Cleaning House: Part I

Behind my apartment, there is a one-bedroom second story apartment, and below that are four little garages. These garages, originally parking when this row of homes was used as housing for Warner Brothers working-class folk back in the 1920s, are now rented out as storage units by my money-savvy landlord. One of these units is rented by a man named Lyn Etcetera. Lyn Etcetera was once named something-or-other Wordsworth, yet he had his name changed a while ago because he didn't like it. Lyn is a man in his early fourties with brown, thinning hair, a shrewish face, and a constant look of befuddlement. Lyn and I do not talk very often, but he comes and parks his old car and opens up his little storage garage every Saturday (and some Sundays) and just sits, staring into the chaos he has crammed in with the moths and the cobwebs and the lizards over the last decade. His space is filled with artwork, with half-painted chandeliers, with heavy blankets, odd pieces of unfinished furniture; little things which Lyn tries to sell at the local Sunday morning flea market. When Lyn is here for four to five hours at a time, he just sits in a beat-up lawn chair and peers into his storage unit, confused and pensive and seeming to wonder, "how did all of this end up here? How did I end up here?"

Lyn has forgotten something very important: cleaning house.

I thoroughly enjoy cleaning. Call me crazy, but every Saturday morning, after I practice yoga and nibble on some fruit at the Malibu pier, I come home and relax by scrubbing my bathroom, washing my dishes, sweeping my wooden floor, and doing my laundry, if there's enough to merit a trip to the laundromat a few blocks away. I do this for much the same reason practice yoga, which I once heard summed up quite nicely: "we practice yoga to shed the unnecessary, so that the necessary may speak." I believe in cleaning the home, the body, the mind, and the spirit. If we all payed a little more attention to the upkeep of these aspects of our lives, the world would undoubtedly be a more peaceful place.