That’s particularly so when the prelude to the crunchy household task is a presentation, by a spouse, of a wet paper towel with which to perform the deed.
A seemingly helpful gesture, the wet-towel move is actually an evil, calculated act, because it makes the job so easy that failure to do it threatened to expose the true nature of the slacker’s heart that beats in the cowboy’s chest.
But for this cowboy, last Sunday was different.
I’m not saying I was smiling as I cleaned up after the dirty bird, nor that I’m considering a late-life career shift into the bird sanitation industry — a label, it strikes me, that confers the same type of false legitimacy as the commonly used term adult entertainment industry.
But, as I said, last Sunday was different.
You may not be aware of the term “idiot vortex.” But I’m guessing many of you have been sucked into one before.
The idiot vortex is to our individual psychological universes what the worm hole or black hole is to the larger universe, at least according to the theoretical work of Albert Einstein.
An idiot vortex, by my definition, can appear during the failed performance of any daily task — the stupider the more dangerous — and has the capacity to suck the soul out of you in seconds.
Having spent untold hours inside these vortexes over the years, I began to hear that familiar sucking sound last Sunday morning when I realized I had stapled the last staple in our stapler.
I was using the stapler to staple together the half dozen pieces of paper of a cheat sheet I had assembled for a band gig. I know most of the material well enough. But because my memory more closely resembles an illegible scratch pad than a photograph, I need to write down things like the words to back up vocals, trail guides to songs, and points at which the whole band stops in mid song.
I was actually stapling the first of four staples to attach cheat sheets back-to-back when I felt the last staple staple.
That sent me to the small box of staples in the back drawer of our living room sideboard, a box that added a harmonic tone to that same soul-sucking sound as soon as I opened it.
Of course, we have smaller than standard staples, rows of which spoon together in their small packages, breeding in the darkness.
I pulled a row out, and because it was a longer row than our mini stapler would handle, had to break it into pieces. Things started going badly when, while still holding on to the stapler, I tried to put the extra staples back into the package.
Not only did they not slide easily into the tightly packed nest of breeding staples, but the attempt to slide them in caused the staple box to tip and sent more rows of uncooperative staples sliding back out.
Apparently so that I could augment my growing sense of frustration and failure, I tried to slide those staples back just as I had the first, with predictable results.
Soon after, part of the left hemisphere of my brain had disappeared into the vortex and, instead of putting the stapler down and using both hands and my full attention to repackage the staples, I began walking with both in my hands through the doorway and toward the kitchen counter, which I was planning to use as a work surface.
I have no clear memory of how some of the staples managed to jump from the kitchen counter into the stainless steel sink and slide toward the drain that leads to the garbage disposal, which staples can quickly disable.
And, speaking of disabled, my last memory of that trip into the vortex is of watching the staples slide.
I later envisioned a complex formula, akin to those written out by physicists, explaining how the seeming simplicity of the task at hand — resupplying a stapler — multiplies the sense of frustration and anger in the person failing to perform it in a way that sets off the equivalent of a nuclear chain reaction and leads to a psychological meltdown that unravels all the functions of the brain the forces of evolution have developed over several millennium.
I’ve not worked out the math yet, but I hope my formula someday will help to explain how certain cowboys, after emerging from the idiot vortex, are able to achieve a sense that all is right with the world by completing simple tasks like cleaning dried, smeared bird droppings off storm windows at sunset.
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