It comes from beneath…

I believe that my house was built on top of an ancient dump, the evil spirits of which are sending forth psychic impressions of all the trash that was left there into my house.

There can be no other explanation for the way detritus simply…appears…in this Den.

No matter how many hours I may spend cleaning, no matter how many times I may sweep through the same room picking up trash, a few hours later I’ll go back through and find a sprinkling of school papers, broken toys, magazines, bits of yarn and pencil erasers, littering the carpet like snow.

I just don’t get it.

Yesterday, I swept through the front of my house. I cleaned off the little secretary in the hall. Picked up the toys from the floor. Recovered the chairs from whence they had scattered and arranged them around the table. Emptied the trash can and the recycling bin next to the secretary, and put all the shoes on the fireplace in the other room.

And yet…I look around me right now…and you would never believe that I had lifted a finger in this room since the Dawn of Man.

The secretary is covered with a blizzard of papers. Receipts, school work, notices, and what appear to be toilet paper cores capped with white paper. I’m going to bet they have beans or pasta in them. I’m going to further bet that this is what I’m glimpsing under the secretary: beans, or pasta, which have escaped from the toilet paper cores.

There is a set of DVDs on the secretary, and a game cartridge for the Pixter (Dumbest. Electronic. Gizmo. Ever.) There are empty picture frames and a couple happy meal style action figures on it.

There’s a stack of magazines or catalogs, I can’t tell which from here, on the coffee table. Plastic wrappers. An empty shipping box (my bad). Three toys. Four pencils, on the floor. And two pairs of shoes (my bad again). There are scraps of paper balled up on the floor, two Reporting Services manuals (neither of which are helping me out much today), several knitting pattern books, school supplies (glue sticks, pencils, erasers), and a set of watercolor paints. Some coloring books. A big manila envelope containing…something.

Several…cables. Which I’m sure go to electronics we own; but not the digital camera. That particular cable has been lost forever. Probably was eaten by the evil spirits of the ancient dump.

A screwdriver. And two bills, which I guess I’m supposed to be ‘doing something’ with, but for the life of me I can’t tell you why they’re here. And two pleading letters from the teachers begging me to come volunteer in the classroom.

Which I would do, if I had a minute.

Which I don’t. Because the evil spirits of the ancient dump keep pushing all this psychic noise into my house.

I’d call for an exorcism, but before I can have a priest over…I’d need to clean. You can’t have a priest over with a dirty house…