You Know What Can Suck It?

Packing peanuts.

I may come off as an outrageously ungrateful schmeckdorff for saying this-- but cleaning up after your birthday is a real bitch. It's not just a cruel reminder that you won't be important to anyone of any consequence for another 360-or-so-odd days (and you'll never be as important as you were when you were thirty!!!) it's that when you receive something that's nice enough to require packing peanuts, well, you invariably end up having to clean up packing peanuts.

My mother-in-law bought me a coffee-maker for my birthday. And it's a very nice one, too. It's so nice, in point of fact, that it required packing peanuts. It's Japanese, as nice things often are, like luxury vehicles, cellists, hari-kari blades, and underage prostitutes.

I received this coffee-maker not because I asked for it, but because my mother-in-law decided I need it, because she decided that the one that I already had was defective or, at the very least, insufficient. I didn't see a problem with the old one-- it turned water and dirt specks into coffee and, as far as I'm concerned, that makes it a Jesusinart, but my mother-in-law was unimpressed with the results.

"If it's such a big deal to you," my wife helpfully suggested following one of her mother's rants on the subject, "you can buy him a new one for his birthday."

Dag, yo! Score one for the missus!

And so, a few days ago, a gigantic box arrived at our house, and I received instructions that said box was not to be opened until the thirtieth anniversary of my processional from my mother's vagina.

And so, on May 12th, it was done.

The new machine is black, whereas the old one was white. The new machine has a digital clock, whereas the old one had none. The new machine has six buttons, whereas the old machine had two toggle switches. The new machine makes very nice coffee. The old machine, well, made very nice coffee. Since I sweeten my coffee to the point where it more accurately resembles wet Fun-Dip, I'm not exactly a connoisseur of coffee, so, while the new coffee maker in all likelihood makes a better cup of coffee than the old one, I'm probably not one to say.

Let's just say, to make everybody happy, that it does. There? Are we all happy? Are we all friends again?

Capital.

Today, I decided it was finally time to throw away the big goddamn box my new Japanese underage coffee-maker came in, tomorrow being trash-day for us suburbanites and all. Now, being alone in the house during this extravaganza, I tried to hold the box over an already over-filled trash bag in a lazy fuck's effort to dump all the packing peanuts into the bag.

Think that went well? Well, the upside is, if it had, there wouldn't have been anything to blog about. I might have had to write about the Thai red-shirt assholes or the fucking oil spill and, really, wouldn't you rather hear about me trying to dump an enormous load of packing peanuts into an already mostly-filled trash bag?

I just spent half-an-hour cleaning up wayward packing peanuts from the goddamn floor.

This is a task that is far more fun than it ordinarily would be when you have two dogs loose in the house, one who is a 9-month-old puppy who thinks that it's funny to eat packing peanuts when your back is turned, madly scooping up armfuls of packing peanuts, the other one who is almost thirteen years old and who stares at you with a look that says, "God, you're such a fucking asshole," in much the same way as an actual thirteen-year-old might look at you in precisely the same situation.

For an asthmatic battling what is probably the fucking whooping cough insanely trying to pick up armfuls of fluttering away packing peanuts before the puppy can eat them, it was quite a work-out. I realize that, on its face, it was a relatively simple clean-up operation but it felt more like doing battle with the Minotaur.

I'm completely fucking spent. And I hate packing peanuts. And I'm not even a goddamn environmentalist.