Hoover my God to thee

Have you ever noticed how much like confession vacuuming is? You sit around, letting the tiny sins of dust collect on the carpet of your soul, and then one day you haul out the heavy equipment and get rid of them all in one roaring go. Fifteen minutes and your soul is as good as new. Of course, if you happen to do something really bad - like break a glass or spill coffee grounds all over the place, then you need to fix it right away, but for any sins less mortal you can get by with the occassional vacuuming. If you're the pious type you'll vacuum every week whether it looks like you need to or not - it'll be a kind of ritual. If you're like me then you'll wait until there's a real risk of someone coming along and declaring your room a health hazard, and then get the old Hoover out.

Of course, the thing with this is that you never know when people (like Death, for instance) may come to visit. If you're lucky, they'll show up right after you've finished vacuuming, so you'll be able to bask in the heaven of their appreciation, and pretend that you're one awesomely neat person. More than likely though, they'll show up unexpectedly just when you've been putting off cleaning up for a while, and then you'll stand around all embarassed, wishing you'd got to the task sooner.

Every time you finish vacuuming and look with pride at your scrupulously clean carpet, you think - this time I'm going to keep it this way. You promise yourself that you'll leap after every stray crumb, every piece of thread. You figure if you could just catch these things when they fall you wouldn't need to do all this cleaning afterwards. It never happens though - a couple of days later you'll be tired, you'll slack off, before you know it your room will be a mess and it'll be time to take out the vacuum again. The best thing you can do, in fact, is not even try, just go ahead and sin all you like and just make sure you clean up regularly.

Not, of course, that there aren't people whose floors aren't always spotlessly clean. These are the kind of irritating, saintly people who'll put in white carpets and then fuss over a 1 mm piece of lint that they discover lying in one corner. I have a lot of respect for these people, but on a personal basis I find them insufferable. That's why I don't even consider going to their house, even when they invite you.

And God? God is the one absolutely clean carpet lying in an abandoned room that no one is allowed to walk on. The one you need to take your shoes off even to come near. The one that nobody can really live with.