning back. The cleaning of the toilet. May God have mercy on your soul. The cleaning of the toilet is a problem dating back to the middle ages. But I would rather not go off on a tangent about the middle ages, so lets skip that last joke. The cleaning of the toilet isn’t as hard as it looks. For the surfaces you can use the wet towel/dry towel method mentioned in the last paragraph. And then you get to pour this pretty blue liquid into the toilet to clean the inside and you have yourself a nice clean toilet. Well kind of…sort of…you can’t make me redo it.
    Almost there. Only two more steps. And next you need to clean the floor. To clean the floor you must have an essential household cleaning item. A toaster. You also need a broom to sweep the floor. If you don’t know how to sweep, here’s what I suggest you do. Go into the garage, find a hammer and whack yourself in the head repeatedly until you figure out how. After you sweep the floor, you have an almost clean bathroom.. I have also heard of a thing called “mopping”, But I have heard the horror stories and death count that come with mopping so we’ll skip mopping.
    Your last and final and 5th assignment? To clean the shower. Follow these step-by-step instructions and you can’t go wrong.
1.) Open shower curtain.
2.) Look inside
3.) Close shower curtain
4.) Compliment yourself on a job well done.
And there you have it. You finally have cleaned your bathroom to perfection. And was it really that hard? I mean really? Well however hard you try you can’t avoid it. But at least now you don’t have to do it for another 6 months. Wait. Maybe that’s the dentist. I always get those two mixed up. Oh well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson III,16,Contact: CutDaDeck21@aol.com, Copyright 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson III, Reviews and comments requested
Posted 06/27/2004