I woke up this morning and stumbled out into my livingroom
blinking the sleep out of my eyes. I stood there a moment while the dreams I had just emerged from fizz away from my brain like carbon dioxide from a soda. And then the smell hit me. The smell of something dead.
I spun around
sniffing furiously
trying to locate the smell. However
I did not have my glasses on. So I ran around and showered and did my morning routine. I was about to give up on finding the smell and heading off to work when I spotted a little fuzzy lump on the dining room floor. A bat. Ugh
and a rancid one as well.
Well
that explains why when I woke up in the middle of the night I saw my oddeyed cat sprawled out in the middle of the living room floor. He never does that to sleep at night
he has some secret hidey-hole he slinks off into somewhere in the bowels of my house. So I guess he was up all night swatting a bat around.
I had to leave for work so all I could do was scoop up the bat with a paper bag and toss into my garbage can outside. A little something for the garbage man to whiff and gossip about. (Hey man
smell this can. Daaymn! I know! I know ! Bro
this can is RANK!) When I went back inside all I had time for was a quick spot-nuke of Lysol to kill any bat-germs and to do a little something about the smell. Tonight I am going to have to mop the entire kitchen and living room floor because I am not walking barefoot where a dead cat has been dragged around.
I dropped into world market last night to pick up a couple of bottles of that cheap but tasty Champaign that was on sale. One of my personal requirements for good Champaign is that it has to be highly carbonated. I do not want some cheap white wine with a few bubbles in it. I want something that when it hits my mouth I can actually feel it fizz on my tongue. It has to actually earn the name 'Bubbly'. It cannot be too sour either. I had gotten some cheap Champaign before (screw off cap and all) and not only was it not carbonated enough; it left a sour taste on the tongue. Like they had used grape vinegar for a filler. Thurston Howell the third would not have been pleased.
This cheap 6 dollar Champaign covers all that. It's wicked carbonated
so when I blow off the cork there is an auditable BANG! And the cork shoots across the room. It's fizzy and it's light and it's a-ok. I drank some last night while watching 'GhostHunters'. Which is good because they did not find any ghosts. Again.
One of the dudes did get chomped by a demon. Something got him in the back and it raised a nasty scratchy looking rash. I was not overly impressed. If he had lifted his shirt and there was a huge dinosaur-like bite mark on him like from that one dude in the movie 'Poltergeist' then I would have leaned forward and ooohed and aaahed and splashed some cheap Champaign around in my excitement. However
little rashes simply do not do it for me.
It rained a little bit last night. The ground needed it
however to my annoyance it rained the hardest during the demon-bite scene on ghost hunters and it caused my satellite tv to go a little frizzy. To double the insult
every time I hopped up to catch it on my normal cable-tv in the other room the one on the satellite would clear up
making me race back. I finally sat there and suffered through the occasional digital crackle and spit.
This morning there was hardly any indication it had rained. The ground was so parched it had simply sucked it all up.
2026 Update
Setting the dial for April 2006, where a rancid bat, a hyper-carbonated six-dollar bottle, and a demon-bite rash are all up for review.
Twenty years on, I admire the physicality: a corpse on the floor, a cat wrestling a bat all night, and you scooping it into a paper bag with your morning coffee kicking in. Today we’d photograph the bat, post it, argue about zoonotic germs, and order a hazmat kit from a delivery app. The satellite-versus-cable sprint is extinct—now every room is one glowing rectangle and rain just buffers your stream. Cheap champagne still exists, but that same pocket change now buys something that tastes like a tax accountant’s enthusiasm; back then it at least popped a cork and fizzed on the tongue. Even ghost hunting has been crushed into algorithmic content. The dead bat was maybe the most honest thing about 2006.
“2006 Ed, why did you trust a paper bag and a garbage can to solve a dead bat, when you could have at least used a shovel and a headlamp? And were you honestly more disappointed by the demon rash than by the satellite static?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you've clearly never been late for work with a dead bat on the dining room floor and a cat that looks way too proud of itself. Shovel? Headlamp? I'm lucky I found my shoes. The paper bag was what I had, and the garbage can was right there, so that was the plan. (Also, I wasn't about to get close enough to that thing to start swinging a shovel indoors. I've seen enough horror movies to know where that goes.) Honestly, I figured the garbage man's curse was a fair trade for not having to look at it again.
And yeah, the demon rash was a letdown. The static made me miss the good part AND made me run back and forth like an idiot. But a little rash just looks like something you'd get from cheap soap. I wanted a full-on Poltergeist bite. That would've been something to tell the guys at work. So yes: rash disappointed me more. Static just made me cuss.
