by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

I hereby confess to substandard house-keeping skills. I am extreme when it comes to actual hygiene, but anything that is not going to make you sick (or dirty) often gets a pass. The Chinese proverb I invented, "He who cooks, does not wash the dishes," works well at a small dinner party, but not when I'm eating alone. Throw in on top of this (male?) propensity for sloppiness, two changes of residence in three weeks and things go to hell.

I had my first dinner guest in my new abode last week, a young man interested in helping with Lokkal. In his honor I moved all the unpacked boxes off the couch and into the back room, and closed that door. I have a high tolerance for disorder, but, after a while, even I cannot categorize the mess as "creative chaos."

Part of the problem is that I have a lot of stuff in a little space. I blame it on epigenetics.

People whose recent ancestors survived famine conserve calories better. The offspring of a mouse who has learned to run a maze, themselves learn more quickly to run the maze. The cellular memory of trauma is passed down generationally.

Just so, my ancestors held on to things, and so, I was born with my pack-rat gene all lit up. Besides, you never really do know when you are going to need it. Case in point:

My 2007 Volkswagen CrossFox runs great. With a high clearance and great gas mileage, it's perfect for San Miguel. But like all old things, people included (especially people), it does have its peculiarities. One of these is an electrical cross-circuit that ever so slowly drains the battery.

My mechanic, who looked less than enthusiastic about trying to locate an electrical short, brightened up immediately when I suggested that I could "solve" the problem by disconnecting one of the battery cables when I parked the car for an extended while.

This on and off has made it impossible to tighten the sleeve of the cable that sits around the battery post. The other day, when I had to jiggle that connection to get the car to start, I knew that I needed to slip a piece of aluminum foil around the post, to eliminate the gap.

Fanatic as I am about not consuming resources, I don't use, at least I don't buy, aluminum foil. I do, however, save perfectly clean pieces of it that come my way, usually at restaurants.

So, I was very pleased with myself, to find in one of my boxes a folded piece of slightly used aluminum foil, which is now one small corner lighter.

The boxes are now cleverly stored away, behind a screen, out of sight in the back room with numerous black garbage bags full of my clothes and bed clothes on the floor of the closet. I need to sort through things, putting some onto and into closet shelves and drawers, and give more stuff I don't really need all the sheets that I inherited when my ex-wife left town.

The back room, at least if you don't look too closely, has an orderly appearance. The kitchen is another story.

Real chefs work in small spaces. Everything they need is within reach. But, while my new kitchen's cabinet space is ample (luxurious by my standards), its workspace is tiny. The drainboard, aside the tiny sink and the kitchen table are quite literally the only "counter" space.

But it came to me the other morning. First, I need to wash my dishes more frequently. Then, I need a small, shallow plastic crate where to put the dishes to dry. The advantage of the crate over the drying rack that came with the place is that I can shift it up onto the adjacent stove or move it entirely into the equally adjacent utility when I need the space it's covering. It's like living on a boat or in an RV, space has to be repurposed, the bed folded up into a couch every morning.

Of course, given my propensity to save things, I had just such a shallow plastic crate, serving as a box in the back room. With that in pace, and a greater effort to keep the kitchen table uncluttered, I'm happy to report that my culinary enterprise is swimming along.

The most pressing domestic puzzle to be solved is the creation of a "cat ladder" so Fellini can come and go as he pleases from this screenless second floor window to the patio below, and back. During our decade of cohabitation, he's always done his business outside. But since we left San Antonio I've provided him with a cat litter box.

When I leave the door open, he has egress to the patio via the stairwell, but he's still timid of the noises the downstairs neighbors (a wonderful family) make. As they make less noise later in the evening, and as it is after dinner that he usually gets his urge, just lately we've gotten into a better rhythm of him relieving himself in the great outdoors, an important hygienic improvement in a small apartment. But the system doesn't always work (oye, the smell!), and, anyway, we all should be free to come and go as we please.

If you will allow me a stinky double pun; finishing on that note would be a shitty way to end an article. So I'll conclude with a literary reference.

Dostoyevsky opined that if you solved all of life's problems for everyone, then the denizens of that utopia would set about breaking things just to have something to do.

Cat's hunt. Humans, when we're not making them, solve problems. The kabbalists assert that "Every descent is for the purpose of an ascent." This temporary disorder of my abode allows a greater, higher order to manifest. And, indeed, gracias a Dios, life is spreading out in wonderful new ways.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go wash the dishes.

**************

Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar