DUSTY CONSPIRACY


I got my hair cut today. “Your hair, it’s so thick,” the stylist said.

I found that hard to believe, because I keep losing hairs, dozens of hairs daily, all over the place. My place mostly – where the dust not only grows thick, but also thumbs its nose at me when it thinks I’m not looking.

And snickers. It snickers at night when it thinks I’m sleeping.

If you watch the commercials on TV, dust is portrayed as this fluffy thing that can easily be persuaded to surrender if you use the right equipment. That’s just not true. Dust comes in many forms. The fluffy stuff is the easiest to catch, even when it morphs into dust bunnies that hop away and hide out under the bed.

But, besides fluffy dust, there’s cluster dust; cluster dust is dense and clings to rugs. And there’s sticky dust; sticky dust is found in the kitchen. It conspires with kitchen grease to glue itself to surfaces adjacent to the cooking areas such as the hood over the stove or the top of the refrigerator.

The worst stuff is more like powdered milk that accumulates on surfaces. You can move it from one surface to another; you can seldom really get rid of it entirely. Some of it can be vacuumed up, but a residue always lingers. So, when I’m dusting, I have to dust each surface at least twice.

My daughter claims that my dusty problem is due to the fact that I don’t dust often enough. It’s true that I only formally dust twice a year. So, who, besides her, says that twice a year isn’t often enough?

Twice a year is also when I dust my bathtub. Let me explain. I swim daily and take showers before and after each swim so I seldom need to use either tub or shower in the bathroom. So, assorted dusts build up in the tub – mostly what looks like the debris from a windstorm along with discarded hairs and cluster dust.

I’m beginning to develop a theory about cluster dust; it’s just another conspiracy. It’s obvious the dust clusters are held together with all my lost hairs. Do you suppose the clusters are the offspring of intergalactic aliens getting ready to take over the world clinging to hair, to the discarded flotsam and jetsam of humankind? Maybe that’s what the nightly snickering is really all about.