Edgar Allan Poe and Warren G Collide. In my basement.

I am crouched in a corner of the house, my laptop balanced on my knee caps. I figure if I stay in this spot and type quietly enough everyone will forget I exist and I can escape the onslaught of January cleaning that is H.

Days.

Days have gone by and my house has systematically grown more chaotic and messier with each passing second. Mix tapes from 1993 have been unearthed and dear God must I admit it... they have been played. Cathy Dennis anyone? Plastic margarita glasses from parties that were eons ago rolled along the basement floor as H lugged bag after bag of detritus out of the room. Somehow we still have too much stuff. Do we really own all those board games? When did we acquire that many DVDs and brands of car wash soap? Is that Diet Coke from the party four years ago? Because that is the last time I remember buying cans of DC.Should they be stored side by side or should we just buy a whole new shelving system all together?

H went with the later. Excellent (note the drips of sarcasm oozing off this word). I knew he would. Yesterday, just as I was beginning to feel better from the sludgy crud of mucus that encrusted me. I had also stopped reeling from the mess that is Christmas taken down, when H brought in the new shelves. People, the man woke up at 6in the morning to buy these shelves. He means business. Boxes lay around the entrance to the downstairs in a fashion that OSHA would not approve of. I was lethargically fingering holiday garland and red ribbons while he muttered about closet space and DIY projects that involved tiny Alice in Wonderland type doors being constructed in the den. I had to step in despite myself. I loathe this type of cleaning.

This type of cleaning is more than that. It is a PROJECT. It is dirty, time consuming and only results in many wasted hours of me reading journals chocked full of poems with titles like, 'The Blood Tells All' and the ever original, 'Young Heart'. An amateur Poe I so wanted to be. Then H gets mad, yells at me like a Drill Sargent to get back to work and focus on the task at hand, and I'm left in a sea of old history papers and Warren G recordings to sift through. After that I get ferociously hungry and eat some old candy I find in the mixing bowls in our cupboards (dictators can't see through steel), I add in some port wine cheese log leftovers and some butterfly crackers to tide me over and I slowly will return to work. I swear.

Now on Day Four of this mass cleaning. Boxes that were stored upstairs have gone downstairs. Boxes that were downstairs have gone upstairs. Boxes that were once treasured have been trashed and the wooden community drinking trough from the Philippines remains in the house. Damn! So do the matching drink cozies. My 1996 mix tape with Ronald Reagan on the cover does not. Do I feel like the house is cleaner? I'm not sure. I still have some old Styrofoam cups (who bought those?!) to deal with and four unused dog costumes to bemoan.