Category: Horribles

It’s a Fine Line Between Good and Rotten

Geezus!  What’s that smell?!

I was going for my second cup of coffee, opened the fridge door for the cream……Sniff, Sniff.  Something died in there!

I didn’t smell anything the first time I put cream in my coffee.  Can something go from perfectly fine to Holy Shit Rotten in a half-hour?  The Viking has a Super Sniffer that can smell a Bastard Fart from a kilometer away, so it’s virtually impossible that he missed the odor of a veggie contemplating its own death.  And, I would have heard about it if he had because he usually makes a loud and public proclamation……

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“Something fucking stinks in the fridge!”

…….and I run for the hills because there will be an in-depth lecture on the wastefulness of food in our house and how no self-respecting Danish person would ever find a rotten anything in their fridge.  Because they all plan their meals a week ahead, purchase all the ingredients in one trip to the store, and do all the meal prep in advance so no food is wasted and no one has to lay on the kitchen floor crying because they don’t know what to make for dinner.  And, in case you are wondering about leftovers, every Sunday, every Dane eats Biksemad (bik-si-mel), which is short for a gawd-awful concoction of every item in the fridge you couldn’t bear to eat during the week, topped off with a fried egg.

I had other plans for the next hour but obviously something had to be done about the fridge if I wanted to avoid another episode of “Why Can’t You Be More Like A Dane?”.  I started rummaging around, looking for fresh veggies that aren’t so fresh anymore.  That’s usually the smelly culprit and finding it could make this task short if not sweet.

Unfortunately, there was no obvious suspect, which meant an aggressive, frontal assault on every container and condiment.  Sigh.  Don’t tell The Viking, but there was a bottle of Bar-B-Que Sauce with a ‘best before’ date of March 2019.  On the bright side, I didn’t find a single container of Science and that should count for something.

The problem then isn’t with the fridge.  The smell is coming from somewhere else…….

Please Gawd, don’t let it be a dead mouse/bird – a gift from a cat – behind an appliance!  

Before I called HazMat, I decided to put all the sinfully wasteful fridge items in the garbage.  I won’t be avoiding the “Why Can’t You Be More Like A Dane” lecture if he sees all the waste on display just begging for comment.  Better to hide that shit as quickly as possible.

I grabbed the garbage from under the sink and…….

Sweet Baby Geezus!!!

Well, shit.  It wasn’t the fridge after all.

The smell coming from the garbage was so smelly and heavy that it took the 3 seconds between the garbage and the fridge for the smell to catch up with me.

In the half-hour between coffee refills, the smell went from nothing to Holy Shit Rotten and that’s just not fair. How can I avoid the “Why Can’t You Be More Like A Dane” lecture if I only have a scant half-hour window?  What if I’m busy during that half-hour?

I’m sure Science can explain the exponential multiplication of odor molecules within a finite time limit but it doesn’t help me be more Danish.

I cleaned out the fridge for nothing.

Shit.

 

 

 

A Bubble of Slightly Hysterical Laughter

I woke up January 2nd to success – I survived the holiday season.  I wasn’t very confident going in, expecting the worst, but it turned out much better than I could have hoped.  Don’t get me wrong, it was grim, but it could have been worse.

This past year has been nothing less than a nightmare for me.  A year in which I was forced to confront my demons, to look at myself with brutal clarity and make decisions I never thought I would have to make or could make.  At first, I was stuck; I didn’t know if I could move forward or if I even wanted too.  There were times I just wanted to quit, when the sum of my past failures were too heavy to carry and the weight of future failures too much to contemplate.  To be completely honest, had there been a handgun in the house I would have used it.  Without a doubt.

With the absence of a handgun, I had to consider my options.  I was caught up in a vicious mantra of “How the FUCK did I get here when this is the exact opposite of what I set out to do?”  Is this what the world’s worst case of Cognitive Dissonance feels like?  I’ve spent more than a decade admitting I’ve made mistakes and trying to correct them, hoping to build bridges to better relationships but the sum of every action, every word has put me right here in a pile of shit.  And I own it all.  Every tiny thing.  It’s mine and I play with it constantly, picking at every detail wondering if I should have handled each thing differently and if I had, would it have turned out better?  If I could go back to 1982, I would avoid life at all costs.

