I woke up this morning and I actually thought it was Saturday. I peered at the early morning sunlight filtering in the window and stretched out on my bed lazily, thinking about how I could just lay there for several more hours if the fancy hit me. But then my brain floated up from the deep dermal layers of the subconscious and a few pieces of the daily puzzle clicked into place. It was only Friday. Sigh.
I'm in the market for a new vacuum. While the one I have now is not actually dead, it does not seem to have the sucking power it once had. This does not surprise me at all since I bought it refurbished off of ebay. It used to be I could pull the hose off and hold it to my face and with a 'fwomp!' it was stick there with a good deal of suction. Or I could point it at a dried up old lizard and it would whisk it away. However, it hardly has any suction now. The spinner things still spin around so I looks like its vacuuming, the cat hairs and shit get caught in it, but it wont suck op chunks.
It's a bagless vacuum and I do not know if I want another one. I liked the fact it does not take bags. Nothing is more annoying than vacuuming and suddenly the bag is full, and you cannot vacuum any more because you are out of bags, and then you go to the store to buy more bags and you realize you forgot to write down the bag type, so you go back home and then go back to the store only to find out they do not manufacture that bag anymore.
That is pretty much what led me to buy a bagless one to begin with. Plus it is all clear and cool looking. However, the bagless ones require a lot of maintenance. To begin with they get clogged a lot. As of late every third or fourth vacuuming I have to pull apart the vacuum and use a little tool I fashioned out of a hanger to dig out some ball of dust and hair and sand. It's just annoying. And then there are a dozen parts you have to clear out regularly. Weird filters and spinny things. It gets tiring. I just want to vac this shit up, dammit, not go through a tune up every time.
My parents have a monster vacuum they bought in the late seventies early 80's from a real-life honest to god door to door vacuum salesman. An 'Electrolux'. The thing was a tank, and worked great well over two decades. The worst beating it got was once when I was a teenager I wanted to see if the vac hose could suck down an entire cigarette within a few minutes. I held it to the end of the hose and to my delight and horror it started burning down the cig at an alarming rate. Afraid to burn my fingers, I idiotically let go of the cigarette. An amazingly stupid thing to do the cig got sucked into the internal bag of hair and dust and ignited. Deep smoke laced with the foul stench of burning hair began bellowing out of the vac. Horrified I yanked the plug. I opened the bag compartment and flames started billowing up, so I dumped some water on it, and then pulled the bag out. I spent the rest of the day scrubbing out the bag chamber and spraying it with Lysol. But no matter what I did, it still smelled like burning hair when you turned it on.
My mom asked about it once but I feigned ignorance. "The vacuum? Why would I be playing with THAT?". But I think she always suspected something.
So, I'm keeping my eyes open for a vacuum. They should have some sort of rating on them for the suck age-power. Like how lawn equipment is rated by HP. I want something that can hold up a bowling ball... for under a hundred bucks. I don't need all the little fancy attachments and extensions because I just end up losing them all anyways.
I was watching television last night and I think I saw the best 'Scare Tactics' clip I have ever seen. For those unfamiliar with the show, it's a hidden camera show where they play horror-movie like pranks on people. Some of the stuff is outrageous and really freaks people out. Well, last night the final clip was with some lady and a male worker. They were working on something in the wall of some building, when the dude tore a hole in the wall.
Suddenly this little tiny midget they had dressed up in makeup, horns, and little goat leggings came prancing out of the hole and bit the dude on the hand. I wish I had a pic of that little midget; they really had him made up. He looked freaky. But the look on the woman's face was priceless. You could just see the barriers of her own personal reality breaking down as she stared at this freaky little thing that jumped out of a hole in the wall and started biting.
I'm not sure what I would have thought. I might have run over and kicked it.
Twenty years ago, Ed's Friday starts with a weak vacuum and ends with a wall-demon biting.
I love how 2006 Ed shops for a vacuum like it's a sacred quest. Refurbished eBay, rating suction with his face, praying for bowling-ball lift under a hundred bucks—these are not numbers, these are dreams. Now a vacuum is a robot that maps your living room and asks for a subscription plan before it will empty itself. The bagless clear tank he admired has become a chore-athon of hidden filters and clogged sensors, and the 'bag always discontinued' problem has evolved into an entire ecosystem of branded cartridges you must buy in quadruple packs. Door-to-door Electrolux titans? The closest thing now is a targeted ad narrated by a 'wellness entrepreneur' trying to get you to buy a cordless stick. And Scare Tactics? Everyone carries a 4K camera and a hundred hours of content, so the 'hidden camera prank' has turned into people willingly filming themselves for clout, no demon necessary. Ed, your real tragedy wasn't the vacuum fire—it was being born twenty years too early for the modern age of absurdity.
“2006 Ed, why did you hold a lit cigarette to the vacuum hose, and how long did you keep denying the burning-hair smell before your mom's silence became the real verdict?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, the honest answer? Because I was a teenager and my brain was mostly static and bad decisions. I had this brilliant idea—would the hose eat a whole cigarette? I figured it'd be a neat little science experiment. It turned into a burning-hair smoke bomb, obviously. Teenage logic, zero foresight.
The denying part? I pulled the 'who, me?' routine exactly once. Mom asked, I shrugged and claimed ignorance, and she just looked at me with that quiet, knowing stare. She never asked again. Not once. No yelling, no punishment, nothing. Just silence. And that silence was the real verdict—worse than any grounding. Years later I still smell burning hair whenever I think about it. She knew. Oh, she absolutely knew.
