The closest to Normal (Illinois) that I've ever been.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Drier beware


Yesterday I found a giant booger on my bath towel.
Children are such a gift! (At least I hope that it was from one of the children).
It reminds me of the story "Detectives" from David Sedaris' Naked:
It was one thing to sit in front of the television, second-guessing a third-rate detective program, but quite another to solve a real case. We were well into our summer reruns when our household was shaken by a series of very real crimes no TV detective could ever hope to crack. Someone in our family had taken to wiping their ass on the bath towels.
What made this exceptionally disturbing was that all of our towels were fudge-colored. You’d be drying your hair when, too late, you noticed an unmistakable odor on your hands, head and face. If nothing else, life in the suburbs promised that one might go from day to day without finding stool samples in their hair. This sudden turn of events tested our resolve to the core, leaving us to wonder who we were and where we, as a people, had gone wrong.
Soul-searching aside, it also called for plenty of hot water, gallons of shampoo, steel wool, industrial scrub brushes and blocks of harsh deodorizing soap. The criminal hit all three bathrooms, pausing just long enough to convince the rest of us that it was finally safe to let our guard down. I might spend twenty minutes carefully sniffing the towel only to discover that this time they’d used a washcloth.
“Well,” my mother said, thumbing through the newspaper one Sunday morning, “The person doing this is one sick individual. That much we know for certain.”
“And they eat corn!” Lisa said, patting her head with a t-shirt.

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