I suspected three years ago that I had utterly failed in the one goal I ever gave myself and I spent the following 8 months in counselling.  It wasn’t until Christmas 2018 though that I knew in my bones everything I had done in the last 35 years had been a colossal failure.  I knew it because the judgement was handed down by a Howitzer who took no prisoners and the sentence was more horrible than I could ever have imagined.  It was very apparent that the goal was to cause the most amount of pain in the most vicious way possible and it was a total success.  I didn’t catch all the issues during the firestorm; they came so fast and so loud it was impossible to comprehend them all.  What I did manage to understand left me confused and shocked.

I called them the following morning anyway, despite The Viking’s livid disagreement, to apologize for the things I thought were the major issues.   At that point, I knew I was done, but I was determined to go with my dignity, if nothing else, intact.  Then, I crawled into my cave and sobbed for the next two weeks.

I might have stayed in that cave for the remainder of my life, but two women* came to my rescue.  I love these beautiful people almost as much as I love The Viking.  They have their own harrowing stories of pain and utter despair, but they are still standing with grace and love and I refuse to do less.  They deserve what support and love I can give them as they have done for me.

Between sobbing events and sometimes during sobbing events, I desperately searched the internet for answers.  How do I survive this?  How could I have failed so epically?  Guess what I found?  I’m a Co-Dependent groomed from childhood to spend my entire life apologizing for my existence.  I also found hundreds and hundreds of parents, in the same position and as devastated as I am, searching for help and support.  The sheer magnitude of pain is staggering.  There isn’t a lot of support out there and most people are too ashamed to talk about it even if there was more support.  I debated whether to post this or not; ultimately, I decided that posting it can’t make my situation any worse than it already is, and perhaps others will tell me their stories.

There was a brief opportunity, a few months ago, that had the potential to resolve the problem, that maybe the words spoken in the heat of the moment would be withdrawn.  Unfortunately, the sentence was firm and implacable.  So I said things I wish I hadn’t, but I hated going down without the slightest resistance.  And now, I feel guilty and ashamed.

However, after exhaustive self-reflection something occurred to me and it’s at this point that it gets better.  The thing about accepting that I failed is that I can decide to accept that I failed.  It is what it is.  Once I accepted that I failed in the past, it only stands to reason that future efforts will have the same results because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, what else to try or how to fix it all.  I’m completely out of resources.

So, I leaned into it, absorbed every fault and flaw and failure and when I was done this is what I found:

When you are this low, you can’t possibly do worse.

When you’ve lost everything there’s nothing left to lose.

Nothing I ever do for the rest of my life could possibly end as bad as this.

No fear can be scarier than what I’ve already faced.

No pain can ever come close to what I live with now.

No shame can be greater than the shame I am already carrying.

Once you’re broken you’re broken, what more can happen?

If you think about it though, that’s freedom   

The worse thing that could possibly happen has already happened and since I’ve survived it the rest of life can only be better than here.  Failure isn’t a permanent condition and it doesn’t have to define who I am or my worth.  And I do have worth, it’s just not here.  So, I laid it all down.  Every hope, every option, every strategy.  I admitted defeat.  After all, I can’t blame them because they are what I created.  The end of the dream that turned into a battle; a dream that I probably shouldn’t have started to begin with.

And that’s where I found redemption

Suddenly, the vise around my chest collapsed and my shoulders relaxed.  My mind stilled for a long moment and the cloud over my head disappeared.  There was a bubble of slightly hysterical laughter in my stomach.  I felt like I had been hanging from a cliff by the tips of my fingers and suddenly just let go.  Relief was instantaneous.  If the fall kills me, so be it, there are worse things in life than a quick death and at least I’m not still hanging on like a pathetic supplicant hoping someone will offer me a hand.  Instead, I’m free.

Who would have thought that giving in to the despair and admitting defeat would ultimately save me?  I’m still dealing with suicidal thoughts and I unexpectedly sob at random times when my losses catch me unaware.

I’ve learned that love isn’t guaranteed to be where you think it should, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anywhere else.  And my love may not be appreciated one place but in another place it may be cherished.  We don’t need to be perfect, we just need to be kind and sometimes the biggest kindness is to walk away, for yourself, but also for those you’ve been struggling with.  The peace you feel may be just as sweet for those you have left behind.

