I wasn’t expecting to be poisoned or sexually harassed…

Who knew?

Before Grandpa Munster could even enter the passenger seat his waft rolled over me.

“Whoa,  Gramps!”  I yelped. ”You smell terrible!”  He froze.  I’d never commented on any of his smells before.  But suddenly I’ve finally hit the breaking point. ”When did you shower last!”

“Well I normally shower every night but last night…”

As usual he touches on the subject of my question without giving me a straight answer.  Me.  And I’m the least threatening of his inquirers.

Secretive… the constant complaint.  The one which keeps him on continued supervisory orders years after anyone else would have shed them.  Or at least the shedible ones I mean…

He smells like it’s been a week.

 ”Just a minute,”  he says. ”I forgot something.”  Yeah I know. to bathe.

Which he does not elect to do here and now.  He returns with a fresh shirt steeped in Fabreeze.  He now smells like two of my four least-favorite smells gloriously combined:  unwashed old-man and fucking-fabreeze.  The other two,  if you’re keeping score, are skunk and old man who no longer knows how to wipe his ass properly.

At the Koodo store the young pup of a bewildered service rep hums and haws over their latest sale and why it’s not right for Gramps.  It’s a different pup and a different conflicting story every time.  Gramps’ flip phone is getting too old.  He needs a new one.

At the Factory Direct Store we finally find the gold mine:  an unlocked flip phone for 29 bucks.  Hooray.  But there are complications and Gramps can possibly save another 10 bucks if we go to more trouble and return another day.  It’s well worth it to me (given my time and transportation expense) to just hand him the ten bucks, but I don’t.  He’s trying to live his life with a shred of autonomy at this moment so I indulge him.

Later he and his stink are gone and I am at the McDonalds drive thru with a coupon, taking great strides toward ruining my own life.  I get two diet cokes;  no ice.  One for my ersatz dinner and another to bring to board game night with the off-seasoned Strat-o gang.  Parked under the golden arches eating discounted shit-what-sort-of-looks-like-food,  the first coke goes down satisfactorily (and naturally on the watery side).

I take a sneak preview of the second coke;  the to-go option.  And It’s all wrong.  It tastes familiar though.  Like a rum and coke or a rye and coke.  I drank a good number of those in my late teens and I remember their grodie little stench and flavor.  I drink two or three ounces trying to get a handle on it.  Rye, rum or something else?  Jack Daniels?  Is the young drive-thru kid boozing on the job?  Did he give me his own drinkie-poo by mistake?

I suddenly wonder if it could be an alcohol-based cleaning product and I vow to sip no more.

I’ve kept the drink and hope to get it tested.  I know a couple or few lab technologists after all.

Pondering this lunacy I head for game night and as I enter the neighborhood with a parallel-parked SUV up ahead,  a little girl maybe eight years old hops out of the driver’s side rear door and stands defiantly in the middle of my lane.  I slow down while she begins to dance.  And by dance I mean gyrate and shake stuff at me. Stuff I wish not have shaken at me by any child (or any adult either for that matter). This is no bird dance but rather something she must have learned from the internet when Net Nanny failed.  Then she leaps back into the car as I pass while a woman,  busy at the rear of the truck seems to have witnessed none of her daughter’s rare talents.

Skeeter Willis, the Brothers Grimm (who are both awesome and in no way grim),  the Thoughtful Educator and… another fine gentleman I haven’t benicknamed yet are present and hear the story of the decrepitude that has so recently befallen their city this day;  the City of Saints. The Thoughtful Educator takes a sniff and believes the drink smells like glass cleaner.

We play awesome games including the pirate-themed Tortuga 1667 which Brother Two has just acquired through Kickstarter and it rocks!  Very efficient, balanced arrangement of interesting components well-pinned to the theme including a hidden loyalty factor we may have not fully appreciated this first time through. You don’t know at first who your teammates are.  Oddly I’d recently been planning a very similar game dynamic in a creation based on the cylons/human intrigue of the latter Battlestar Galactica show.  I’ve been creating a lot of board games lately.  More on that some other time.

Toward the end of the night Skeeter gives me shit for not blogging.

Believe me I have wanted to.  I find it hard to explain why I don’t.  It sort of almost has to do with momentum. The longer I don’t do it the harder it gets to start again.  It’s actually five times as complex as that but the punch line is probably not worth the lengthy explanation. Also it’s all very stupid and worthy of embarrassment - which I might still be capable of experiencing?  Perhaps?

Regardless:  it seems I am back, and I would very much like to stay.