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.
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.
2 comments:
Harsh. I'd like to think that I was providing motivation. Either way. I'm happy to see you back.
You actually made it happen. I'm grateful.
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