Freewrite: my mother lied to me… about Easy Off Kapow!

Your mother lied to you. That's the truth. You've been living your life thinking Easy Off Kapow! was a children's cleaning product – a mere distraction or a toy with which one can clean tops of stoves, but not perform real cleaning, like how one would clean, say, a bee-infected warehouse, or the gutter full of decomposing material attached to your grandmother's back porch.

No, you have been missing out on the truth about Easy Off Kapow!. Well, I am here to set the record straight.

Have you ever felt that cleaning solutions just aren't the right fit for you? Have you ever found that, in the middle of the night, your vinegar-soaked hands, your bleach-stained trousers, your ammonium-smelling underthings, and still you are just not getting clean enough? Ever wake up thinking about just how many bugs are crawling over you, right now? Most people don't think about the bugs – most people think it's zero – but you know the truth.

There are millions of bugs on your body right now, and they only want one thing: they want to charge you with treason. They have been put there by the Warren Commission, and they have been lying dormant for most of your short life. But now, the time has come. The Warren Commission Bugs have laid all their eggs in one basket, and now they have come home to roost. And it's not going to be pretty.

You might think, well I'm a clean, up-standing citizen, what do I have to hide from the Warren Commission Bugs? Why do I care if the Warren Commission bugs report me for espionage and treason, when I am obviously innocent?

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You know the kind of person. We all know that kind of person. I was one of them before. We all were. It wasn't so much that I had been blind to the truth. It was just that I had seen the truth differently.

Several years ago, during college, I felt like I didn't belong. Every day I woke up, I didn't know where I was. I had frequent bouts of wonder. I couldn't choose to live in the world, when I didn't know what living really was. I couldn't find aim or structure in life, because whenever I tried to focus, I felt guilty for focusing on just one thing.

I now know that this is the first stage of the lifecycle of the Warren Commission Bugs. They lie dormant for many years, eggs passed on from the parents, and at around some time after puberty, the hormones set them off. The Warren Commission Bugs are ready for their first feast.

And they feast on confidence, pooping out insecurity.

I knew something was wrong. I went to the library every day, and read every book. There were a lot of books in libraries in those days. Until one day, one book really stood out. It was Learning to Lye, a brief history of human hygiene. This book was fascinating. It told me that over the years, lack of human hygiene has caused an untold number of deaths. And the underlying cause of hygiene-related death is these Warren Commission Bugs.

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The problem, of course, is that the bugs know that hygiene can kill them, and they are afraid. They are afraid of any kind of cleaning product that does its job. Remember the time Fred went to the car wash and never came back?

That's right, the Warren Commission Bugs knew he was trying to get clean – or perhaps they mistook him getting his car clean for him getting himself clean of the bugs – and terminated him.

It is a very real risk, when talking about, cleaning about, or mucking about with the Warren Commission Bugs. You must be vigilant and always address the three Cs: Combustible Comestibles Contained. That means, whenever you are burning your compostables, always put it in a good container so it can't fly away. You don't want the embers to get caught by the wind, fly away, and catch fire elsewhere. The bugs are afraid of fire, but even more so, they are afraid of contained fires.

And that's where Easy Off Kapow! comes in. Easy Off Kapow! is a kind of fire-based detergent that can get you real clean, real soon. And it comes in a handy container for defeating those pesky Warren Commission Bugs. No fuss, no muss, no husky men coming to the door to take you away when all you want to do is mind your own business, hey, I was just trying to live my life, man, why do you have to shit on everything I do?

Buy now, before it's too late. Easy Off Kapow! only $5.99 at participating stores.

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This is a fifteen-minute freewrite, written in three five-minute chunks with different prompts.

The first prompt is "Your mother lied to you. That's the truth".

The second prompt, the interference, is "It wasn't so much that I had been blind to the truth. It was just that I had seen the truth differently".

The third prompt, the conflict, is "the time Fred went to the car wash and never came back".

Photograph by Mimzy

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Any similarity in name between Easy Off Kapow! and other non-fire-based cleaning products is purely coincidental and should not be taken as an endorsement nor as evidence of any relationship between Easy Off Kapow! and other similarly-named products. In an infinite universe with a finite number of words, the same group of words is bound to be used by different things, and if you take sound symbolism into account, it is even more likely that two products of roughly similar purpose are going to have roughly similar names even in different languages. All evidence points to the fact that if we took a bottle of Easy Off Kapow! to, say, a Pygmy tribe in Central Africa who have no shared linguistic heritage with English, and showed them a bottle of Easy Off Kapow! with the name scratched off, there is a very high likelihood that they would independently conjure up the name Easy Off Kapow! to describe this new wonderful cleaning product. Thus, any similarity between the name Easy Off Kapow! and the name of other cleaning products is inherently tied to the essence of being a cleaning product in the first place. Now, if we really wanted to, we could change the advertised name of Easy Off Kapow! to something else, but that would not change the fact that its true name is, was, and always will be, Easy Off Kapow!.