If you’ve been through this hell, I’d love to hear from you.  Misery loves company but comfort can best be found in numbers.

With Love from Me to You

 

*I’m talking about you Annette and Johanna – you wonderful, bright stars.

I Have a Skeleton in My Closet!

My Great-Grandmother, Mabel Applegate, wrote a book of her life that began at 2 o’clock in the morning on January 2nd, 1897.  She had quite a few of the books coil-bound and gave them to all her children, grand-children and great-grandchildren.

It’s marvelous.

I wanted to add on to her story.  I wanted to preserve the family history, so I started working on my parents’ story several years ago.  It’s been a LOT of work!  I scanned almost 800 photos to save on a stick to be shared so everyone in family could enjoy them.  I spent hours and hours talking with Mom and Dad, taking notes and asking questions.  Then I started writing the book, deleted it, started over, tried editing it, deleted it and started over again.  Eventually, I found my way through it and can finally say:

I’M DONE!!

It’s true!  I sent the entire manuscript to one of my sisters, Janine, and she went through it all for me.  I was worried.  What if she thought it was terrible?  What if I insulted someone?  It’s terrifying to put your work out there for everyone to critique.  My anxiety is through the roof, but I’m in too deep to back out now.  Thankfully, Janine loves it and says I shouldn’t change a thing.

The last thing to do before having it printed, is to transcribe Mabel’s book into the back of my parents’ book.  Since Mabel’s book was printed, there have been great-great-grandchildren born and I want to make sure that her story isn’t lost to the following generations.

While I was transcribing, I came upon a story she told about Andrew Hellman, alias Adam Horn in 1820.

What?!  Now, that’s interesting!  An alias?  Ooooo…..I hope it’s because he’s a pirate and that he collects powdered wigs, pinching them off the person’s head without them even being aware that it is gone!

I’ve read Mabel’s book several times but for some reason I’ve completely forgotten about Mr. Andrew Hellman and why he needed an alias.  He was only a tailor, after all.  This story was passed around in the family, but Mabel copied the text out of a book from that era.

According to the author of that book, Hellman was…

“…a young man of good personal appearance, sober, steady, and industrious, well behaved and mild in his demeanor and withal, intelligent and well informed.”

That doesn’t sound like someone who would need an alias.  I continued transcribing.

“He seemed, however, to have imbibed a lasting dislike to the whole female race, looking upon them as mere slaves to man…..a convenience for the other sex, to serve in the capacity of hewer of wood and drawer of water: to cook his victuals, darn his stockings, never to speak but when spoken to, and to crouch in servile fear whilst in his presence.”

Ugh!  I think I know why he needed that alias!

Hellman met a farmer named George Abel who was Mabel’s great-great-grandfather.  Hellman managed to hoodwink the entire family, by

“…restrain[ing] the fiendishness of his disposition.” 

Isn’t that Fabulous?!

Completely taken in by Hellman’s act, George lets him marry one of his daughters – Mary.  She is described as

“…in the twentieth year of her age, a blithe, buxom and light-hearted country girl, with rosy cheek and sparkling eye, totally unacquainted with the deceitfulness of the world.”

What a delightful description!!  The entire story is written like this and it’s fantastic!

Long story short:  Hellman begets a child with Mary – a girl and he’s not happy about it.  He begets another child with her – a boy but he’s not happy about that either because he thinks Mary was screwing around and refuses to acknowledge the boy as his.  The third child is another boy who is, you guessed it, apparently not his either, and Hellman threatens to kill Mary if she has another child.  She doesn’t.  Hellman tries to poison Mary, but she figured it out in time.  He then poisons all three children, two of which die.  Then, Hellman chopped Mary up with an axe.  Henry, the surviving poison victim, was visiting his Uncle at the time or he would have been chopped up as well.

Hellman escapes custody before he can be brought to justice, flees to Baltimore, assumes the name Adam Horn, and marries another woman.  He kills her, too.

“On the 4th of December 1843, the prisoner [Hellman] was brought into Court to receive the awful doom of the law…..that he be taken to the jail of Baltimore  County, from whence he came, and from thence to the place of execution……there be hanged by the neck until he be dead.”

