Pet Smells

This weekend I had my first owning a pet experience. If you've read this before, you know that I desperately want to give up any type of hope and become a cat lady to fill all of those holes that I have in my life with hairballs and empty cans of Fancy Feast and this felt like the first step on the way there.

It started on Saturday afternoon after I burned the Canadian flag into my front while I lay by the pool and talked on the phone. I forgot to rub in the sunscreen because I was distracted with a 48 hour followup to hanging out with a girl.

I'm completely out of my element on this one. I'm used to "Hey, you're cute" then "Hey, I'm drunk" and then a phone number with a question mark after the first name that I'm never going to call. Honestly, this is the first time that I've made an effort responsibly and relatively sober and kind of hoped that something worked out. I have to be honest, it's not an incredible amount of fun, but I guess it's how the other half or 97% live. I'll try it.

Anyways, next to the pool I forgot to rub the sunblock in because I started eavesdropping on this chick that was talking about going to a Los Lonely Boys concert that night and I was really intrigued about who a typical Los Lonely Boys fan was. I thought they were always just the band that happened to be playing at the fair that day that you happened to be there.

I went back to my apartment after not learning too much about the LLB demographic. I did think that there might be a white trash element to it, but can't confirm that yet. My apartment smelled a bit foul and I thought it was the recycling or the trash so I hauled it all out and went so far as to actually attack the bins with an assortment of sprays and a roll of paper towels. Thought it was done.

I sat at my computer for a bit and could still smell it faintly. I did the obligatory nose to armpit and thought it could be me. I don't really smell ever, but didn't want to rule it out. So, showered.

A few hours later I could still smell it. I pulled everything out of the cupboards and cleaned them out. It smelled like cleaning produck at that point and covered up the gross smell.

The next morning it was in the kitchen area again. I was at a complete loss and went to Mother's Day in the city after making mixtapes for mom and sister all morning. I just relistened to one of the playlists and it's absolutely heartwrenching. It's like an audio suicide note. I'm wondering how that's going to go over and also why I was haing a Mother's Day morning funk like that.

Mother's Day was radical. My sister showed up from LA. There was a slowly escalating water arms war that eventually resulted in a broken window and blood. That's a badass Mother's Day.

Got home and walked in my door and it was an odor of death you could feel. The only thing that it could've been at this point were the floors. Vaccuumed and did the linoleum on hands and knees because I don't have a mop. The smell was still there and I went to grab my neighbor to borrow his nose because he doesn't smoke and probably has a better one.

He asked why and I told him I needed to locate the smell and he said that he had it in his apartment, too. Bingo. Light Bulb. Eureka. Uno. Tic-Tac-Toe. Yahtzee. It was a dead rat in the wall. Awesome.

So, I named it "Stinky" and will consider it domestic pet ownership until they extract it from the wall. In the meantime, this bitch is going to be tits up in Glade plug-ins and mandle burning.