Mr. Clean

The older male is not known as a clean freak.  Through the years, he has come to realize that his definition of clean is vastly different from his wife's.  A man can, for example, tidy up a room--essentially relocating great piles of junk--and talk himself into believing that he has cleaned it.  His wife, on the other hand, cleans house by first tossing out the male and then proceeding.

A man's definition of clean begins early, usually during the college years, when a dorm room is regarded as clean if there are less than two piles of vomit on the carpet.  The man ages gracefully from there, rotating his dorm room sheets at the end of each school year, usually tossing these in the trash and starting over.  Sometimes he does laundry.

This struggle for clean is why many men remain single . . . and why they eat food from a microwave that appears to double as a taxidermy laboratory.  Single men, of course, are far healthier than married men, as they have become immune to life-threatening diseases such as botulism, rickets, and scurvy . . . having survived on Swanson's frozen dinners for decades.  These single men also need no embalming when they die, as the vast amounts of preservatives residing inside their tissues has, essentially, pickled them.

The older married man, however, must learn to live with a clean-freak woman who insists that the shower basin be scrubbed monthly.  He usually does this scrubbing while he is showering himself, and often contracts athlete's tongue because of it. 

By the time the manopausal male has reached maturity, he is wholly familiar with the various cleaning products and supplies that his wife uses.  Most of these are kept under the kitchen sink and can also be used to kill rats.  These same products are used to clean the coffee cups the male drinks from every morning and, following a good scrubbing, his coffee may produce psychedelic dream landscapes comparable to those achieved through ecstasy or mild narcotics. 

However, since clean makes for a good marriage, the male accepts that he will die an early death by vacuum cleaner. One day he will simply be sucked away and disappear into the Bissell.  His wife will find him inside the bag, and this is how she had preplanned his funeral.