So, pinching powdered wigs wasn’t the reason for the alias.  I’m disappointed, to be honest.  A powdered wig pinching pirate (say that 3 times fast) is so much cooler than an axe murderer on a branch on the family tree.  On the other hand, Andrew Hellman turns out to be a celebrity among the Unquiet Souls enthusiasts.  I checked.  He’s the unwanted gift that keeps on giving.

“He haunts his former house/the road by his house/the local lovers’ lane, ax at the ready for new, teenaged victims…”  taken from:

http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/hatchet-man-a-story-for-atlas-obscura-day/

I suppose I shouldn’t complain.  We do have a skeleton in the closet and that’s more than some people can say, right?  And maybe, if I put a teaser at the front of the book, it will get new generations interested.

 

 

That’s No Way To Treat Girl Guides!

Dear Dare Foods Canada Ltd.,

Let me say, to begin, that I appreciate your work with Girl Guides of Canada.  Any corporation that gives back to communities and supports organizations for children should receive praise.

So, just for you, WooHoo!!  Great job!

But then yesterday a young Girl Guide rang our door bell and asked if I would like to buy a box of cookies for $5.00.  She didn’t seem overly enthusiastic in her sales pitch, but I really want to support youth programs so ignored her lack of animation.  I gave her the money and received the cookies which I placed on the kitchen table.  With perfect timing, The Viking (my husband) showed up, almost like he has a sixth sense that zeroes in on cookies like a Surface to Air Missile.  He smiled hugely.  “Cookies!!”

We each took a cookie – chocolate for me, of course, and vanilla for him, because he’s just that kind of a husband who gives his wife chocolate – and took a nibble.

Sweet Baby Geezus!!*

 

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What in the whole wide world IS this crap?!*

We both ran to the sink and started spitting out whatever this horrendous concoction was supposed to be.  Thank Gawd for double kitchen sinks – we would have been in a real pickle if we only had a single sink.  I’ll just leave you with that image.

DARE FOODS…….you can’t call that a cookie!  It tastes like you mashed cardboard and sugar together then packaged it.  It’s horrible!  Now I know why that poor girl was so unenthusiastic!  What kind of a company gives a youth organization terrible food and then expect them to raise money?  As I’ve already stated, I want to support youth programs, but if we can’t eat what they are selling, what’s the point?  Sure I could buy the cookies and then throw them in the garbage, but we have world hunger and environmental responsibility to consider.

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When you are providing garbage, you can’t really claim you’re supporting communities and youth programs, now can you?  You are more of a hindrance than a help, methinks.  Once upon a time, Girl Guide Cookies were great, but the Yumminess has been in serious decline for many years.  And you can’t claim you aren’t making enough profit and have to squeeze additional revenue from fundraising causes because I checked.  You’re making MILLIONS in revenue every year.

In the age of Truffle Oil, Tapas and Amuse-bouche, I’m sure you can come up with something edible for the girls to sell.  It’s like you aren’t even trying.

It’s great that the cookies are peanut free and have no artificial colors or flavours, but maybe a bit of flavour could have been left in them?  Any kind of flavour?  How about Caramel?  Caramel cookies are delicious!  Look how easy that is.  It took me, literally, 12 seconds to think of a better cookie for Girl Guides of Canada to sell.  You’re welcome.

Now, I realize I’ve been a little hard on you, but I don’t want you to feel like a total failure.  The packaging isn’t too bad, and the nutritional information is easy to read, and the pictures of girls are cute.  You see what I did here?  Yes, The Sandwich Method.  Good feedback, bad feedback and good feedback again.  You can take this directly to your next shareholder meeting with complete confidence and I’ve done 50% of your new product development.

It’s too late to help the Girl Guide’s fundraising this year, so you should just hand out some cheques to make up for your terrible product.  Next year, though, is the perfect time to roll out some delicious new cookies.

You can do it, Dare!  I know you can!

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Sincerely,

Mrs. Completely

*I’ve skipped the profanities in case your company is easily offended.

Annual Health Review

I had an annual ‘Health Review’ today.  I’m not a fan.  I’m not sure why – there is nothing truly horrible about them but somehow I feel the same way about Health Reviews that I feel about any other sort of review.  Like the ‘Let’s review what you should have done under the circumstances’ or the ‘Let’s review why this didn’t work’ or ‘Let’s review your underwhelming performance at lawn mowing’*.

