Cleaning the latrine with a toothbrush.

Despite what goes on in just about every army movie ever made (did Jack Webb have someone do it in The D.I.? No, wait, that's the Marines. My bad.), I've never been ordered to engage in the title activity. When drill sergeants want the latrine cleaned, they want it done now, with broom, mop, and bucket. The preferred method of ballbusting-through-cleanliness was when it came time to clean weapons. I had one guy who could find a speck of carbon in a weapon that had been gone over with wire brushes, CLP, and, yes, toothbrushes to get into the nooks and crannies. Don't know how he did it, but I lost a lot of sleep time to his eye for dirt.

Still, knowing the M16A1, half a microgram of carbon might have been enough to keep the damn thing from firing. No wonder the AK47 is the world's preferred military sidearm. You could drop those things into a mud puddle and they'd still fire.

By now you're probably thinking something to the effect of: "Abel, what in God's green satin bloomers are you on about?"

The above militaristic ramble came from me struggling to find an apt metaphor for the daunting task of cleaning out my SL inventory, which now stands at a rather intimidating 13,130 items. Where did all of this stuff come from?

Some of it hails from my early days on SL, pouncing on any freebie package I could get and worshipping Yadni as a god. Three hundred free clothing items in one box? That's for me! Gimme!

And then there are the gadgets and avatars. I own two different versions of Dr. Who's K9, both programmed to follow me around faithfully (and zap anyone on command, but I haven't had call to do that... yet). I have avatars that I've bought, cherished, and worn only once for longer than twenty minutes. So my tendency to impulse buy plays into things as well.

And let's not forget the stuff I make, too. Every item I've made for Averlast is in my inventory, not to mention every texture used to make those items, plus every failed prototype that I uploaded but just looked wrong on the final product. The stuff to make the speed bags alone...

So yeah, I say "I need to clean out my inventory" a lot. But then I get daunted by the size of the task, and put it off until some undefined time in the future. This, of course, only serves to make the task bigger, as more uploads, more notecards received and, yes, more impulse buying adds to the morass as time goes by.

Tell you what: If you clean up my inventory, I'll clean your latrine with a toothbrush. ;-p