Being a friend of Kat’s for about four years now I can say I have a firm grasp on her reality. Sharing in the teenage girl tradition of “sleepover my house” I have acquired a great deal of knowledge about what kinda stuff is goin down there. Needless to say I have not yet grown accustomed to the strange ways and habits of her household even though I am a frequent visitor. It doesn’t seem to quite fit the Meyers family way to live, which I have grown to love. Here’s the little amount of knowledge I have collected on the two realities in cut and condensed version.The first and most important thing you must know about a household is the food situation. This is what I always notice first. To the adolescent and teenager alike food comes before breathing, thinking, sex, and all other normal human functions. When opening the Pouilliard’s refridgerator you may learn a whole new language. There’s probably some brown substance that smells not too bad until you read the name. Humus. Garlic flavored chick pea humus. What the hell is that? You’d expect in any typical fridge to find typical food, but when you glance around every normal thing was horribly altered by some disgusting process which only lengthens the name. Butter is no longer butter. It is sweet cream unsalted. Mustard is now bohemian sundried prune mustard. There’s tofu milk and tofu burger and tofu juice. There’s even more excitement in the cupboards. Stoned wheat crackers. At least there are a few words you can identify with. Couscous. Is that a frenchman’s sneeze or a middle eastern rice dish boiled with nuts and currents? You tell me.An unyielding element of the Pouilliard household is the totalitarian father figure Mista Pouilliard. When meeting him you always feel the need to hold back that heaving urge to poke his belly and watch him giggle like a school girl. He doesn’t giggle for any girl except Bette Davis. Mista Poulliard belongs to the DESCAD group of O.C.D. sufferers. DESCAD stands for disinfecting electrometallurging sandblasting chloriting asepsis daddy. When indulging in one of his more philisophical moments, which would be almost every minute of the day, he’ll bless a person with one of his wise DESCAD teachings. “Lauren, don’t shine the light in that corner. Jen might see the dust!” Sensing my acute superhuman ability to detect microscopic entities, he will decontaminate and antibacterialize the heck out of the house till it is free of every subatomic particle omitting the ones that constitute oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sodium hypochlorite.Entering this environment is like walking the thin line between psychological purgatory and hell. You would dread sneezing in the house. Mista Pouilliard might have to fumigate again. But the spic and span bathroom can be the real psychological undoing. Taking a shower is like playing a game. The sparkle on the meticulously white floor and walls of the stand up shower is so brilliantly luminescent that you stand in awe as your cornea slowly begins to melt. While blindly opening the door your now faced with the dilemma of daring to touch or even enter this germ free zone. Placing your foot on such clean tile seems almost a crime as you bob your foot in and out of the shower in indecision. But there are more obstacles. The smooth clean surface of the shower floor, once combined with the slick property of water, can create something like a slip and slide simulator. Blindly twisting and jiving like some maniac in free style luge racing you reach for soap and encounter what seems to be an array of foreign decisions which look as though they should be placed in the Pouilliard refrigerator. I do say choose the watermelon one, since it is the only soap one can “spiritually and fully” identify with. All this can make taking a shower quite a mind blowing operation and some would prefer just to not take a shower all together.The Meyers family has quite a different situation on their hands. Yes we have mustard in our fridge and you’ll find a stick of butter here or there. But we got real mustard. The kind made from mustard. And it says so right across the top of the bottle in red letters. We also got butter. It may not be in it’s package but at least you won’t have to worry about being grossed out by some long and scary name. In fact a lot of the fridge has unlabelled food in it. That is the beauty of the Meyers family fridge. There is no need to get in a frazzle over the name or the cholesterol content of each piece of food, and you’ll get a surprise each time you open a new container. The cupboards have crackers. Saltine crackers. The fancy kind with the salt on top. And you don’t even have to worry about getting stoned when you eat one. We have minute rice that you make in a minute. I don’t believe any of our boxes contain any Frenchmen sneezes. It’s all just good ol’ fashioned American food.There is an unyielding element in the Meyers’ household too. It is the ferret. The ferret comes first. The ferret comes last. And ferret comes everything all in between. Much like the father in the Pouilliard family, the ferret is the one say in environmental conditioning determination. Although she doesn’t giggle you can still poke her belly, and she hasn’t the faintest idea of what sodium hypochlorite is or how to use it. The one and only perfunctory and established condition in the Meyers household is set by the ferret. It is simple and psychologically stable. If the ferret is out, all the doors are shut. If the ferret is in her cage, then the doors can be opened. Other than this one itty bitty thing the household can remain peaceful in the purest form of happiness other than enlightenment, the political misnomer coined anarchy. The dinosaurs survived tons o’ years with it. Our household can survive longer.Not only do we not kill off all microorganisms and breathing life forms in our household, but we let them grow happy and free with us. Nature is allowed to grow. Outside while mankind is slowly deconstructing nature with it’s sodium hypochlorite and it’s antibacterial hand gels the Meyers household has created the proverbial Garden of Eden with nude children and everything. It may not be spotless and immaculate like the Pouilliard household but it is one of the first and only forms of human/nature equallibrium mankind may ever see, other then the Girgis backyard. This is evident in the Meyers household stand up shower. The innocent little buildups and bacteria that grow in the shower also serve a role in protecting us from spontaneous loss of vision and slippage. The bacteria carpets the floor in a comfy blue rug so slipping does not make showering such a task. And you can choose from our wide variety of white, peach, and yellow bar soaps that smell like soap and look like soap and don’t have a country named after them. Life at the Meyers’ household is simple and sweet. I am a simple person and I like to live without stress as much as possible. Obviously outward appearance isn’t as important to me as other things are. That is why the Pouilliard household is so strange to me. They depend heavily on outward appearance. Their household is confusing and spotless. Will the Pouilliards ever let go of their inhabitions and spill the milk? I guess till then I’ll just drop a breadcrumb on their floor now and then. It may not seem like a lot but to me it is the difference between unadulterated comfort and cardiac arrest.© 1999 PB+J Industies
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