No one wants to give you a review if you’ve been great at something.  No one ever said, ‘Let’s review how you won that Gold Medal at the Olympics’ or ‘Let’s review how you delivered that baby in the back seat of your taxi’.  They don’t review that at all!  They give you a medal or an award or name a street after you.

At my age, a Health Review begins before I ever make it to my Doctor’s Examining Table.  They send me to be drained of blood, to pee in a small jug and this year a new kind of fuckery called a Stool Sample. And, to make it as inconvenient as possible, you have to go to the Lab to get the kit to get your stool sample so you can bring it back to them when you arrive for the other tests.  And if you don’t want to sit in the waiting room for 23 hours you have to make an appointment, so you only have to wait 12 hours in the waiting room.

This year they made me recite my full name and birth date before they would drain my blood.  I asked if this was a trick or something?  What if I get the answers wrong?  Will you not drain my blood and accept my warm jug of urine?  Apparently, it helps them make sure my body fluids aren’t confused with anyone else’s body fluids but what if that other person’s body fluids pass more reviews?  That would be to my advantage, wouldn’t it?

The Blood Drainer wasn’t amused.  She took all my blood and told me my Doctor (Janna) would be ‘in touch’, but that was a complete fabrication because my Doctor never calls me.  The admirable Natalie, of Front Desk Fame, calls me and tells me when to present myself at the clinic a week or two hence.  I didn’t bother to explain this to The Drainer though because I may have already annoyed her.

As it turned out Natalie called me the following day to say Janna wanted to see me.  Stat.  Thank Gawd I didn’t annoy The Drainer as much as I could have because Natalie sent me for more drainage.

Long story short….Janna started throwing around words like ‘Sugar’ and ‘Diabetes’.  She sent me to see another Doctor (Buki) who sent me for more drainage.  Now I have two Doctors who will, in all likelihood, give me more ‘reviews’.  And Janna demanded my presence today for the regular Health Review that I’ve been dodging for 3 years, because I am more than just my Back and my Diabetes.  Apparently.

After the preliminaries of weight and height, she reviewed my tests, said my blood pressure and cholesterol were great, my heart was a machine and my lungs were stellar.

Me:  Yes, but what about my stool sample?  Did they find anything really interesting in it?  Like a tooth or a gold nugget?

Her:  No, but if there had been any gold in it the Lab Technician would have kept it.

Me:  That’s probably what happened – that Technician looked shifty to me.

Once I was on the table, she went straight to work in the murky depths beneath the sheet.  She’s chatting away about vacations and stuff, but suddenly stops and says….

“Huh.  Your vagina goes to the right and it’s tipped back.  That’s a bit challenging.”

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I’m not sure what I should have said to this.  Several ideas popped into mind:

  • Maybe it’s Strategic Evasion Maneuvers. I almost fell this morning, maybe it was my vagina making a hard right turn.
  • Maybe it’s shy. It’s not like it gets out to socialize very often.  It’s more like an introvert really.  Or….
  • Maybe it’s just a willful and contrary orifice determined to get a bad review.

Whatever the case, after a moment of rummaging she said, “Oh!  There it is!”

When I told The Viking about my vagina, he didn’t seem surprised at all.  He must have known it all along but deliberately kept that fact to himself.  Next time I have a Health Review, I’ll be asking him the state of my vagina so I don’t have any more surprises.  He’s more familiar with it than I am, after all.

So.  To review:  My heart, lungs, blood pressure and cholesterol are fantastic, but I don’t get an award.  My pancreas got a terrible review and is now a subject of ridicule and Organ Bullying.  And my Mammogram gave the boobs an A+.

Still no award though.

 

*I deliberately mowed the lawn terribly because my Mom said, “Don’t do any chore for your husband unless you want to do it forever”.  So, when Stanley asked me to mow the lawn I mowed the lawn….kind of like a crop circle before crop circles became popular.  Now that I think about it though, I should have received some sort of award or recognition for the idea of crop circles because it would have countered the resulting ‘review’ of my lawn mowing skills.

Dear Me,

It’s okay.  Go ahead – have a moment.  Hell, take three, because you deserve it.  I can’t think of anyone more deserving than you.  Of course I’m biased, but I’m sure everyone would agree with me.

