Condiment courtesies and my scuffle with sauce

As I mentioned last week, I just moved from a place I've been for a little over a year, by myself, to a place with three roommates just down the street. Though my more skeptical friends can't believe I'm getting roomies after being alone, I'm looking forward to it. I'm good with change, and am pretty easy to live with, if I do say so myself.

But there are courtesies you have to attend to with roommates that you don't have to worry about when you're alone. With roommates, you can't walk in the door, take off your pants, and spend the rest of the evening on the couch in your undies burping and watching Friends reruns or Sports Center while trimming your toenails. You also don't park in the middle of your driveway. Or leave your clothes in the dryer for a week. Or hog the condiment shelves of the refrigerator, which occurred to me as I was cleaning out my fridge as I moved: I was moving from a home where the whole fridge was mine to a place where it was only 25 percent mine. I was going to have to do some major downsizing.

And that's where this story begins. Me and the cat, cleaning the fridge. Just us and the condiments. I couldn't remember the last time I used the ginger - garlic marinade I found in my door, much less the sweet onion mustard that looked like a tiny jar of earwax. Both went into the trash. Even Akeelah wrinkled her nose at some of what I found -- and she'll eat anything, alive or dead.

While I did find some items that were a little... um... fuzzy, green or lumpy (occasionally all three), it was also kinda fun. It was like when you clean out your closet and get rid of crappy stuff you never wear, but while you're downsizing you also discover awesome stuff you forgot you had. Last time I did this, i found a great pair of tall brown cowboy boots I forgot I owned. This time, cleaning my fridge, I found my favorite homemade barbeque sauce -- made by a friend in another state and hands down the best I'd ever had.

Because it was so good and I'd forgotten about it, I thought perhaps I should open the jar and just make sure it was still a) good (not expired) and b) good (delicious). Basically, I wanted to stick my finger in and taste it. So before twisting off the top, I absentmindedly gave the bottle three really good, solid shakes so as to ensure all the barbeque-y goodness was thoroughly mixed up.

And this is where the fun began.

The second I stopped this vigorous shaking, the smell of barbeque sauce was all around me. It was like I was swimming in the stuff because, well, I was.

When I looked up, my kitchen looked like a murder scene.

The cap must have popped off during the first hard shake, because my kitchen had become a meat-eater's dream come true: there was barbeque sauce on the floor, refrigerator, walls and counters. There were globs of barbeque sauce on the ceiling, which dripped down in great barbequey clumps onto my shoulders, which were covered in the sticky-sweet goo.

My face, hands, chest and legs were drenched in barbeque sauce.

Akeelah the cat sat befuddled, licking herself in the middle of the kitchen floor, her face, tail and paws completely slick with brown, delicious sauce.

And I collapsed on the floor of the room, hysterical with laughter and completely beside myself that I had just shook the entire bottle of barbeque sauce out on every flat surface (and some not so flat surfaces) of my kitchen. If somebody had walked in at that moment and seen me there, they would have immediately flashed back to the Scarface bathtub scene -- it looked that gruesome:

"You wanna fuck with barbeque sauce? You wanna get rough with me? Okay, say hello to my little friend, the loosened twist off cap!"

There was no way for me to go to another room for cleaning supplies without squishing and dripping sauce across my carpet and furniture, either, so right in the middle of the barbeque sauce bloodbath, I had to strip down to my underwear, throw away my clothes, and tip toe out to safety and cleaning materials.

Later, when the scene had been mopped up and the rags (and my clothes) thrown away, L came over. As she walked through the door the first words out of her mouth were "Uh, what's that smell?" I shrugged nonchalantly as the strange mix of barbeque sauce and 409 wafted through the apartment. She then went straight to the kitchen to throw something in the trash (remember -- the trash is full of the barbeque sauce scuffle carnage), and before I had a chance to warn her, she shrieked and jumped back, confused and shocked.

"Jesus Christ!" she gasped, peering into the mess of saucy clothes and rags, which looked now more than ever like a bloody mess. "What the hell happened?!!"

Let's just say I kill a condiment for fun, but for that barbeque sauce, I carved it up reeeal nice.

[God, I hope you get that reference.]