Escape from Coolville. Sherman Sutherland

I get for leaving a brand-new jug of Mountain Fresh Tide in the laundry room where anybody can steal it.

      My question is, Why can’t it go the other way? Why can’t we get positive karma to go around? What if nobody stole the new guy’s box of Bounce? And then he’d leave the quarters and the quarters guy would think, Hey, somebody left my quarters, so I won’t steal this brand-new jug of Mountain Fresh Tide. And then eventually people would expect to find their stuff where they left it and the landlady could throw away the “Not responsible for lost or stolen articles” sign and everybody would help everybody else find their stuff because that’s what we’d want somebody else to do. And I could do laundry a week later and my Mountain Fresh Tide would still be there.

      All we need is one person who doesn’t steal everybody else’s stuff when they leave it in the laundry room.

      I’ll start as soon as I make up for my Mountain Fresh Tide that some dickface stole.

      * * *

      Is it just my imagination, or are my eyebrows really growing inside my head?

      * * *

      And, by the way, what’s the deal with mountain climbing? Even if everyone’s goals aren’t arbitrary and certain stuff actually does matter even though we’ll all be dead one day, mountain climbing is the most arbitrary goal of all arbitrary goals in the whole entire universe. It’s cold, it’s windy, they don’t have time to look around and really enjoy the scenery, plus they’ve got their sherpas doing all the hard work, anyway, so what do they even accomplish? And they leave their trash all over the side of the mountain. Mountain climbing is stupid.

      * * *

      There’s something about easing into a perfectly warm tub that just . . . feels good.

      * * *

      There’s something that’s a drag about realizing, once you get in a perfectly warm tub, that you left your lighter in the kitchen and you have to get out of the perfectly warm tub and drip water all over your apartment until you remember where you left it.

      But then you find it balanced on a dirty mixing bowl in the dish drainer and you figure you may as well light another stick of rainforest incense in the kitchen while you’re there, since you plan on soaking in the tub until you have to leave for work tomorrow morning.

      * * *

      I should do the dishes. They’re starting to stink. What they smell like is when we had to help Uncle Russell clean up after whatever that river was that flooded. There was that layer of brown, chocolate-pudding-looking mud on everything that didn’t smell so bad, but when you stepped in it, there was that other layer underneath that was black and tarry and totally skanky-smelling. That’s what it smelled like in the sink just now when I knocked over a bowl.

      * * *

      I bet Matt has a dishwasher in California.

      * * *

      Ooh, I forgot about the bacon. It’s ready.

      * * *

      If anybody ever dies from eating bacon, tonight will be the night.

      An Athens, Ohio, man died of a heart attack after eating a half sheet pan of bacon. Apparently his last words were, “I was in the mood for something salty.”

      Hopefully that won’t be my News of the Weird obituary.

      * * *

      It’s so quiet I can hear the sizzling of the candle wick.

      * * *

      Is this moldy black crap on the shower curtain bad?

      * * *

      Railroad crossing without any cars; can you spell that without any Rs?

      * * *

      T-h-a-t.

      * * *

      What if the mountains are alive?

      * * *

      Maybe to somebody else, our whole universe only lasts as long as a fart bubble in the bathtub.

      * * *

      Speaking of bubbles, next time I take a bath, I’m totally breaking out the Mr. Bubble. It’s packed away somewhere.

      * * *

      I bet this is what it’s like to be in one of those sensory deprivation chambers. I was just kicking back, with my arms back behind my head and it felt like my elbows were touching each other even though they were four or five or however many feet apart. I kept trying to figure out what the feeling was, but I couldn’t. Then it felt like there was this big huge fan blowing down on me, holding me in the tub. Then I was flying—I just took off almost immediately. Whoa! He’s too high! Slide down. It’s bumpy.

      WhumpWhumpWhumpWhumpWhump. Then my arms and legs started inflating and before I knew it I was as big as those balloons in the Macy’s Easter Parade (or was it Thanksgiving?) Everything inflated except for my hands and my feet and my head. And my penis. And then it was like, Whoa! There goes the penis! It’s inflated! God, it’s huge! And my face expanded too. I was floating like Underdog—no—Long Dong Silver. I looked down to see who was holding my strings and it was this totally hot chick. I got down closer until I could see down her shirt. Sir Lancelot was so huge he was dragging on the street, knocking over cars—Oops!—and a school bus. The girl looked up and caught me checking her out. But she was smiling. She loved it. Then, Whoa! She flashed me her big bazoombas. I picked her up with my penis and gave her a ride to the roof of a building and she put a tractor tire around the top of my penis so she’d have a place to put her feet. And she rode. I had to get out my binoculars to see her facial expressions since she was twelve stories higher than I was. She was loving it. The volcano was about to erupt, I could tell. Then it came. God, it was incredible. All over her. All over the city. Covering cars; filling up jeeps and convertibles. Tires on pick-ups were exploding from all the extra weight. Then it was like, We’re losing air. Damnit, Scottie, do something! She’s going to fall.

      * * *

      I think I ate too much bacon.

      June 14

      Dear water-splashing fucktard,

      Dude, what the hell? Seriously. What the hell are you doing in the restroom that you get water all over the whole sink counter and then that huge puddle all over the floor? Unless you’ve got flippers for hands or you’re the Jolly Green fucking Giant washing your hands after you drop a ginormous green deuce, I can’t even come close to figuring out how the hell you can get so much water all over the place. Seriously.

      I used to think maybe a toilet flooded, or maybe one of the faucets doesn’t work, but it’s never wet by any of the toilets or urinals, and all the faucets work fine, and none of the pipes are leaking and it’s not coming out of the wall because it’s always dry by the wall, too. (Yeah, I checked, asshole.) So then I figured that you must be that Muslim guy who does his religious washing thing every day, but when I sneaked in to catch him in the act, he was wiping up whatever water he did splash. While this does explain why we’re always out of paper towels, it doesn’t address the more urgent question: Who are you, Water Splashing Fucktard? And how do you splash so much water all over the sink and the floor every single day? Are you washing your hands, or scrubbing up for surgery? I mean, even if I tried, I couldn’t make that big of a mess. That’s what I don’t get. What is it, exactly, that you’re doing?

      And why don’t you ever wipe it up? There are paper towels in the paper towel thing right now—I checked—so you could have wiped up that big wet mess. But, no, that’s not your style. And, thanks to you, water-splashing fucktard, I have a dark wet spot right in the middle of my crotch from when I leaned in to get an eyelash out of my eye. So now it totally looks like I soiled myself, because I’m wearing my light gray cotton pants, so the wet spot is super-dark