So, you had a little meltdown last week, got drunk and bawled for 6 hours – it happens to everyone at some point.  No need to beat yourself up.  In fact, you should pat yourself on the back for keeping the whole affair relatively quiet – you didn’t do it in Wal-Mart did you?  You didn’t wear a T-Shirt with your full name and address on it, right?  See?  That’s something to think about.

And no one took videos, did they?  Yes, I know you had headphones on and your back to the room, so it would be almost impossible to be certain, but there was only The Viking and Junior around and The Viking wouldn’t take advantage, now would he?  Junior…..well, he does have a cell phone glued to his hand, but I can’t see him adding insults by posting your drama on Face Book.  Remember?  He loves you.

Yes, he does!  It just felt like you were alone in the world.  You have a ton of people who love you and care for you and are now looking at you like you’re a fucking lunatic.  How did I know what you were thinking?  Because you aren’t the only one who has dropped the burden momentarily and then had to face the people who have seen you at your absolute worst.  It’s an embarrassment but it won’t kill you.  In fact, those witnesses are now frantically scouring their brain trying to find a way to help you.  So, just let them fucking help you!  They feel like shit because they didn’t think they needed to pay attention as closely as they should have.

Small problems accumulate until they become overwhelming mountains that block out the sun.  You aren’t imagining anything that isn’t real.  It totally is real!  Stress changes the way your brain performs; neurons and electrons, hormones and proteins behave differently, your body functions at a slower rate – these things are out of your control.  All you can do is recognize the signs.

Did you just tell me to fuck off?!  I’m trying to help you and you tell me to fuck off?!  It’s not all bullshit.  Seriously?!  You think life would be less stressful in prison?  A convent?!  Do they even exist anymore?  And if they do exist don’t the nuns have to work all day and pray every 3 hours?  You have difficulties getting up for 9:00 in the morning.  Yes, you do.  Don’t shit a shitter.

Fine.  Prison it is.  You would get 3 meals a day and I suppose you might be able to spend the rest of your time with adult coloring books.  You won’t have to pay bills or make meals or run errands either.  There might even be a library and I would assume you could take online university courses.  Or not.  How the fuck would I know what you would be allowed to do?  Do I look like a hardened criminal to you?!  I think it’s safe to assume that you can’t pick your meals from a menu and they probably don’t have fizzy water on tap.  I don’t know if you can bring a TV from home or if cable is available in your cell.  And, it’s highly unlikely they would have a Nail Technician or a Beauty Consultant on staff.  No.  I’m not calling Martha Stewart.  Besides, she’s American and would have very little knowledge about the Canadian Penal System.

Speaking of which – how do you know that you won’t get assigned to kitchen duty anyway, with a big broad who makes shivs out of turnips?  What if they make you go out in the yard in the rain?  What if they make you eat tuna salad on enriched white bread?  What if there are no private showers?

You might even have a cellmate.  Well, I suppose you might be able to arrange Solitary Confinement – if it’s an actual thing here – but then you probably won’t be allowed to take your coloring book and pencils in case you decide to poke an eye out.  You might be lucky to get a beat-up copy of The Odyssey by Homer to keep you amused.

Yes…. you would get caught up on sleep but once you’ve accomplished that…..well, what then?  I suppose you could work out.  Maybe there would be a yard somewhere, full of weight machines that you can just start bench-pressing 350 pounds and sweat like…. like…. a dude bench-pressing 350 pounds.

Are you really certain that Prison life is for you?  True, you would have very few responsibilities and money wouldn’t be an issue because Conservatives love their prisons, but there is a lot of downsides, the least of which is the big broad that makes shivs out of turnips.  There is the problem of getting invited to prison as well; you can’t just show up and check yourself in.  That would be the Looney Bin.  I understand that the entry requirements are much less stringent, so there is that…..

They don’t make you have public showers and you might not have a cellmate in case someone decides to poke someone else’s eye out with a pencil.  Your art will have to be done with pastels and crayons while Nurse Ratchet fills a syringe with psychedelic drugs and critiques your work though.

So, after all of this, you are right back where you started from – a lunatic not yet in an asylum.  Just go to bed for a couple of days and ‘adult’ next week.

Also, thank The Gawds that you have The Viking and you aren’t sitting alone in your dark closet.  Okay….you might still be sitting alone in your closet, but at least The Viking will check on you occasionally.

