The Editor's Note #5

IN SPITE OF POPULAR DEMAND…
THE COLUMN!

Salutations readers! I am horrified that you have neglected to send me things that happened over this EXTENDED EASTER WEEKEND! I don’t know why I even write this column! Nobody replies and few people read it anyway and…oh forget it. It looks like I’ll need some totally awesome PUBLICITY to get more readers and make me feel like somewhat of a success. I’m working on getting Jennifer Lopez to do an advertisement. She seems interested. She has returned my calls, by which I mean her lawyers have returned my calls.

As if ravenous allergies and plagues of insects were not enough, Spring has decided to push another indignity upon us: Spring Cleaning. This tradition is kept in circulation by Mr. Clean, who is actually a murderous poltergeist. For some bizarre reason, he must have died and gone to Hell and hates all of us, which is why he brings it back in the form of Spring Cleaning.

I am an organized person, but I practice the “Heap” method of organization. For example, every morning I retrieve my clothes from the Heap of Clothes. If I need some paper, I take it from the Heap of Paper. If for some reason I need money, I ask my parents, because try as I might, I have not been able to make a Heap of Money. However, my mother, who is a “Normal” organizer for most of the year, has a nasty habit of going into my room when I am not there and removing the Heaps, packing the contents neatly into drawers, closets, or trash bags as the need arises. Naturally, I am left totally helpless. I suspect she does this because she enjoys my grief.

Despite this rivalry, my mother and I somehow work out a system that makes us both happy, like she promises not to tamper with the sanctity of the Heaps too often and I do not go and become delinquent and break things with an axe. If the world was free of Mr. Clean and the Pine Sol lady, this happy state of affairs would continue.

But alas, every year of my seventeen years my mother finds a part of her brain switched on that changes her from a relatively “Peaceful” organizer into what I like to call the “Totally Insane Homicidal Manic” organizer. During this time my mother apparently loses the parts of her brain that make her easygoing and wonderful and develops in their place a variety of demonic abilities, up to and including the ability to breathe fire.

This is what happens. One Spring Saturday, I’m sitting at my computer doing something incredibly important and productive and most likely related to National Security, like melting the purple aliens of planet Zoborg or writing my novel. With no warning whatsoever, my mother tears into the room and tears further into me, saying in a long tirade that I 1) am horrible and 2) could not organize my way out of a paper bag. Instead of waiting for a protest, she proceeds to pick up various objects of mine and the exchange goes like this:

Mom: Is this trash?

Me: No, that’s my dresser!

Mom: It looks like trash to me! (She tries to lift it)

Me: It’s not trash.

Mom: Is this trash?

Me: No, that’s my cell phone!

Mom: Call 911, my back is broken.

And so on until everything that was deemed trash is now on its way to the landfill. What my mother does not throw away, she places in a box. In the “Rampage” state, my mom is crazy about boxes. She’ll pick up everything and give it its own little box, after which she will label the box, after which she will put this in another box and label this as well. Somewhere in our basement are fifty cubic foot boxes containing exactly one (1) eraser.

I expect that many of you are agreeing with me. “Mitchell,” you wish you could ask, “Will you please stop writing until next week?”

I shall grant your wish!
Mitchell W.