Howard Hughes
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Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

A large percentage of arguments can be resolved by defining terms. Take "clean," for example. Is the cigarette smoker, who showers and changes their clothes twice daily, clean? Having performed human dissection, I can attest that smokers' lungs are gray with soot.

Howard Hughes was peculiar. Towards the end of his life his strangeness became legendary. He would take the label off and repeatedly wash a can of food before opening it. A bit odd myself, I can only hope that he rinsed as well as he washed.

The hose of the washing machine at Veronica's house used to spill into a utility sink. There I discovered that the water exiting from the rinse cycle is gray, much like a smoker's lungs.

Like Howard Hughes about his cans, this got me thinking about my clothes. Saturated with that dingy gray water, even after the rinse cycle, were they really clean?

Here, at my new apartment, I have my own washing machine. It's manual, with each cycle separate: wash, rinse, centrifuge. Here, before "pulling the plug" to drain the machine I again noticed and was bothered by the unclean state of the rinse water. But here, without a computer involved, it was easy enough to run a second rinse cycle.

I'm happy to report that the water of the second rinse cycle is significantly less dingy, and that, so far at least, I stop at two rinses. I wonder how many times Howard Hughes washed his cans... or if he smoked cigarettes.

Hughes in his Spruce Goose, 6x larger than any aircraft of its time, made entirely of wood, it flew just once
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G, the man who earned my eternal love by opening his house to me when I fled colonia San Antonio several months ago, had a weird soap habit. His thing was dish-soap.

Most strangely, he would dilute dish-soap in a spray bottle and spray it onto flies setting on kitchen surfaces to kill them. (Who knew?) I had many conversations with G punctuated by his hunting flies, spritzing that thing around the kitchen.

Flies really are dirty creatures, vomiting and defecating wherever they land, as soon as they land. And swatting them can disperse their body parts. (Don't get me started about those electric bug-zappers in commercial kitchens.) But swatting them lightly, so that they die without shattering, is much cleaner and healthier than spraying dilute dish-soap over otherwise clean dishes, pots and kitchen counters. Dish-soap is not safe to eat.

Yes, as with double-rinsing my clothes, I am being somewhat extreme. But I've learned to embrace my obsessions.

Less fanatic is my critique of G's actual dish washing technique. So profligate was he in his use of dish-soap that at the kitchen sink he resembled a kid playing in a bubble bath.

If you ask, What's wrong with using too much soap while washing the dishes?, I will reply, the same thing that's wrong about using too much detergent when you wash your clothes; it doesn't rinse away.

Believe me, a residue of petrochemical dish-soap on your dishes is much dirtier, much more toxic biochemically, than whatever crumbs of toast or residue of tea or drops of watermelon juice you are over-zealously trying to wash away.

I admit that greasy pots, pans and plates need extra soap. But then and there, as everywhere, the solution is to rinse thoroughly. A better solution is to use, as Veronica does, non-toxic dish-soap.

Hughes punched Ava Gardner in the face so she smashed an onyx ashtray over his head.
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My dishwashing skills aren't what they could be. My excuse is that as a vegetarian, a little dried carrot pulp stuck to the juicer doesn't change the flavor or the healthiness of the juice.

On my recent trip to New Orleans, my daughter asked me while I was performing the task at her kitchen sink, if my sloppiness washing dishes was a ploy to get out of being asked to do the job. Actually, I think her question was a ploy, reminding me to do a better job, which I did.

It doesn't help that, with age and all the time I spend staring at this screen, my vision has degraded. I know that the simple solution is to wear glasses while I wash, and to turn on the brighter kitchen light at night.

But I don't like wearing glasses, and sometimes before going to bed, just rinsing the crumbs of my midnight snack off a plate, there in my shadowy kitchen, I find myself laughing aloud, the butt of my own joke, for washing dishes in the dark.

But don't worry, if you are coming for dinner. I've taken up the habit of cleaning the kitchen the first thing in the morning while brewing my tea. It's never really that dirty. But then, as with "clean," we'd best define that term.

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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.

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