From: "Kelly J. Cooper" <kjc@[APOCALYPSE]>
To: nobody
Subject: not for the squeamish


A lot of people rotate through my house for a lot of different
reasons.  This is cool, sometimes really cool, sometimes not.  But
every so often someone does something really... yucky.

I found 1/2 a pound of raw hamburger, open plastic, sitting on its
little styrofoam home, in the bottom of one of my garbage barrels out
back.  Not in a bag, not wrapped up tight.  Just sittin' at the bottom
of the barrel, in my little bit of a backyard.  In July.

Lifting the lid the first time was charming enough, and left me pretty
unhappy.  But sliding it out of the barrel and into a bag while big
fat black flies buzzed around, bumping into me and crawling on my
skin, was when the smell really got me.

Now, I gotta say that I've smelled a lot of horrendous things in my
life.  Shared living quarters often means bystander effect for
responsibility - no one owns anything, particularly messes.  I've got
a real nice maggot story that I'm more than happy to tell over dinner.
I spent six years in a college town, so I got used to that stale-beer
/slash/ vomit-n-piss scent that seems to permeate the sidewalks and
rise in the heat.  I was the newbie EMT in the back of the rig with
the drunks and the unhappy folk.  I've smelled lots of things that
made me want to throw up.

But I've never smelled something that grabbed the back of my head,
squeezed the lizard brain and screamed "BAD! BAD! BAD! BAD! BAD!"

The smell was indeed horrible, but the gag reflex came from someplace
else entirely.  And that's the thing that the thinking part of my
brain locked onto and considered with great care while I stood in
front of the fan in the kitchen and felt my heartbeat flip out and my
guts try to exit in all directions and phantom flies stir the hairs on
my legs.