The Battlecry of Hygiene

Some of you may be unaware of my living situation at present. To sum up, I feel like I'm living in a slum in India, and my efforts to make the apartment into a civilized place with basic hygiene have been foiled by a brainlessly persisting duo we shall refer to only as 'the J-Team', who lack any sense of clean living. As a result, depending on how things turn out over the next few days, I may be moving to a different apartment. Before I go, I would like to post a monologue/lament that I wrote for the only roommate capable of enforcing some degree of cleanliness in our apartment. He has departed our apartment, where to I know not, only that it was the rising tide of filth that likely drove him out. So without further ado, I present 'Lament For Javan/Call to Defend Basic Hygiene'.

Please imagine me dressed in a toga giving this address at the Acropolis in front of legions Roman soldiers. Got that image in your mind? Great. Let's go.



"No, Javan. Why did you have to leave? We needed you the way a steaming apple pie needs a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Without you, disarray is beginning to take over again. The horrors are once more beginning; the odor of foul things spreads once more through the apartment, forcing all but those responsible to the rooms wherein they, the innocent, remain besieged by olfactory offense. And the perpetrators wander the halls guiltlessly, tormenting the rest of us with their absent hygiene. Foul things spring once again from the buried kitchen sink, while a vain war is being fought against the bugs of litter entrenched in the living room. Oh Javan, glorious champion of civilized living! Finals are swift approaching, but to study amid this degenerate debacle is an abomination! Why did you leave us in this our time of greatest need?

These impassioned cries cannot bring you back, gone as you are from us. I weep for your absence, and bemoan the fact that I have not your great girth to intimidate the putrid defilers into compliance. But I cannot permit our fragile gains to be lost, cannot allow our apartment to slide back into the degeneracy of days past. You left us a legacy of what a civilized dwelling place should look like, and I will not allow that to be sullied.

To arms, Daniel! Arise, Naoki! Raise the banner of hygiene on high. Summon the vacuum forth from its ancient resting place; bring forth the sacred twin reliquaries, Broom and Dustpan! Send emissaries to Wal-mart, send messengers to Febreze and call their aerosol-propelled combatants to our cause! An evil relentless in perseverance and odious in nature rises from the dungeon we consigned it to in ages past. The one who guarded the gate with an air freshener in each hand is gone now, passed on to greener and cleaner pastures, and a scourge of pestilential proportions now roams unchecked through the halls of our apartment. Arise, children of cleanliness! Remember the name of Javan, bear up the standard of hygiene, and beat back the filthy miasma that seeks to claim our apartment!"