Good Lord, Get Off Your Ass And Clean Your House

As you all know, I live at the Poderosa. The Pod is my humble home. Seven rooms of bliss, and seven's not that much, and yet I say this one thing over and over. "My house is like a pigsty."

And you know, I've never quite understood that phrase. Sure, pigs are always caked with mud and pig doo, but look at the average pigsty. It's a fenced-in square of mud. That's not so bad. There are no stacks of magazines and DVDs, no clarinet music strewn about the living room, no dishes waiting in the dish drainer to be put away in cabinets. No folded clothes on the bedroom floor, no wet laundry in the washer waiting to be dried, and most importantly, no kitchen table that serves as the storage place for a coffeemaker, coffee, liquor, toys, papers, batteries, snacks, more DVDs, and, well, everything but dinner.

So I'm sure somewhere on a farm in Iowa there are pigs saying, "Look at this pigsty. My pigsty is like the Poderosa."

I like to laze around in bed on Saturday mornings. After a long week at work and a long Friday night of chilling, it's just what the doctor ordered. While doing this lazing, I generally like to watch BBCAmerica's Saturday morning fare. I'm in love with "Cash In The Attic," and have a ball watching "Bargain Hunt." It all comes to a screeching halt, though, if they decide to slip in episodes of "What Not To Wear." I personally don't care what I wear, much less a bunch of women I've never met, and I hate this show with every fiber of my being. That's usually my cue to get out of bed and get started with the day.

I'd been seeing commercials for another show of this ilk, one called "How Clean Is Your House?" Apparently it featured two old bitties who come to your house and tell you how clean it is. Oddly enough. It didn't look the least bit interesting to me, so I never sought it out.

But a few weeks ago I caught an episode of "How Clean Is Your House?" quite by mistake. And let me tell you. I seek it out now, even though once I find it I tend to look away more than I watch.

Quite simply, the answer to "How Clean Is Your House?" is, "Spotless." I mean, compared with the poor souls who show up on this program. For never in all my born days have I ever seen filth like this.

The show always begins with us being introduced to the Poor Schmoe (PS) who's getting a visit from the Old Bitties (OB). The PS always tells his or her story, which consists of things like, "I used to live with my mum but she died," or "I'm a bachelor," or, "We do Wild West Reenactments and travel a lot." Then the OB show up at the PS's home, while the PS is gone, and have a look around. And I don't really know if I can describe what these homes look like.

Imagine your living room. Now, imagine what your living room would look like if the local trash truck backed up into your yard, broke out your living room window, hoisted up its trash holder, and dumped the entire contents into the room. I know you think I'm exaggerating here for effect, but I swear to you I'm not. When the Old Bitties open the door, stuff literally falls out. They can't walk through a room for the trash - there's not even a path, say to the computer or the bathroom.

And speaking of bathrooms, well, we can't, really, because the bathrooms are always quite unspeakable. There's never much water in the toilets, but that's not to say they're not full, if you get my drift. We see 10 or so years' worth of gastrointestinal events right in those toilet bowls. Right in the room where these people brush their teeth, for God's sake, assuming they do, which if you think about Britons and dental work, maybe they don't anyway. But disgusting is just not quite the word.

And kitchens. Lord have mercy, the kitchens these PS have. If the OB can find the sink, it's full of rust and dirty dishes. And rusty dishes. The kitchen countertops are about 3 inches high with filth. What kind of filth, I've no idea. Is it grease? Lint? Dust? We don't know, until the OB take samples of this filth, run it to a lab, and tell the PS all about what the filth is and what kind of bacteria are dancing around in it. And the PS stands there, listening, sometimes sniffling up with tears, wondering how in the hell they let their life get out of control like this.

Then for the rest of the show the OB show the PS how to clean things, and the OB clean the entire house and get it all sparkling inside. And the PS comes back inside the new clean house and marvels about how now life is going to be just fine.

Now, here's my aside. I like a good aside. I still don't think I'm giving you the full descriptive benefit of the filth in which the PS on "How Clean Is Your House?" lives. And so I did a little internet research for you. Yes, with much effort I found some pictures, so the least you can do is click a couple of times on these links and have a look for yourself. If you dare. All you have to do is click on my link, then the link on the site that says, "Image Gallery."

