Rant about my uncle, part 1: My dirty uncle

Here, I’m gonna complain for a little bit. Deal with it.

Quick background: My uncle (my mom’s brother) and I rent rooms from my mom. Call me a loser if you will, but if you do, I’ll just say “screw you” and place you right behind David Archuleta on my short list of people whose faces I desire to deliver a roundhouse kick to.

Anyway, I love my uncle. If you don’t know him, he seems rough around the edges, but he’s actually pretty witty, personable, and opinionated — a highly entertaining combination. He’s also one of the most generous people I’ve ever known, and very caring when it comes to family, even if he doesn’t always know how to show it.

Those things make up for all the annoyances and frustration he causes.

But just barely.

My uncle’s a truck driver who’s usually home for a week — maybe two — and is then on the road for anywhere from two weeks to two months at a time. It usually takes the entire time he’s gone to mentally recover from the short bursts of time he’s home.

Now, I’m not OCD or anything like that. I used to border on it, though, and despite a somewhat laid-back nature, I ended up angry a lot. I’ve calmed down a quite a bit since those days. Today, though, I still believe in rules, order, and structure. But I also believe quite strongly in balance and flexibility. It’s made me even more laid-back.

These days most things just don’t even bother me.

I’ll still get angry at stuff now and again, but it usually lasts a couple minutes and I move on. However, my uncle’s living habits — and the rare moments I feel like the Playstation’s cheating — are about the only things left that can deliver me to near rage-level anger. With the Playstation, I usually just break a controller and feel better, but with my uncle, I have to deal with it. Confronting him — which I have done before — usually ends in a worse situation, because then my mom ends up getting involved, and all three of us end up with hurt feelings and/or pissed off.

Being a truck driver, my uncle doesn’t exist in a world with the same kind of order and structure the rest of society — or mainly myself — are used to and/or prefer. All he has to do is go where he’s told and make sure he’s not driven too many hours in a given span of time. So for him, he just kinda does what he feels like at any given moment regardless of how thoughtless it is or how it impacts anyone else.

Today he was supposed to be headed back out to the road on a west coast trip — usually those last no less than three weeks — so I was expecting a nice break during which order would be restored in the house. He had just been home for three weeks, so I was starting to go crazy.

***

The very second thing I did today after he’d left the house was clean the bathroom he and I share.

(You ever notice how people say “very first” to place more emphasis on the importance of the event? That’s how important cleaning my bathroom was. The only thing is I waited until after I worked out to do it, thus “very second.”)

I usually wait to clean the bathroom until after he leaves so that I can enjoy using a bathroom that will remain clean or no less than clean-looking for at least a week, maybe two. It usually still looks clean by the time my uncle returns home. But when he gets home, it usually takes only about two days for the bathroom’s level of cleanliness to be dropped back to zero level.

As the bathroom’s cleanliness goes, that’s one of the few things I still remain sorta obsessive about. But when my uncle’s home, I just accept there’s no way I can keep it clean for more than a day or two.

The following statement is not hyperbole; it is truth: each time I take a shower, if my uncle used the shower last, it takes me at least two — sometimes as many as four — disinfectant wipes to clean my uncle’s shower residue from the shower floor. I can’t even figure out where some of it could possibly have come from. Between snot rockets and other hygiene issues, it gets pretty nasty.

Sometimes I hear him delivering said snot rockets while he’s in the shower from the other room. It’s at that point I consider kicking in the door, flushing the toilet, and yelling “NO SNOT ROCKETS!!!”

The fact that he’s a shaggy gentleman doesn’t help anything, either. The shower ends up clogged, and then it takes forever for it to drain. When that happens, the residue has time to kind of gel at the water’s surface — kinda like that layer that forms atop cold soup — and then it makes the shower floor even nastier when it finishes draining.

So today he left and I proceeded to hammer my bathroom with a full-service cleaning: I dumped a bunch of Drano down the shower drain; I washed all the towels, the rugs, and the bath mat; I scrubbed the shower, the sink, and the toilet; and I cleaned the mirror. I took it easy on the floor, though — rather than really mopping it, I only dry-mopped/dust-mopped it. Surprisingly, it somehow wasn’t as bad as it tends to get.

I ended up waiting until after I cleaned the bathroom to take a shower. I wanted to enjoy getting clean in a clean bathroom.

After my shower, I looked back at the shower floor just to make sure not all humans discharged sludge from their pores. Sure enough, the water drained like it should and the shower floor still sparkled!

***

Around 8:30 p.m. this evening, I was sitting down to watch TV. I had even made some popcorn to settle in to what I was watching. Just as I was digging in, my uncle called my mom to say he’s not headed out until tomorrow morning, so he was coming back home from the truck yard for the night.

I don’t think I’ve been as angry as I got when my mom told me that since I was in college, which was something like six years ago now.

Sure enough, as I predicted the moment I heard the news, one of my uncle’s priorities upon returning home would be to hop in the shower. I now think he secretly intended to trick me into believing he was leaving one day earlier than he was so that he could come back home and dirty up the bathroom within mere hours of me cleaning it.

The residue’s not as bad as usual, but I don’t care. Just because I’m that pissed off about this whole thing, I’m gonna clean my bathroom again tomorrow. I WILL ENJOY A COMPLETELY CLEAN BATHROOM!

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Tags: bathrooms, cleaning, Rants, relatives, uncles

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