"After seventeen years of working in private houses every day, the things I know the most about are slapped faces, creamed corn, black eyes, wrenched shoulders, beaten eggs, kicked shins, scratched corneas, chopped onions, bites of all sorts, nicotine stains, sexual lubricants, knocked-out teeth, split lips, whipped cream, twisted arms, vaginal tears, deviled ham, cigarette burns, crushed pineapple, hernias, terminated pregnancies, pet stains, shredded coconut, gouged eyes, sprains, and stretch marks.
The ladies who you work for, after they sob for hours on end, make them use blue or mauve eyeliner to make their bloodshot eyes look whiter. The next time someone socks a tooth out of her husband’s mouth, save the tooth in a glass of milk until he can see the dentist. In the meantime, mix zinc oxide and oil of cloves into a white paste. Rinse the empty socket and pack it with the paste for a quick and easy filling that hardens lickety-split.
For tears stains in a pillow case, treat them the same way you would a perspiration stain. Dissolve five aspirin in water and daub the stain until it’s gone. Even if there’s a mascara stain, the problem’s solved.
If you could call it solved.
Whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you’re making the world a better place, but really you’re just letting things get worse. You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.
Time is running out. There isn’t the kind of energy you used to have. You start to slow down.
You start to give in.
This year there’s hair on my back, and my nose keep getting bigger. How my face looks every morning is more and more what you’d call a mug.
After working in these rich houses, I know the best way to get blood out of the trunk of a car is not to ask any questions. "
The ladies who you work for, after they sob for hours on end, make them use blue or mauve eyeliner to make their bloodshot eyes look whiter. The next time someone socks a tooth out of her husband’s mouth, save the tooth in a glass of milk until he can see the dentist. In the meantime, mix zinc oxide and oil of cloves into a white paste. Rinse the empty socket and pack it with the paste for a quick and easy filling that hardens lickety-split.
For tears stains in a pillow case, treat them the same way you would a perspiration stain. Dissolve five aspirin in water and daub the stain until it’s gone. Even if there’s a mascara stain, the problem’s solved.
If you could call it solved.
Whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you’re making the world a better place, but really you’re just letting things get worse. You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.
Time is running out. There isn’t the kind of energy you used to have. You start to slow down.
You start to give in.
This year there’s hair on my back, and my nose keep getting bigger. How my face looks every morning is more and more what you’d call a mug.
After working in these rich houses, I know the best way to get blood out of the trunk of a car is not to ask any questions. "
— Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor
