I should wash out my mouth!

Yes, I’ve been cursing, possibly even more than Michele Wojciechowski, the only freelance writer I know who could make George Carlin’s zombie blush.

Sometime after my wife and I married, but before my daughters were born, a liquid soap dispenser in the house went dry.  Brandishing our newlywed Costco card, we purchased an industrial size barrel of liquid soap, refilled the eensy little container and placed the barrel in the cleaning closet.

Leap forward over two years, to this evening.  Yes, I said leap forward and not skip forward or fast forward or lean forward.  Stop being silly and pay attention.  Now, where was I?  Ah, yes, this evening.  I’ve been doing a bit of housecleaning today, partly because it’s my responsibility as the work-at-home parent, and mostly because my wife’s old (as in from a long time ago, please don’t get me into trouble over this) college friend is coming into town to visit us, enjoy a few days respite from her own little buggers, and celebrate the independence of our great republic with the consumption of charred mammal flesh and gunpowder.

So, while my daughters slept upstairs and my wife drove to the airport, I set to the last task of the day: cleaning our cat’s litterbox.  If you knew Pecos the Cat, a former stray who was hit by a car on Pecos Street, picked up by an animal shelter that mended his broken jaw and morbidly gave him a moniker that daily reminds him of the most horrific moment of his seventh or eighth life, you’d understand why I procrastinated with the poop scooping.  Let’s just say Pecos has been making up for those three long weeks while his jaw was wired shut—he’s been eating nonstop ever since.  He’s now a remarkably tubby ball of fur whose eating skills are possibly only trumped by his ability to overwhelm me scatalogically.

Fortunately, thanks to the power of kitty litter marketing, odor-locking and ultra-clumping flavor crystals make the task of scooping Pecos turds a relatively easy job.  As I raked through the gray litter, however (which looked like a tiny, cleaner version of Avalon Beach), I scooped up something, well, gooey.

Please don’t stop reading. I swear, it’s all good clean fun from here.

Upon closer examination, I discovered that the liquid soap barrel, which resides on a shelf directly above the litter box, was leaking.  In fact, was leaking is probably an incorrect way to describe what I found—has been leaking is better.  Yes, for possibly two years or longer, the liquid soap had been slowly making its escape from a manufacturer’s flaw in the lid, creating a puddle of soap underneath the barrel that, after who knows how many months of planning, was launching an assault on the filthy litter box below.

Please don’t ask me why the litter box is located in a cleaning closet, which is located in a bathroom.  Such is condo living.

So, I grabbed the barrel (okay, it’s only a gallon jug, but barrel is so much funnier to say) and within seconds found myself quoting lines from Ghostbusters:

"He slimed me."

Blessed by the fact that I was standing in a cleaning closet, I reached up, grabbed a rag, and began wiping.  I also was in a bathroom (such is condo living), so I began rinsing out the rag in the sink.  And that, my friends, is when I learned that soap is perhaps the dirtiest thing on planet Earth.

Billions and billions of stars, ahem, bubbles burst forth from the rag, filled the sink, and began dive-bombing the floor like little translucent lemmings.

So now I had liquid soap, which apparently behaves exactly like Mogwai when wet,  foaming all over the floor.  The rag was useless.  I was useless.  Friendly, harmless bubbles were transmogrified into rabid gremlins:

I left the litter box inside a cleaning closet inside a bathroom covered in soapy gremlins and closed the door behind me.  The horror, the horror.

I went to Blockbuster Video (Hello, ghost town!) and picked up copies of Ghostbusters and Gremlins, which were both mysteriously released on my wife’s birthday, 25 years ago: June 8, 1984.  Hopefully I will find the key to thwarting my bubbly badguys somewhere within the combined 211 minutes of these films.  As an added precaution, I picked up another film from 1984:

There’s got to be something in that “wax on, wax off’ scene that will help me.

If not, I’ll have to tell my wife that we don’t have a bathroom downstairs anymore, or a cleaning closet, and that Pecos the Cat must take care of business in a litter box under our bed (such is condo living).

No matter what, I know I’m going to have dreams about Mr. Miyagi fighting Mogwai and the Marshmallow Man tonight—and there will be plenty of soap to wash out my mouth if and when I go back in there.