Today Paul & I did our annual cleaning-all-the-things day. We have a whole stupid, boring, highly mature, perhaps slightly neurotic cleaning routine that we developed as we drove our things out to Los Angeles.

It was incredibly hot today, the sky looked like we were in hell, and yet! We got rid of things, organized other things, displaced a small nation of spiders, and generally felt good about ourselves by the time it was over.

I'm that weird grimy that comes from sweating a ton in dusty environments. I would love to write so much for you about How I Became A Non-Slob, because truly I feel like it is close to miraculous. Very few people, I think, grasp the actual factual change in our lives, mostly because the people who knew us as people with a messy house live 2,000 miles away from our new relatively non-messy house.

The fact is that I can barely understand who I was, until I see that bag of paper peeking out from under the bed that need to be filed. Then the sense of who I was crashes down upon me, I start to have Grey Gardens flashbacks, and I put that shit where it goes.

I am so tired that I really can't explain it. I can only jibber on about how different it all is. I throw things away! I don't buy new things! I put stuff where it belongs, on the first try! I feel like a particularly immature teenager being proud of all this, but I am very, very proud of it. My home is not a burden to me. It is a place that I care for, and it cares for me in return.

It was a combination of deep, desperate desire to be better, and the right time and place. It was a clean slate in many ways. I will forever be grateful that I got my shit together at least enough to get the dishes done at the end of the night.

And with that, I must clean the grime from me and head to sleep.

p.s. Is anyone watching Stranger Things? I just watched the pilot; it is basically The X-Files plus D&D, so.