This is completely and only for catharsis; beware

So, like I mentioned before, I cleaned the industrial size church kitchen. I am doing this in order to pass health inspection for the cafe. In a recently purchased Eagles Lodge from the 60's, you might imagine all the perma-nast that permeates every last nook and cranny of this enormous place. It has been a year long cleaning/demo/rebuilding effort by many various volunteers, with much blood sweat and tears poured into it. And today was my day.

With a couple of great friends of whom I will be forever indebted, a have put in thus far a total of about 15 hours of scrubbing in this gigantic kitchen. What keeps us going is the promise of what could be; a sparkly, awesome, community cafe. Sometimes the going gets tough when you're scrubbing 40 years of meat grease off the walls and ceilings. But hour 16 for me today was by far the worst.

I was alone today. My radio was trapped in the other meeting room of which I didn't want to disturb. It was late at night. The kitchen is old. Big. Dirty. And possibly haunted by the ghosts of drunken Bingo past.

All I was gonna do was soak the fridge grates in a little bleach and scrub them off. No big deal, until I realized the fridge grates were home to 40 years of bloody, fatty, dripping meat. Which in turn created a meaty orange casing of rust. With trusty rubber gloves, I carefully pull all 8 out of the giant, old, smelly, rotting fridge. As I pull the last one out, I look down to see what's really hiding under it; a 1/2 inch thick puddle of old blood. Too thick to crust, to old to pool. What was left was a meaty layer of fat and blood with something of an Elmers Glue consistency. And that is when, yes, I came closer to losing my lunch than during the last time I had the flu. I dropped the grate and unfortunately cupped my mouth with my dirty orange gloves to stop the flow. YUUUCCCKKK!

Though soon enough I recovered, squealing with my grates all the way back to the kitchen sink. I dropped them in a foot of bleach water, and again took a moment to recover as I watched little bits of fat melting off of them. But, brave as I am, I dug in, found a giant pumice grill stone, and began the hour of soaking and scrubbing.

As I finished, I marveled at how the rusty orange almost shone now as a dull peach. And then, being the dumbass that I am, I drained the sink. With all the pumice bits. Which, of course, clogged the drain, causing the emptying valve at the floor to overflow. A lot. With a lot of grease, and fat, and rust, and pumice. At this point I think a lot of cuss words came out of my mouth; though I cant be sure as I was busy doing more asinine things, like grabbing the nearest pristine white table cloth and throwing it into the mess to stop the tidal wave heading for the food area. Which of course didn't really work. So there I spent about another 40 minutes mopping, drying, squeezing, and washing out of the now ruined table cloth.

But never fear, I still had a bit of energy left yet. Good thing, because as I was washing out the table cloth with the sprayer near the dishwasher, my eye caught a little glimmer in the NOT working garbage disposal. Ok, maybe a big glimmer. Like 4 inches of rotting meat and...some other kinds of foods...piled up about a foot down into the disposal. Apparently, the wedding rehearsal dinner party that we lent the kitchen to on Friday forgot to heed my warning of "IF you use the kitchen, DO NOT put anything in the garbage disposal!!!! It will rot away forever!!!" At this I was met with "no worries, we wont even be in kitchen at all!"

Hm, methinks otherwise. As the scent of rot wafted up to me, so did my lunch. well, almost. Another close call. But no, I was strong, and dove in to get it! Reaching down in all 12 inches up to my uncovered arms, I began pulling out piles, lumps, and strings of rotting food. And then, it happened. I decided it would be a brilliant idea to use a rag to pull the stuff out. As I got a large handful, and dumped it into the trash, somehow the rag sort of snapped back, ricocheting all of the sludge back off the side of the garbage can and directly into my face; yes, all of it: hair, tshirt, eyes, and even my mouth. And that is when I began to cry.

There are all sorts of reasons I shouldn't feel sorry for myself, and shouldn't feel frustrated, or angry, or, whatever. And all of them very good reasons. But somehow, in that moment, none of those reasons mattered. I cried because of all the hard work I put into that place. And I cried because in one short weekend of miscommunication, or apathy, or whatever, my 15 hours of work had been reduced to a trashed kitchen, and the need to back way up and start again, to reclean, repolish, restart. And, I cried simply because I had just spend the last 2 hours bathing in rotting blood and guts. And now it was in my mouth. And I cried, and I took my gloves off and left.