Let's start with the woman whose mum died. And really, I was half expecting the Old Bitties to find the woman's body underneath all the filth in that house, but they never did, which was at once a relief and a disappointment. Here are the slides from her episode of the show. As you can see, she's a messy so and so. And she talks in her interview about how she never invites friends to her home. Well, I'm certainly glad of that, because after one invite, she'd have no friends left. And what really bothered me about this woman is that she's a DJ. She loves records. I love my records too, and it appalls me someone would be so haphazard with her own collection. But that's just me.

And how about the bachelor? Here are some slides from his stint at being the PS. Now, I'm going to be bold here and say this guy may well be the Filthiest Man On The Face Of The Earth. There are two rotating themes throughout this episode - how the guy can't get a girlfriend, and how he loves his little nephew, whose parents won't allow him in the guy's house. I personally can't believe the gall of this guy to pine around about not having a girlfriend. Can you imagine being taken back to this place after dinner for a romantic interlude? And as for the nephew, well, if I were forbidden from seeing a beloved member of my family because I was the Filthiest Woman On The Face Of The Earth, I'd either learn to clean or kill myself. But no, this guy visits his nephew in the outdoors. In public parks. And that, my friends and blogees, is just plain pitiful. And for pure comic relief, the bachelor complains to the OB that he always seems to be scratching. As if he can't understand that! The OB do some labwork and find out this is because there are enough dust mites in his bed to fill Wembley Stadium, its football field, concession stands, and parking lot.

Now let's move on to the Wild West Reenactment family. They're a weird-ass bunch of people anyway, so I don't guess I was so surprised that they would live like they do, though the extent to which they live it is disarming. Have a look here. OK, so maybe I lied when I said there's not a path cleared through any of these rooms, because there's a distinct strip of filthy floor running through the other filth in this PS living room. But! This family has the added attraction in the dirt department of owning 3 dogs, 3 tarantulas, a lizard, a chinchilla, and a rat! Boy, I bet that rat thought he'd died and gone to heaven when these people brought him home. These folks also had a special bonus of actually having a filthy freezer. They left food in it so long it developed a life of its own. The mom whined a lot about her allergies, and when the OB showed her all the bacteria in their house, it was only then she seemed to understand the reason for her constant wheezing. After their house had been cleaned, though, this PS family just flat-ass creeped me out. See, if you'll notice from the pictures, and it was more obvious in the episode, they never show a bedroom for the daughter. However, the son's bedroom features bunk beds. And the family, there in all their cleanliness at the end of the show, talk about how they'd always been a very close family, but now they'd be even closer, and all I could think of was a brother and sister in their late teens sleeping in the same bedroom. But again, that's just me.

But here's the thing. I guess. This show mystifies me in so many ways it's kind of hard to find the thing, but I think this is it. These people get a quick cleaning lesson, a whole team of BBC Cleaners to wash up the filth they've created for themselves over the past decade or so, and at the end of it all they sit around in their homes talking about how now everything's going to be just fine.

No it's not!

What "How Clean Is Your House?" really needs is the HCIYH psychiatrist, who comes in and analyzes all the inhabitants of these homes to find out why in God's name they've let their surroundings go to hell in a shitbucket, and why, even if they're embarrassed by it, they still choose to sit around in their own filth all day. Because you cannot tell me there's not something seriously wrong with a person who does that. And having a clean house might be great, and keep them from scratching and having asthma and having to pine about not being paired up with a fine ladyfriend, but it's not going to solve whatever created the problem in the first place.

And I can guarantee you that if the OB would go back and visit the PS five years from now, they wouldn't find a nice and tidy abode. They'd find five more years of filth.

And this could happen, I suppose, and then the show could go on from now till the end of time. Which is I guess why there is no HCIYH psychiatrist.

Anyway, if I ever go on about my house being a pigsty again, I give you all permission to slap me hard across the face.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* We have no acrowinners, owing to the fact that I didn't get much of a head count of participants. Which is OK. Gives me more time to clean my house.
* By the way, I may have achieved some sort of record for the amount of times the word "filth" is used in a blog. But I can't help it. Sometimes filth is just filth, and there's no way you can dress it up.