I'm a serial cleaner. Martha knows, this is not a good thing.

Cleaners should move in circles, not lines. They should pick a spot and stay there until it is spotless. Then they should move on to the next spot. And the next one. And pretty soon the bathroom would be clean. And then they could move on to the next room.

I know this not from experience, but observation, from watching generations of women — my grandmother, my mother, my wife — clean all around me, sometimes literally. I'm not saying I never offered to help, but sooner or later all these women came to the same conclusion: The best way for me to help clean the house would be for me to go somewhere else and come home only when they sent me some sort of all-clean signal.

Now that no one else is around to clean my home, I still try to follow the same pattern: The dirtier the room, the more I want to stay away. Still, sooner or later, a man's got to do what he's got to do, even if it involves Tidy Bowl and industrial-strength Mr. Clean.

Focus is the problem, as my high school football coach used to say. I try to get something done in the house once in a while but always end up getting distracted.

Let's say I decide to clean the bathtub on the first Saturday morning without football games on TV. First I go in search of supplies, which takes me into the alien world of chemicals beneath the bathroom sink, where I am reminded that a U-joint has been leaking for weeks, which takes me in search of a wrench in the carport, where I find that an uncapped bottle of flea-and-tick shampoo has been oozing on to the floor, which means that I'm going to have to find a bucket and some rags, which I usually keep under the house, where I find a long-neglected bodyboard that positively needs to be taken down to the beach at that very moment, which means that the bathtub can wait another week.

It's the same pattern in the yard, only in reverse. When I finally decide it's time to whack the hedges, I go inside to find some work clothes, which are all dirty, which leads me to the washing machine, where I find a bundle of still-wet clothes from when I got distracted the week before, which gives off an awful scent that sends me inside for the Lysol, where I see that leaking U-joint under the sink, which sends me back to the carport, where this time I discover that my bicycle has a flat tire that needs to be repaired first if I'm going to go for a ride instead of pruning the hedges. Which I do.

The cleaning can wait until next week. Again.

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.