Cleanliness is next to: washboard abs, gainful employment, and meaningful relationships on the list of things not attributable to me.

Since I am not a gainfully employed laborer, in the fullest sense of the word, I spent Labor Day cleaning my room. 

Those who are regular knowers of what is going on in my life will recall that prior to moving to Fayetteville, NC, I was a gainfully employed laborer. These knowers of my life will also recall that the job in which I was employed was as a fabricator of custom light fixtures (fabricator = teller of lies about building lights, because really I mostly did the simple repetitive things that were 1. most boring AND/OR 2. least likely to result in complete disaster. I was ok with this arrangement). 

Now the shop is a dangerous place. Filled with peril, maybe even fraught. Mostly its dangerous to people who are: uncoordinated AND/OR clueless in the presence of power tools. I happen to be both of those things. Mercifully, I was surrounded by people who, while not above shameless belittling of other peoples' misfortunes, did a pretty good job of making sure I didn't do anything stupid enough to be life threatening. I survived that job with no major injuries except for a picturesque but fairly inconsequential thumb-scraping captured vividly in my facebook profile picture. 

Having thus earned my stripes as a mighty people's hero of the proletariat, I fled to NC where my limbs would not need to keep as constant a vigil against band-saw encounters or wayward hammers. Which brings me to room cleaning.

You have to understand that room cleaning happens only under certain circumstances: I can no longer reach the door without stepping in old saltine wrappers, the laundry pile starts glowing and giving off a fetid funk, it takes ten minutes to move everything onto my bed in the morning so I can reach the door (vice versa in the evening), or when I am overcome with such a deeply profound existential ennui that I feel my only options are room cleaning or dishes.

So it was room cleaning. Cleaning my room for me is a chance to assert dominance, to remake my immediate surroundings in a glorious sunburst of creative destruction from which there will emerge, naked as the newly reconstituted phoenix: the carpet. It is a process and a chore, but more importantly, a trial. It is to be taken in deadly earnest, not to be trifled with. And so, like some latter day Zeus with douchebaggy scruff in lieu of awesome beard, god of hearth and bookshelves (a paraphrase, admittedly), I set about my room cleaning from the Olympian heights of my bed, the only open real estate left in the room. Room cleaning, as I said, is a chance to assert dominance. And I asserted. I sternly admonished the nightstand, delivered several blistering barbs to the recalcitrant CDs, put a lamp in an arm-bar etc. And then, in what would prove to be my Waterloo, I attempted a downward-kicking-stumble-thrust on my rolling office chair. Not deigning to administer the full weight of my Zeussian power, I had chosen instead to lead with the "Wee-wee-wee" piggy of my left foot. The office chair was unimpressed, and so I followed up my martial maneuver with some rocking back and forth on one foot and some loud inhaling. Still nothing. So I gave up, defeated (de-FEET-ed! ha-HA!).

As I mentioned earlier, I'm not exactly Barishnikov reincarnate, so toe-stubbing is something with which I'm familiar. I didn't think too much of it, other than that it kind of hurt to wiggle it. Eight hours later, after getting home from practicing, I remove my sock to discover that my pinky toe has swelled horribly, grotesquely, to almost definitely 2/3's the size of my fourth toe! Outrageous, I know. Also, there's a nasty red/purple welt running down the length of the inside of the toe. At this point I know what you're thinking: "Ohmygoodness you don't have health insurance!" and, "Its too bad you're too late for dramatic first-cycle news coverage of angry town-hall meetings about health care reform!" I know. Those were my first thoughts too. I could just imagine: hobbling angrily to a town-hall meeting to vent my spleen, and maybe aerate my colon, complete with tearful story and then the dramatic unsocking of The Toe. But alas, it is not to be. 

Still, having survived almost a year at the shop unscathed amid saws and lacquer thinner and who knows what all, it seems poetically unjust to have probably fractured a toe attempting to clean my room. This is a dangerous dangerous world. Fraught right up to the gills with peril. And now, years from now when my grandchildren are asking me why I limp, I won't be able to say: "Well, it may have cost me a toe, but we got the chandeliers out on time," instead I will urge them to be careful about how they treat office furniture. You laugh, but thats only because you know that I don't even have a girlfriend, let alone a wife and children, and am in fact so far from any flavor of progeny that I might as well just cut off the toe and wait for them to perfect cloning if I want offspring. But at least my room is clean(er). I need a job.