Got a new dish-washing scrub brush, and boys, it is a beaut. It’s snub nosed, comes with a shoulder holster and fits my fist like a set of brass knuckles. We’re talking heft and the kind of authority any prison gang would respect.

Did I mention it has a very rugged handle — like what you’d find on a curling stone or the no frills flat iron that Mom used on my First Communion suit with nothing but elbow grease, unyielding battleship iron and the occasional hit from a cold Utica Club and/or an unfiltered Pall Mall.

The business end, though, that’s where the poetry meets the toad. Those bristles are as tough and mean as alligator teeth, so sharp and deadly that Mr. Geneva down at the Convention wept openly when he condemned them as inhumane. I’ve seen up close and personally what those bristly piranhas can do to a pan encrusted with your arrogant, baked-on ziti and I’ve almost been brought to tears myself.

Back in the day, if the cave man had had one of these pluperfect babes — especially after a Friday night mastodon feast on the good stoneware — well, let’s just say he could have saved an epoch of scrubbing and been able to join his Neanderthal guests playing Pictionary on the cave wall with the finger paints.

So, life is grand, eh? Well, in fact, the quality of my new scrubber (I like to call it My Glock) is so high that I am almost embarrassed to use it on your normal postprandial dinner goosh.

The first time I used it, I was stacking dinner plates and pans in the sink. They were not pretty. Marinara sauce everywhere, an errant pea rolling from one plate to the next, half-eaten sausage welded to the edge of a plate. The bottom of a sauce pan covered in burnt cheese, burnt alfredo sauce, burnt Moe Green, and burnt sienna.

I thought “Look at the goosh on that pan. I don’t want my new brush to see that. And where did that green pea come from?”

That is why God made sponges, of course. They do the real dirty work at the sink, leaving the Glock for those special hits that call for a cold-blooded pro. I mean, it could scrape the dub dub off a flubba.

And you know how they say never bring a scrub brush to a gun fight? This brush may be the exception to the rule. I know it would be perfect in a bar brawl. At the very least it could dig a bullet out of an arm or leg, scrape off all the blood and gore and make a perfect charm for a bracelet like one of those made of Swarovski elements.

Or a Christmas gift for the man who — WAIT JUST A SEC. WHAT THE HELL IS A SWAROVSKI ELEMENT? YOU CAN’T JUST PLOP SOMETHING LIKE THAT INTO A PARAGRAPH WITHOUT… HEY. TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF ME. I HAVE A PERFECT RIGHT TO INTERRUPT THIS SENTENCE AND, UH, IS THAT A GLOCK? WHAT? IT’S A SCRUB BRUSH? WOW, WHERE CAN I GET…HEY, IS THAT A PEA STUCK IN THE BRISTLES? A SWAROVSKI ELEMENT? EEEWWWWW. THAT IS GROSS, MAN — has everything, including a bullet wound (and, if still alive and able to recite the abc’s up to j without dribbling or asking what century it is.)

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2018, all rights reserved.