Dead Skin

If you want to know where all this crap I type comes from ---

I was polishing my, um, desk, no seriously I was. Obviously SuperMaid Joyce sees deteriorating timber as part of the charm of this place, and the fact that I haven't noticed the state of the pseudo-oak desk-top for seven-odd (15) years speaks volumes about me too.

So, there I was moving things onto the bed or back to the bookshelves (where 80% of the *junk* on my desk belongs) in order to gain access to the mythical and alleged wood. CHeerist - this desk has lost a lot of its...? Shine? Varnish? Value?

I shuffled the remaining stuff around, mainly computer junk, to spray the environmentally friendly (I never heard it say a bad thing about the mosquito fogging) polish on, perforce I picked up my keyboard and placed it over there, polished the wood and set the keyboard back. Now with everything looking lovely and pristine(ish) I noticed the many imperfections that previously were relatively insignificant, below the threshold of my care factor. But now...! Look at that keyboard! There's an eyelash on the 'r' key! Shock horror! rrrrrrrrrrr. Now it's shifted to the 'g' key. ggggggggggg. Still there. gggggggrrrrrrrr.

So puffed it off with a huff of my laboured breath and immediately a cloud of dust particles arose!

Woah, that's a lot of dusty stuff. Whence? But now, itchy eyes!!!

After swiping the irritants from my eye (it wasn't the spray-on polish's toxic fumes, surely not), I picked up the keyboard. I turned it over and tapped the top, now on the bottom [a Nabokovian touch there, hah], a few times on the newly polished desktop, in the process scratching a few more commemorative notches into what remains of the varnish. Sparkles of snow-dust fell slowly onto the desk. A few more taps and the blizzard continued. Obviously it was not snow, but it fell down in flurries like snow. It was more like one of those movies where they want it to be snowing but it ain't snowing so they use fake fluff to clump up on the actors eyebrows (viz: Jon Snow about half the time he's on-screen in GoT). Imagine what that stuff is doing to those poor actors' lungs!

I tapped again. And still the particles fell. A CSI - EQLGHQ delight! A smorgasbord (veritable, of course) of DNA evidence! Eyebrow dandruff, beard drippings, lashes from the other eye, finger-tip exfoliation, desiccated unmentionable nasal disjecta, fingernails, toenails, pubics, prepuces...

Softly they fell, falling softly all over the desk, falling upon the living and the dead tired.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I tried using one of the silicon (or is it latex?) covers, but, you know, it was, as they say (or are you, perhaps, one of them?) like having a shower with a raincoat on. Just no sensation, no feed-back, no fun at all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thinks: Oh that's right - I have a keyboard puffer-and-brush set thing somewhere. Pffft. Who knows, somewhere here, must have lost it while I tidied up the desk just then. Maybe it's under this pile of snow?

Still, you can't beat a good tapping to get the DNA out.

E@L