O Brave New World That Has Such (Savage) People In It

While I may have recently learned how to mop, that doesn't bely the fact that I have come a long way in terms of savagery, hygiene and cleanliness; four incidents come to mind, all from when I was twenty-one and living in the Outer Banks, in a shack across the street from the beach with a bunch of dudes . . .

1) my friend Rob put down a half-eaten roast beef sandwich on our filthy, garbage-strewn living room table and got up to go do something and I took a look at the sandwich and thought: This is going to be trouble down the line . . . but I didn't actually do anything about the sandwich, which was soon obscured by a section of the newspaper and two weeks later, when someone picked up that section of the newspaper, looking for the crossword, we saw the remains of the sandwich-- it was now a moldy bun and the roast beef was gone, replaced by a mass of writhing white maggots;

2) the bathroom floor was so filthy that we decided it was a lost cause, but instead of even attempting to clean it, we threw down a pair of wooden pallets so that we didn't have to walk on the filth;

3) Hightower suggested that after you use a dish, you should then wash it, but my friend John made a rebuttal, which became house policy: if you're so high class that you need cutlery and flatware, fish it out of the sink and clean it . . . once we dirtied all the dishes, we never washed them and made do with our hands;

4) a friend stayed for a few days with his mangy cat and a week later, while I was waiting tables, I noticed that my scalp was really itchy . . . it turned out that I had fleas (there's a shampoo that gets rid of them).