Palinode's domestic tips

For years, people have been coming to me for advice on ways to make their homes more beautiful, more secure, less ketchup-spattered. And I've been giving them the best advice that the twenty-first century has to offer. Here's the advice that, frankly, was simply too amazing, too galvanizing, to deliver face-to-face.


Coffee beans: Warm-climate countries all over the world grow and export coffee, a hard green bean that is usually roasted to blackness. Not many people know that the roasted bean can be ground up and passed through boiling water for an exotic and refreshing drink! Warning: Tincture of coffee bean contains caffeine. Warning: you could be spending your money on alcohol instead of sucking back $4 lattes.

And here’s a handy tip: you can use coffee grounds to help ‘round out’ a bagful of garbage.


Walls: Walls are those vertical slabs set perpendicular to the floor to keep rooms from bleeding into each other. They’re also there to be run into at high speed! Ha ha just kidding. They are there to keep you from moving from one space to another too easily. Architects and builders hate your freedom, people! Reclaim your liberty with a sledgehammer. If you’re in college, you may apply for a license to tape Klimt posters to walls, but unlicensed or overage Klimt users are usually chased through the streets and pushed into the sea. And you know what? They deserve it.


Beds: Beds are designed to make the experience of lying on the floor a little less ridiculous. How many times have you laid down on the floor and thought what the fuck? A good bed will answer that question for you.

The bed industry was initially a marketing gimmick on the part of pyjama manufacturers, who understood that customers would not buy comfortable lounging wear just to lay down on a hard floor. Initially a wooden or steel rectangle on short legs was introduced to provide a kind of ‘frame’ to mark an area of ‘laying-floor,’ but the real breakthrough came when a soft but resilient elevated pouch for the bed was added by inventor Bob Mattress Jr. His father, Bob Mattress Sr., invented a hair mousse that renders users susceptible to mind control.

Peter Garrett famously observed that sleeping in a bed is much more difficult when it’s burning. Usually it is the mattress that does the hard work of being on fire. My advice is to remove the mattress and sleep on the floor, the way god intended. Unless you want to have regular sex with anyone.


Electronics and Home Entertainment: No matter what kind of style you choose for your home, chances are that your electronics are not going to match (unless Faceless Tech is your decor theme). The secret here is to use the hollow chambers of your body and your inbuilt neural system to accomodate your home entertainment needs. Laptops and compact component stereo systems can usually be cut into bite-sized chunks for oral administration. To prevent unsightly cords protruding from your orifices, install a small generator wherever you can fit it.


Pitchfork-wielding Mobs: You don’t find these items often in the home, but when you do, you’re probably Frankenstein’s monster. If you take the precaution of barricading the doors, installing archers at the windows and rigging tripwires to pour huge cauldrons of boiling pitch on the approaching mob, you can be certain of being a Frankenstein’s monster who’s hip to medieval defense methods.


Balusters and Balustrades: Well la-di-da, Mr. Fancytron. While you’re having your balustrade installed, why don’t you build some faux-classical ruins at the entrance to your hedge maze out back? Oh no, you go on wandering the halls of your plywood-and-vinyl McMansion, listening to the echo of your steps and wondering why nobody likes you and your money. I’ll stay here with the pitchfork-wielding mob. We’ve got hay to poke and monsters to chase.


Dance Dance Revolution: I have no advice for you. When the shock troops of DDR come jumping and turning down the street, you will dance or die horribly. Nothing I say can make a difference.