I got home from work last night and opened my front door to my house and was immediately rewarded with a putrid stench. It was bad. It was not quite gag-bad, but it was still pretty bad. I thought to myself ‘What the hell? How could that little bat make such a stink?'.
So I got busy doing some cleaning. I ran down to the dollar general and got a giant can of carpet fresh and some antibacterial Mr. Clean for the bare floors. I get home and start picking up the bigger un-vaccumable chunks off of my living room floor. I noticed the stench was stronger in there. And that's when I noticed it. A big dead rat.
Sucker was big, too. It had obviously been bloating in the house heat all day. A big bottle green fly sat on the corpse, buzzing its wings in an angry defense over its prize. I went and got a box and scooped it into it with a stick while the fly buzzed its indignity at me. I then poured about half a bottle of carpet fresh on the spot where it had been. It's annoying because tonight I am going to have to pick up a carpet shampooer. That's a real exciting Friday night, shampooing your carpet. Oh well, it needed to be done sometime. Actually, that entire carpet needs to be ripped up. It has more stains on it than a crack whore's mattress. However, I have more important things to worry about in my house, so a quick shampooing is all it is going to get.
Renting a carpet washer is fairly cheap, however it's the chemicals where they get you. I wonder if there is a cheaper alternative I can use than the stuff you have to buy. I need to be careful, though. I have had bad experiences putting the wrong kind of chemicals into machines. Like the time I decided to try liquid dish soap in my dishwasher.
So I spent the rest of the night cleaning. Vaccumed the floor mopped the kitchen and the dining room and so on. I just had a weird feeling that the rat-stink had oozed through my house like some sort of mold and I had to scrub it away. It was late when I was finished, but the smell was gone and I had no fear about walking around barefoot. I polished the night off with a sweat-inducing soak in the hot tub and then moseyed on to bed.
I decided last night that I do not like my dining room/kitchen table anymore. It is a big hulking wooden monstrosity that I got form my sister. It does not have any chairs, just a long low bench in front of it. It looks like something from a Viking hall. It has amused me, but the top is now horribly scratched up and the entire thing is starting to wobble. I suppose I could take the time to fix it and refinish it, but I do not really want to.
After mulling it over a bit, I decided I do not want a kitchen table. I want a restaurant booth. The high-backed kind so, when you are sitting, it you feel like you are in a private alcove. The long padded seats and the simple Formica table. It's the perfect table to sit at while you are eating a bowl of cereal and reading a book. I will have to keep my eyes out for a used one. Or build one myself, it cannot be too hard.
2026 Update
20 years back, and Ed's Friday night is a bloated rat and a rented carpet shampooer.
Ah, 2006. A simpler Hell, where a man's biggest Friday-night sin was renting a carpet shampooer and pouring half a bottle of chemical scent over a rat stain. Look at the rituals: drive to Dollar General, buy Mr. Clean and Carpet Fresh, physically scoop a corpse with a stick, then spend the night scrubbing because the smell had 'oozed' into the house. Now? We summon a same-day carpet-cleaning service on an app, or we just rip up the carpet and install gray laminate, which I despise for entirely unrelated reasons. The dead rat would be documented in high definition and posted to the neighborhood app before the box even arrived. Ed's other cost trap—chemicals for the rented machine—has metastasized into subscriptions: everything is a monthly fee, from the robot mop to the 'premium' air freshener that mists the room with engineered neutrality. And he wants a restaurant booth with Formica? In 2026, Formica is a retro flex, and high-backed booths are sold as 'private dining pods' for people who crave a booth but rent a 400-square-foot apartment. Ed, you were an oracle of dumb domestic choices. Shampooing that carpet did nothing. You needed a biohazard suit and a priest.
“2006 Ed, after all that carpet-fresh and scrubbing and barefoot confidence, did the rat-stink ever find its way back out of the walls and haunt your Viking-hall table, or did the booth you never built absorb it instead?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I’m happy to report the rat-stink never crawled back out of the walls. That carpet fresh and a lot of elbow grease did the trick, and for a solid week the place smelled like a chemical flower explosion, which was almost worse, but at least it wasn’t dead rat. The Viking-hall table never got haunted by the ghost of rodent odor, just by my own laziness and a growing wobble. I kept telling myself I’d refinish it, but then I’d sit there scraping my spoon against the bowl and think, you know, a booth would be a hell of a lot better. I still haven’t built one, obviously, because I’m me and I have a house full of half-finished projects. So the rat smell didn’t get absorbed by the booth I never built; it just faded into the ceiling fan and became another boring memory. Take that, foul germs.
