Last Saturday, I dragged our vacuum up to our master bedroom to do a good, thorough cleaning. We make the bed every day and put away clothes on occasion, but every once in a while I notice that when I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock, I'll raise cloud of dust, and I know it's time to vacuum.

It took some time to go through the clothes I'd built up that fell into the recycle pile -- stuff I'd worn once and hadn't really sweated up or anything and decided not to throw down the laundry chute. You never know -- They might be able to go another round if I don't plan on seeing anyone important and keep a few steps back from the people I do run into.

Anyone who pretends to be offended by this is a hypocrite. Chances are, you've got a shirt hanging off the doorknob right now that you're planning to wear again, and you're not telling anyone, are you? (Socks and underwear, however, are another matter altogether. People who double team those are beneath contempt.)

At some point, though, the recycle pile gets deep enough that you can date the layers like fossils in sedimentary rock, and it's time to toss them all.

Soon after I started vacuuming, I started feeling a little stuffy-headed, like there wasn't enough air in the room. We have a gas fireplace in our bedroom, and I'm always a little worried that one day I'll keel over from carbon monoxide poisoning. I glanced over and saw just the pilot light on -- not enough to poison a mouse. I kept vacuuming but felt a little woozy.

Soon, though, I realized the room was filling with a deep, funky smell. I glanced toward my recycle pile. Maybe it was a critical mass thing. Each shirt alone was not big deal, but when you piled them up, it was another thing altogether. I leaned over and sniffed the pile. Nothing.

Was it me? I stuck my head down into my sweatshirt and took a deep breath. Despite the fact this sweatshirt hadn't seen the washing machine in a dog's age (sweatshirts, in my opinion, can be reused until someone -- usually my wife -- complains that I look like a hobo), I didn't encounter anything too toxic. I sniffed the air some more. I bent down and looked under the bed, thinking maybe a pair of gym socks had started fermenting. Nothing.

I started to worry that something had crawled into the rafters and passed away. I'd heard scratching noises on the roof in the middle of the night about a month before and just assumed that a raccoon was up there doing whatever it is raccoons do. Maybe whatever that was had ended badly, and what was left of him was left behind.

Finally, I realized it was the vacuum cleaner. Over the years, I've gotten so many things stuck in the vacuum that I've developed almost a bloodhound's sense of scents. I can instantly tell whether it's a stuck vacuum belt or a kid's belt stuck in the vacuum. I can tell you what carpet fringe smells like and know the exact odor of Christmas tinsel as it wraps around the beater and is about to melt. I turned off the vacuum and flipped it over. Nothing.

The stench was now filling the room to the point where I had to crack open a window. I was starting to feel a little nauseated. If you can think back to the way the showers smelled in middle school, you'd have an accurate picture of what I was going through.

At the same time -- and this was very unsettling -- as I sat there on the floor with the overturned vacuum cleaner, I started to feel really, really hungry. At this point, the air in our bedroom was thickening in a gray haze, and I started to worry I was hallucinating. I got up and stumbled down the stairs.

I found my wife in the living room. Was there something wrong with the vacuum cleaner? She thought about it for a moment, then raised her finger the way people do when they're about to tell you something they should have mentioned earlier.

"Oh, that's right! Yesterday, a full package of Parmesan cheese fell out of the fridge all over the kitchen floor, and I couldn't find the broom, so I vacuumed it all up!"

I nodded and trudged back up the stairs to open more windows, fighting conflicting urges: either throw up or order a pizza with extra cheese.

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