Saturday, January 09, 2010

I'm not sure I love anything as much as I love canned air. For one thing, it's "canned air," which makes you sound nicely stupid asking store clerks for it. For another, it scares the living shit out of my cats, which is entertaining. And then there is its mighty mighty power. What else can move the absolute moraine of crumbs, paper fibers, dust, cat hair, cutaneous matter and other evidence of your existence from where it gets so tenaciously lodged in your keyboard? It drives me nuts, that stuff. There is an element of futility in canned air, of course, rather in the manner of a leaf blower; you are not removing things, exactly, but moving them somewhere else, herding them like sheep. (Any cleaning, really, is just relocation: I shall take this piece of grit, transfer it from my carpet to a vacuum cleaner, then move it from my vacuum cleaner to the trash and transport it to a dumpster.) So you do spend a certain amount of time chasing bits around your keyboard to no avail with canned air, but at least it gets things moving. And out, eventually. The whole thing is so terribly metaphorical.

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