You never really know what you have until you have to vacuum it up.

Posted by Matt Morris on November 1st, 2019

You never really know what you have until you have to vacuum it up.

If you're a pet owner, that means you never know that you have litter all over your floor. Or possibly that lovely little mug from your former co-workers which had so much sentimental value it almost made you cry when it broke.

Pets can be really rough, and that's just a reality. They become part of the family, but the family is dysfunctional at the best of times. I sometimes look at my dog and wonder if he really likes me or actually harbors nothing but fear and subservience behind those seemingly so-expressive eyes.

Does he roll over because he likes his tummy scratched, or is he actually trying so hard to not threaten me that he's basically asking me to bite jugular or gooey bits?

Best not to know, probably. I expect if we were arbitrary caught and kept as pets to some larger and more advanced civilization that we couldn't quite understand or comprehend, we would probably spend a fair amount of our time trying just not to encourage them to kill us.

Regardless, if you're in the position to wonder any of these things (or, if all of them, you probably need the same brand of therapy as I do), you'll need a good vacuum to take care of the pet messes, whether cat litter or mug shards.

I wrote an article once about the best Miele vacuum, and that's honestly the only reason I even know that Miele is not the name of some advanced generation Pokemon. I can't say it was the most exciting piece I ever wrote, but I can certainly say it was informative.

When buying a vacuum, you see, there are a lot of important points to consider. How durable, how easy to clean, how wieldy or unwieldy, how much storage capacity there is.

Literally a laundry list of stuff to shop for.

If you've come to find out what the right call is, you have come to the wrong place. I'm not going into all that. I really just wanted a chance to exercise some allegory.

So let's get allegorical.

You have crap on your floor. Figuratively. Maybe even literally.

All that stuff that litters your walking space, your kneeling space, even your sleeping-on-the-floor-because-the-wife-is-pissed space. You might be getting shards of porcelain in your feet every time you walk, or it might just be germs.

Whatever you're picking up from the aforementioned crap, you can assume not all of it is good, if any.

We don't get surrounded by anything we don't choose to surround ourselves with. Except in a Tokyo subway. That's kind of just a free-for-all.

In America, though, this means extravagant shopping weekly to get stuff we won't get around to eating because the other stuff we didn't get around to eating doesn't take good together, and we threw out the leftovers last night.

It also means getting that upgrade and committing yet another recycled device sold on the ads. And yet another charger and pair of headphones dumped into that drawer that keeps all the old cords for stuff you don't have any more or didn't ever own, to begin with.

You can't get a vacuum with the storage capacity to suck this offal in. Even if you could, your sentimentality wouldn't let you. "But what if I find whatever device that charger goes to, and then I can't use whatever device that charger goes to because I finally threw the charger out 23 years later!?"

Needless to say, you don't have to be a minimalist to see that it's worth paring down what we have and what we own. There is no future in hoarding. Just watch the TV show, folks.