Cleanliness is Godliness

I will admit that I hate art. Not “the arts”—I enjoy music and dance and theater and have actually participated heavily in all of the above. I hate visual art. I have some hanging in the apartment because I hate bare walls more but I am physically unable to appreciate sculptures or paintings or galleries or displays or anything else.

However, if I hate modern art more than I hate the general category of art. By modern art, I am referring to ambiguous images spattered on canvas or created out of clay or cans or dead bodies or whatever “artists” are calling “medium” today.

Keep that in mind…

The first time Officer/Gentleman was living in Savannah (before OIF III), we weren’t very serious. There was an intimacy to our relationship that came from knowing each other for so long, and having dated seriously in college and when we were together it was like we had never broken up, but by virtue of living 1,362 miles from each other (before he went to Iraq), it couldn’t be that serious. I visited O/G in Savannah three times before he got deployed.

The first time I visited Savannah, it was June. His apartment was both messy and dirty. You could see the dirt on the floor of his shower. There were crumbs permanently affixed to his counters. Worst of all, there was a pile of plastic blue Super Wal-Mart bags that covered a 3-square foot area in the corner of his living room. It was about two feet high. I cringed when I thought about what sort of critters were living underneath that pile. But being young, foolish, in love and desperate to get our relationship back on track, I chose not to comment on them or the general condition of the apartment.

Then I visited in July. His apartment was filthy, as I expected (O/G was never a tidy person), the shower floor was black, so was the kitchen floor, there were chunks of pizza crust, dust, and dirt stuck in the carpets, there were six empty shampoo bottles in the shower. The pile of plastic blue Super Wal-Mart bags had now spilled out to encompass a five-square foot area of the room. Still about two feet high. This time, I decided to ask about the bags.

It’s just handy to have some plastic bags around for stuff.

Granted, but you clearly go to Wal-mart often, so the supply looks to be renewable.

The last time I visited was right before I went to work on the campaign in late August. The living conditions were deplorable. As in, if I had called his chain of command, he’d probably still be pulling staff duty. Luckily I wasn't staying there--we had planned a getaway to the beach and were just swinging by to pick up his stuff. The pile of plastic bags had overtaken a third of his living room. But it was no longer justified by the necessity of plastic bags.

It’s modern art.

He was so very proud.

We talked about getting together after the election but we could never seem to make plans. I think it was my subconscious telling me to stay the hell away.