At first glance, it looked like a tire fire in my kitchen. Two pork chops, left briefly unattended on the stove while I tended to more important duties on the 4th floor patio overlooking the pool, had almost reached their chemical flash point. Thick, greasy smoke, with the scent of Caribbean Jerk sauce, was wafting out of the kitchen directly into my clothing closet. It was then that I discovered one of the hazards of living in a studio apartment. One slight kitchen mishap and all of your clothes smell like torched pork.

I've also discovered that there are plenty of products on the market today to help guys like me out. A bottle of Febreze® (sprayed generously throughout the closet) solved the clothing odor problem swiftly. In my bathroom, a handy container of Clean Shower® ensures that I will never again get on my hands and knees to scrub the tub. Not that I ever would anyway, but it's nice to know that I won't have to. It even says on the bottle, "It works. You DON'T." Monday morning I may send a bottle of the 'ol Clean Shower® (instead of myself) into the office to test that theory.

I imagine that we're not too far from a couple hundred other products like these, designed to take care of our unpleasant duties. For example: why dirty the shower at all? Splash a little "Nostench®" under each arm and behind your ears and you're on your way. This concept is based upon the "Fraternity Shower" my brother Curt used to take years ago when we would go out for the night, where he would spray a generous amount of cologne all over his body in lieu of a brief blast from the showerhead. What the heck, he thought - you're just going to end up stinking after an evening of carousing anyway.

I'm looking forward to some of these products, since most of the daily activities in life are starting to bore me. The marketing departments in this country know this, and it's only a matter of time until they capitalize on it. And with science on their side, mapping human DNA and cloning animals, we'll eventually not have to do anything for ourselves.

In the future, I will rue the day when I have to sleep or eat or do anything besides work. We'll eventually have a product of some sort that will conquer all of these things, and we'll be able to toil 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What else is there, really?

One thing that marketers won't be able to do, though, is duplicate the smell of my paperback dictionary, which has been with me for over 8 years and 25,000 miles of travel. It's been dropped in the Caribbean Sea, abandoned for an evening on the Atlantic shore, and later retrieved even though it is only a $5 book. Its paper is yellow and the cover is creased and worn and missing the corners. This dictionary has traveled throughout most of North America and it smells like heaven to me.

Sometimes there's a lot to be learned from those simple things in life. I'm not so sure that we're going to evolve much by avoiding elementary work. I mean, man has been cooking with fire for over 500,000 years. While it might have been fine for early hominids to walk around with pork-scented clothing, it's apparent that some humans still need some practice in this arena.