Marathon

A perfect way to not spend a day. Tomorrow will be again. Every joint and muscle in my body is spent. D is half my age and he was walking dead, stopped us at 4:30, because we had stopped talking and were communicating with grunts and gestures. Seriously wasted. He had control of the scrubber, I mopped like a man possessed. We got 3700 square feet done, scrubbed and double mopped. Still have to do 300 feet of back hallway (the dirtiest floors in the building) then re-mop everything, let it dry, and do two coats of sealer tomorrow. This job would have cost a thousand dollars, at least. I used 20 changes of water in the six gallon Rubbermaid mop bucket, mopping up sludge. The Peroxy 2 foams the dirt out and there was an amazing amount of dirt. Disgusting, really. My senior year at Janitor College we took the gold in mopping at the Custodial Games, but I was so much younger then. Today, even using the Modified Chevron and the new 32 ounce Fantail Loop, paying attention to my body, using my thighs and paying close care to posture, it was all I could do to mop for seven hours. In my prime, well, I still hold the school record for Marathon Mopping. 42 hours (a ten minute break every two hours) before I literally fell asleep leaning on my handle. Mopping for the record requires intensive training. My mop wringer is dying, I'm going to need a new one in next year's budget, and they don't make the Geerpress Floor Prince anymore. I went online tonight, The Janitor Network, to see what anyone had to say about the new generation of wringers. I'm sure they're plastic. The heavy, metal, one I'm using now has lasted over thirty years. I used it today probably 10 times for every change of water, so 200 times, and I do that double-squeeze I learned in college, so 400 times. Heavy use. I can't imagine a piece-of-shit plastic wringer holding up under that kind of demand. We had to stop a couple of times to let the fucking scrubber cool down. An industrial tool. And we were pushing it right to the limit. Actually, the noise precluded any conversation that wasn't yelled. I mostly focused on what I think of, now, as a kind of mid-western zen state, in which doing and not doing are the same. I protect my body, the physical aspect of me, that's mopping endlessly, but I have that aspect well in hand, the rhythm of the Modified Chevron is like cross-country skiing, once you get your body in motion, assuming someone has laid track. Even laying track, I grew adept at gliding. There is no effort, when all the cells are firing. That many hours with a handle in my hand, and not a blister. That's what I'm talking about. What I thought I was talking about. Nine ways from Sunday. Probably mean something to someone. I have daughters, for instance. I got a new 32 ounce Fantail Loop, because I expected to total the recent new 32 ounce Fantail Loop. I can't write that enough, it makes me laugh. I'll get over it. But it is such a fine mop-head, so well constructed, so well designed, engineered, that I clean it at end of the day. D's collapsed on the stairs, and I'm cleaning my mop bucket, rinsing my mop-head, realizing she (mop-heads, like boats, are generally feminine) was good to go. I must have mopped eight thousand feet of floor today. This would have killed a cheap mop-head. I don't date those girls anymore. Fanny may be a keeper. You give a mop-head a name, and then what happens? You can't live within a mile of any church. I don't sleep with mop-head, that was an ugly rumor, but I do wash her hair, and comb it out. My god, I've thrown over the fox for a mop-head. Will my friends think less of me? Should I care about that? I monitor myself as close as I can, not much gets by me, but the deal is there's this panoply, a fugue, the ongoing nature of things. Which, of course, makes me think about the last time we connected. Forget the hand-cuffs.