Still life of the dirty dishes (do flies think?)

unadulterated realness

Here we stand at the junction of our anticipation and our memory, and as each fleeting moment slips into oblivion and is seamlessly replaced by the next we continue on, ever changing along with our reality yet truly unchangeable from without.

The dishes had been sitting in a tote on the floor in various positions throughout the house now for several weeks. There were piles of laundry, clean and dirty, strewn across the bed and the floor of the back bedroom. The kids room was undoubtedly the cleanest room in the house and was jammed with 3 beds and an ever shifting tide of toys, stuffed animals, musical instruments, and of course clothes. There was a load of bedding being washed in the tub, wet clothes hanging out on the porch, bags of dirty laundry and garbage piled up in front of the driveway just past the strips of dirty old carpet that were flopped out in the dirt yard. Much more overwhelming and hopeless than any of these surface level problems was the fact that every shelf and every drawer and every box or bag or even any open surface was covered and spilling over with random clutter. Guitars and keyboards lay up against kids toys and winding around and in between all of them were electrical cords and trash and dirty balled up socks, and over the tops of them were draped shirts and jackets and towels and blankets.

    I had a lot to do, but I sat writing instead, trying to muster up the gumption to become a fiery cyclone of unrelenting efficiency. Or maybe I should masturbate.

    Several hours later I was back at the very brink of action, but what to do? Usually I would wait for an idea to strike me, an epiphany of some sort. I'd be sitting looking at the mess for hours until the pieces finally clicked into place and I would leap into tetrissing my shitpiles. No such ideas had occurred to me though this evening.

I often sit in reflection for quite a while before beginning on one of my nocturnal housekeeping crusades. I’ve found moving things to clean large parts of the floor to be a much more efficient process for deep cleaning and in doing so I’ve been able to experiment with many different arrangements for the furniture. My wife hates it and begs me to stop but she also almost always loves the new setup when I get it right.

I had barely slept and my head simmered with smoldering negativity as I rolled out of bed bleary sore and hungover staggering towards the bathroom to begin the wearisome daily process of picking through my shitpiles to find any clean enough laundry to pass off as a respectable company man and not get spanked and scolded by my domineering and matronly employer. Water was everywhere, oozing out into the living room with the speed and mindless persistence of a sentient flesh eating bacteria from another planet intent on spreading into every microscopic crevice and greedily consuming everything in its path. 

The sound of the flies buzzing on the flystrip, desperately attempting to free themselves from sticky imprisonment and inevitable death at their final landing place, was oddly satisfying. I sat and grinned up at it. "What's a matter, little guy, you stuck?" The fly just kept buzzing away loudly trying with everything it had to lift off like it had done effortlessly every other time it had landed, but there was no hope. It was stuck tight just like all the dozens of other flies that were already covering the surface of this dangling tongue of sticky paper, and just like the others was doomed. After the last frantic explosion of energy they always stopped and I guess they either got more stuck trying to escape or were too tired or injured to try anymore. Was it possible that they realized there was no way out and accepted their fate? Do flies think?

The question has been rattling around in my mind for a while now.