Road Apples
Nov. 2, 2009

Next to godliness

By Tim Sanders

I was watching a TV sportscast, and Marilyn was in the recliner, reading last week’s Post. I heard her sniffle, and then choke back a sob. When I turned, I saw a tear trickle down her cheek.

“I feel the same way,” I said. “I do believe Auburn set a new NCAA fourth quarter penalty record last Saturday!”

“You’re a boob!” she sniffed. “There are other things in life besides college football. Just listen to this, from Brett Buckner’s Family Guy column. It’s about how he uses cleaning as a coping mechanism. He says:


‘I dust, I vacuum. I piddle and pick up. I arrange and rearrange. I fluff and fold, do laundry, wipe down countertops and scrub toilet bowls until I feel settled and ready to entertain.’


A MAN SAID THAT! HE ACTUALLY CLEANS HOUSE! It makes me want to weep!”

“I know,” I said. “He can’t help it, he has an affliction!”

“AN AFFLICTION? THAT’S NO AFFLICTION, THAT’S EVERY WIFE’S DREAM. IT’S A GIFT FROM GOD!”

I couldn’t let that go by. “He admitted in an earlier column that he had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. A disorder is not a gift.”

“Well, if he’s got a disorder that makes him want to clean and dust and fluff and fold, all I can say is it’s better than the disorder you’ve got that makes you want to track in dirt and spill and dribble and crumple! He’s not content unless his house is all nice and tidy, and you’re not content unless there’s rubble around you and piles of junk on your desk and food on your chin and stains on your shirt. I believe ‘Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam’ was written with you in mind. Didn’t you ever hear about cleanliness being next to godliness?”

“Yes, it may be. But I always say you’ll never be as close to God as when you’re dead, so stay dirty and live longer.” It was my feeble attempt at a joke, but it didn’t get any laughs.

“That’s not funny,” she said.

“I know, and neither is accusing me of being an obsessive-compulsive dirt magnet. This obsessive-compulsive stuff is nothing to joke about. Remember that guy I worked with in Decatur, the one who was always washing his hands? Every five minutes he’d run to the nearest sink and scrub them. I’d be willing to bet that even if those hands are still there, he hasn’t got a single fingerprint left by now.”

“But they always looked very nice and clean, and he didn’t carry germs around. Where’s the harm in that?”

“Okay then, how about that fellow in Texas a few years ago who counted stop signs. He couldn’t help it, he was obsessive-compulsive.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, he and his wife drove from Silverton, Texas to Branson, Missouri, using back roads. They took the exact same route there and back, and he counted an odd number of stop signs–847 or 983 or something–on the round trip. It made him crazy. He felt that since they took the same route back to Silverton, there should have been an even number of stop signs. He convinced himself that either somebody had removed a stop sign while they were in Branson, or they’d added another one. He didn’t think that was fair play. He lost his appetite, and couldn’t sleep. Finally he left home in the middle of the night with a chain saw and began cutting down stop signs en route to Branson. By the time the authorities caught him, he’d cut down sixteen signs, and was starting on number seventeen near Wellington. There were nine collisions in his wake, all due to his obsessive-compulsive stop sign disorder.”

“You just made that up, didn’t you?”

“That story is absolutely true! Okay, so maybe he only cut down three or four stop signs, and maybe he lived in Lubbock, but you can’t expect me to remember those kinds of insignificant details. The point is that the guy counted stop signs, or parking meters, or power poles, or water towers or something, and he wound up in jail, either that or in a state asylum. And it was due to an obsessive-compulsive problem which may well have started out with the seemingly innocent need to clean house. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, you know.”

“You think an innocent neat freak acorn can grow into a deranged oak tree with a chain saw?”

“All I can say is that all of that cleaning and folding and fluffing and toilet bowl scrubbing may be fine for a woman, because her loins are chock full of estrogen, but it’s bound to catch up with a man. A man’s loins are fueled by testosterone, which drives him to concentrate on really important, manly things.”

“Oh sure,” she said, “manly things like locating the remote control, getting duct tape off the dog, and solving the age-old question of whether Hires Root Beer will work just as well as Coca Cola on your battery terminals!”

“The point is, excessive tidiness suppresses testosterone flow, and rearranging doilies will eventually cause a man’s testosterone to back up on him. You mark my words, in a few years this Buckner guy will snap like a twig. His wife will come home and find him galloping up and down the street, threatening neighborhood cats with a wire brush and a bottle of Lysol. I, on the other hand, may still be a bit disheveled, and there may be peanut shells all over my desk, but I’ll be just as sane five years from now as I am today!”

She said that she wouldn’t be a bit surprised, and added that I was an idiot.

I’ve heard that before.