My Overdue Dish

What energy! Where energy! Phew, I just scaled Filth Dish Mountain. I got to the top, looked all around me, the stunning vista, and then I sprayed it with hot red water, turned it into an avalanche. I slid down the crumbling mountain and looked at what had settled in its stead. Clean dishes, steam and drip, vessels ready to be tucked away, ready to await reuse. I am getting into a dish doing groove, and there's a lesson or some lessons to be found within the practice. First, reluctance. Reluctance is the changeworthy actions killer. Reluctance is what makes Filth Dish Mountain so official in the first place. Reluctance is a disheveled room and a steady flow of diversion. Reluctance is free time, is passivity. It's forfun reading, it's pet-and-bother-the-cat-for-too-long. In short, it's lots that don't feel like lots of change. That's why the dishes in the kitchen sink blow up into mountainous scale. But there is a peace in addressing the chore. That's something to relearn. When I do the dishes now I am all up in that shit. Hot as fuck water that is somehow a friendly greeting, "welcome back to the necessity of the sink!," says the scalding hot water that I rotate my hands through with confidence, sure to not allow my hand to stay steady under it. If I just stood still and let that red hot fluid flow my hand couldn't take it. But I am a living-breathing-raging machine of dish production, movement and focus make it something to learn within. It's savoring the dishes I am making happen. (Sidenote, I am taking a quick break from typing to put on my shoes, I don't need to have my shoes on now, BUT DAMN it feels good to have your shoes on, you feel ready to go, you are buzzing with LET'S GET TO THE GO) I think reluctance stopped me from doing these dishes with such blissful fury. Connotation of my old ideas of chore: task, slump, requirement, burden-hardship, mandate, order, doctrine, would rather not. This is bogus. When I was a dishwasher (clearly my history with the gig allows me to lean harder on Dish Mtn than other old world "chores" I am trying to relearn all the time) I would do it with this same frantic involvement, but I was expected to, it was $$. When I am told: Do this, it's $$, I am all about it, I am docile and exemplary. When it's me on my own, or when it was, I'd be more about how this is my time, no $ on the line, just me, my time is mine to fuck up, let me make a mess and ignore it. I don't want that style of me one bit. I want to scrape those dishes, I want to get lost in remembrances of what were those scrapings, the clusters of minute bites missed that signal the meals the gal and I so lovingly made for one another. I want to feel every piece of dish in that sink, rotate and be thorough, feel the heat, be the movement, make it happen. I cleared the mountain, and it's weird but I think I like the feeling of leveling it more than I like the piecemeal killing of dish hills and dunes. Which is gross. We have a trough for a sink. The build up is spectacular and foul. It carries it's own smells, it's not a playplace for the curious meow meow, it makes tidepools of disgusting bloated cereal and splattered red sauces, like a haunted house electrified with glow in the dark gore. Ha, I might have to figure out my relationship with the dish and its recycling even further. For now my scaling of that mountains is lesson enough to harness. No more reluctance. Appreciation of all the things I do, and the usefulness of my energy. I want more and more energy, I want to redirect it to things that I can make explode in ways that catch the eyes of pedestrians, that wake up the neighbors and shock them. I don't want the kind of energy that helps me down a seventh beer. I want the stuff that has a razor edged new style of leveling with the living world while we still got it. That appreciates our chances within it and thereby harnesses our moments, especially the ones we let slip by like they are just dirty dishes that need to get done. Fuck that cow, these aren't chores, these are ours for the taking and remaking! Reacquainting!