The Human Stain

I feel the need to share an interesting discovery that arises from the whole sorry mattress episode, documented in the previous blog.

If you watch enough telly, you will have been horrified by close-ups and descriptions of what lives in your pillow and your mattress. You will have been told that, by the time a mattress is thrown away, it is 50% heavier than when it was new because of all the sweat and human skin that it has soaked up during its time underneath you. You will have seen magnifications of horrific dust mites, marauding around your bed linen like herds of miniature, albino Godzillas on the rampage.

I find most of those worries a bit abstract. It doesn’t seem that real so I’m not going to get in a tizz about it. And, I think that’s a perfectly normal response to the number of things I could get in a flap about if I let the current affairs programs lead me around by the nose and stuff poisons up it.

But, I’ve had the contents of a mattress shown to me in the most unpleasant way. As you will know, I recently performed an unintended experiment by forcing vast amounts of water through a mattress for a week, and had it sitting on a metal lock-up box. Sort of like a nice laboratory table.

What was left on the box was a bit of an eye opener. And then a bit of an eye waterer. It was a layer of, and I’m going to use the scientific term here, human sludge goo. It was sort of a grey, goopy, semi tacky slurry, made from… well, what the hell is it made from?

We are told that we are mostly water and that we slough off a huge number of dead skin cells a day. That’s apparently what most of the dust in your house is. But this stuff? It can’t be just water or skin.

So kids, when the teachers at school start telling you what you’re composed of and they start carrying on about oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous and so on, stop them in their tracks, look them dead in the eye and say,

“I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. I have it on good authority that the human body is largely made up of grey porridge.”

(And before a certain regular visitor starts; no, I won’t mop it off. For the record, I don’t really like my new mops. I think they’re a bit crap. What a surprise. Anyone wanna buy a ute? I’ll throw in a free mop.)