Every rest stop along the highway and every gift shop in a tourist town is a church in which we buy trinket idols for our gods.
Trinkets come in many shapes and sizes, a crab magnet that says Maine, a snow globe with the Statue of Liberty inside, mini replicas of say the Golden Gate Bridge, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Mongolian Monument to Genghis Khan or even a koala with a hidden camera behind its eye that you take home and don’t even realized you’re being watched. Humans scavenge the world for these little knick-knacks so they can put it on top of their mantle to say, “Do you see! Do you see my feats, do you see?!”. This search for identity does not come without price.
Every household whether they chose to fight back or not is at war. An intruder that Trojan Horses its way into your household form the bottom of your shoe. An invader who has mastered air combat riding the winds through your windows and doors. A master of guerrilla warfare arising from your carpets and flaking off your skin. The enemy I refer to is dust and dust loves your trinkets. In fact, some research has probably shown dust more than any other visitor appreciates being shown your trinkets and ‘feats’.
Do you have a Precious Moments Figurine to remember your wedding or birth of your little humans? Dust loves it. Is there a football signed by your favorite player of all time? Dust loves it. Did you just finish setting up Jesus and the nativity scene for Christmas? Dust loves it. What about that little statue from your favorite Disney movie? Well I have news for you, Dust loves it.
It was during the second Punic War that Dust realized it would become the dominant species on the planet. At the Battle of Cannae, Dust witnessed Hannibal’s Double Envelopment Tactics and knew the art of surrounding the enemy was the perfect methodology for them.
Dust’s victory over humanity is almost absolute and so most buy trinkets to our conquerors instead of fighting back. James Joyce felt this lose very deeply:
“Home! She looked round the room. Reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided.”
Kyusaku Yumeno has not been handling the defeat well either:
“See dust drift soundlessly across the street in the dead of night as though it were possessed by a spirit, a whirling and spinning cloud. It is as though it were a recollection, at once not our own and yet somehow dragged out from within us, the physical conglomeration of our pain.”
Armed with Swiffer, rag or paper towels we fool ourselves into thinking we can fight back but this is exactly what Dust wants. Like bees and eccentric art teachers, Dust communicates with dance. In the swirls floating through the air, reflected by the sunlight Dust is saying, try to wipe me away, I will be back, and you will learn futility and obedience. Thank you for letting me dance through your house, I appreciate the exercise, peasant.
So, who still fights this futile war you ask? Moms. Around the world moms hold wartime drafts within their household recruiting children to their causes. With these child armies they attempt to eliminate the occupying Dust forces through simultaneous surgical strikes throughout the home. Most of the time these attacks occur in April, dubbed operation Spring Cleaning. For decades these mothers have not given up hope. During every Spring Cleaning mission they hope this time maybe this time my child army wont half-ass their chores.
But alas, for now, Dust remains.
Unrelated to my poor salary, this investigative journalist has no furniture. Merely a bean bag chair and upon the mantle a single plaque that reads:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty and despair!
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I guess I’ll go dust it forever.