Cadavers, Lots and Lots of Cadavers

 

Before we get into the number of Cadavers afflicting me, I must confess, that after only 2 words in this blog, I had to use Spell Check.  That’s how smart my brain is today but, let’s be honest, ‘Cadaver’ is a tricky word – is it ‘ver’ or ‘vre’?   In American English it’s ‘ver’ in British and Canadian English it’s ‘vre’, so it’s no surprise that I find it difficult, along with ‘theatre’, ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘centre’.  And Spell Check is losing its damn mind right now, underlining most of the words in this paragraph in blood red.

But that’s not important right now.  Cadavers are important.  Namely, the cadaver/s that are in my car.  And I’m absolutely certain it’s cadavers because I was blessed with a cadaver in my bedroom a few years ago because a cat brought a mouse in the house, chased it around and then lost it behind a mirror in my bedroom.  It didn’t take long for maggots and then massive flies to create a fucking nightmare in my bedroom 6 weeks later.  I get faint just thinking about it, too.

Junior’s first car had a mouse die behind the fan and the smell was disgusting.  I was still married to Stanley and he had to take the fan out of the car to retrieve the holy stinker.  I’m sure he feels faint just thinking about it.

And then we had a mouse in our Fifth Wheel trailer.  We dragged the damn mouse all the way from Calgary to Arizona where it died.  What little sympathy I might have had for the little thing to die so far from home was quickly lost.  I thought it was smelly garbage.  We cleaned the entire trailer from top to bottom but still the smell smelled.  Then we found it under the sink and behind the water filter.  The Viking used a flipper to poke more smell out of it before he managed scoop it up and discard it…..and the flipper, too, because there is no way that flipper can be used for anything other than removing cadavers now.

So, knowing what I know about the smell of cadavers, my car has become a torture chamber.  We can’t find the cadaver to exhume it from the car and thus make my car safe for human habitation again.  We’ve look everywhere, sniffing like bloodhounds, under seats and behind door panels.  It’s not in the heating/cooling system either.  We put two cats in the car hoping they would point where the cadaver is but, being cats, they were more interested in being anywhere else than there.  So.  What. The. Fuck?!!

And then yesterday……..

……

……

……the smell was gone.  What does that mean?!!  Does it mean that maggots are preparing themselves to become an infestation of bloated black flies that will likely drive me completely and permanently insane?  Will they wait until I go for food and then hatch all at the same time while I’m driving which will make me exit the car immediately and without stopping, probably vomiting as I hit the pavement?  Would insurance even cover that? Or maybe it fell out when I was whistling along Stoney Trail?  I did hit a couple of good bumps that might dislodge a cadaver from the engine compartment.  Ideally, that would be the best outcome – leaving the cadaver to ferment in the middle lane of the freeway.

Unfortunately, I can’t be 100% certain that the cadaver is no longer my problem.  How long does it take for a mouse to turn into the minions of hell?  I’m sure Google can come up with something:

Eggs hatch within 24 hours, and house fly larvae emerge. House fly larvae, or maggots, appear similar to pale worms. Their sole purpose is to eat and store energy for their upcoming pupation. Larvae feed for approximately five days, after which they find dry, dark locations for pupal development.

Gawd!  I have to wait 3 more days for Hell?  Today is Friday, then Saturday and Sunday……..so sometime late Monday or Tuesday.  I won’t take any chances and will refuse to drive the car between now and then.  Sure, The Viking will snort at my sissy-ness but he’s not the one that will be engulfed in huge, disgusting, bloated flies in a confined space.  Just the thought makes me nauseous.

I’ll just have to steal The Viking’s truck – a one-ton dually.  He’s pretty good at protecting himself and his things because he was quite the wrestler back in the day, but I have been practicing Tai Chi.  It will be a face-off in the driveway, an aging wrestler and a sloppy Tai Chi-er.  And it would be prudent to stand about 10 paces apart, so no one gets hurt.  I’m not expecting this to be a lengthy undertaking.  Three moves each, with rests in between, so about a half hour.  There will be energy drinks on hand, so we stay hydrated and Cliff Bars to keep up our carbs.  Maybe an ambulance on standby or is that just a little over the top?

As for my car, if there is an infestation in the car, I’ll just have to burn it down to the axles.  Because if I’m honest, I’ll never feel the same about my car ever again.