Rain and Stench
A great thunderclap woke me, and I lay abed listening to the furious downpour which accompanied it. The sound invited me to rise and look out the window, but the warm covers insisted that I remain buried, and not expose myself to the room's chill. The covers won, so I drifted for a while in a half dream of flooded roads and wind-tossed woodlands. Only when the storm had calmed a bit did I wake sufficiently to leave the comfort of my cocoon and look upon the gray afternoon of solstice, with its drifts of wood smoke and its sodden landscape. A glittering stream still flowed along the road verge, and the massed clouds still threatened to engulf the treetops. The moody sight cheered me no end.
The rain continues, and is expected to do so for days to come. It's probably going to be a wet Foxmas.
Rain failed to dampen a strange odor which insinuated itself through my window a couple of hours ago. It was a cloying perfume smell (which, fortunately, has since dissipated.) At first, I had my usual reaction to a powerful yet inexplicable smell: brain tumor! Then I decided that it was not a hallucination, and realized that it was most likely either: a) A lost starlet (perhaps Britney or Lindsay... or both!) having sex in the bushes under my window; b) A neighbor foolishly taking a shower with some over-scented body wash and their bathroom window wide open; c) Somebody doing a load of washing and using too much of some foul fabric softener; d) Somebody had dropped a box, breaking its contents, a bottle of Wal-Mart perfume, when placing Jul presents under their Wotan tree, or; e) A guy in his twenties visiting town from Long Island had passed by on the road a few hundred feet west. Either it was one of those, or Ashton Kutcher's head had exploded.
Now a more sinister explanation occurs to me. What if the Mad Scientists at the University of California have been engaged in an experiment to genetically engineer skunks which spray a mixture of Old Spice, Cher's "Unihibited", and Drakkar Noir, and one of their subjects has escaped? And, if so, what if it breeds, and it passes on its evil, engineered genes to its offspring? The whole world could end up stinking like that! Oh, the horror! I think I'd rather have it be a brain tumor than that!
The rain continues, and is expected to do so for days to come. It's probably going to be a wet Foxmas.
Rain failed to dampen a strange odor which insinuated itself through my window a couple of hours ago. It was a cloying perfume smell (which, fortunately, has since dissipated.) At first, I had my usual reaction to a powerful yet inexplicable smell: brain tumor! Then I decided that it was not a hallucination, and realized that it was most likely either: a) A lost starlet (perhaps Britney or Lindsay... or both!) having sex in the bushes under my window; b) A neighbor foolishly taking a shower with some over-scented body wash and their bathroom window wide open; c) Somebody doing a load of washing and using too much of some foul fabric softener; d) Somebody had dropped a box, breaking its contents, a bottle of Wal-Mart perfume, when placing Jul presents under their Wotan tree, or; e) A guy in his twenties visiting town from Long Island had passed by on the road a few hundred feet west. Either it was one of those, or Ashton Kutcher's head had exploded.
Now a more sinister explanation occurs to me. What if the Mad Scientists at the University of California have been engaged in an experiment to genetically engineer skunks which spray a mixture of Old Spice, Cher's "Unihibited", and Drakkar Noir, and one of their subjects has escaped? And, if so, what if it breeds, and it passes on its evil, engineered genes to its offspring? The whole world could end up stinking like that! Oh, the horror! I think I'd rather have it be a brain tumor than that!