Why clean the garage floor?
Because it’s trash day and upon taking the barrels out of the garage I noticed a dark oily brown swill oozing from the corner of one of the broken barrels. The stench was nauseating and I was pretty sure my skin would melt if I accidentally splashed any of the sludge on my leg. Why is it that every one of our trash barrels leak? They barely hold the bags, never mind whatever noxious liquid makes its way out of the bags (and how does that always happen with a sealed bag?). This week I put signs on both barrels so the trash people would just load the entire full barrels into the truck and take them to the dump where they belong.
All the trash, everything that goes into those bags, we have either eaten, worn, picked up or handled somehow. Everything we put in the trash was at one time safe for humans, but some incredible transformation occurs when the stuff goes into the barrel, as if the trash says, “Okay, we’re trash now, we don’t have to concern ourselves with the delicate inhabitants of the planet. We have nothing better to do right now, so let’s use the next week or so to become the most serious, most advanced, most toxic and repulsive waste material known to mankind. Also, we don’t have to stay in these flap-tie bags.”
How To Clean The Garage Floor
1) Search the house for the most powerful cleaner, some kind of heavy-duty industrial product, maybe something like Lestoil. If a half full bottle of Windex is the best you can do, and your daughter has your car so you can’t go to the store for something better, and the ooze is traveling across the floor, use plan B.
1b) Use a jug of laundry detergent. You always have it, it’s a cleaner (and pretty strong in its concentrated form), and it’s a significant enough amount to cover a large spill.
2) Don’t mix with water, as the instructions on any concentrated cleaner indicate. Pour the whole thing (that’s right, the whole bottle), straight out of the jug, onto the spill.
3) Use your push broom to spread it around, then let it soak in thoroughly.
4) Scrub it with the same broom, but don’t keep splattering it on your shoes, socks, and legs because that’s unbelievably disgusting (good luck with that).
5) Race around and remove all the stuff on the perimeter of the ooze because as it becomes less viscous with the cleaner it spreads rapidly in all directions.
6) Hook up the garden hose, open the garage door, hope that the floor is pitched toward the opening, then full-force blast the waste water sludge toward the door.
7) Keep blasting to keep the volume of water moving. As you pull on the hose don’t let it kink (it will) because the water flow will stop and the moving puddle will move back toward you, as if just released from a dam.
8) With the hose and with the broom move the disgusting mess out the door and onto the driveway. Watch it re-puddle at the exact spot where you get in and out of your car, and find that not even an ounce has evaporated by the next morning.
9) Fire up the leaf blower to send the rest of the water out the door and to further dry the floor. Do not spray random drops of the filthy water over all the things you were trying to protect from the ooze.
10) Long for the days when you could use bad car behavior or general lack of kid cooperation to assign “make up” (how you make up for what you did) chores.
11) Enjoy the freshly laundered smell of your garage.
—Dad
