Ended up taking the train in to the office this morning. Was too much of a pussy to get on the bike and pedal in. And apparently too cool to add subjects to my sentences this morning.
But don’t worry. I paid for my laziness, and not just by keeping the pounds my fat ass added over the weekend because Burgerville has those God damn Walla Walla Sweet Onion Rings on the menu again…
Oh, non-Northwesterners? Add those somewhere near the top of the List of Reasons Why You Need to Live Here. I’m not a huge onion fan and never liked them in ring-form, but these things taste exactly like deep fried sin. Fucking delicious (and only available when the onions are in season). I’m seriously considering taking on bulimia as a hobby just so I’ll never have to stop eating the bloody things.
Anyway.
So the train. Like I needed another reason to avoid it…
Was sitting on the MAX, finishing up Armaggedon in Retrospect
I didn’t notice her at first. By sight, you probably wouldn’t either. Just looked like another white-trashy type: badly bleached, frizzy hair… slightly overweight, but not exactly ‘fat’… that haggard, bar-hag look that made her look about 10 years older than she probably is. Nothing that really stood out.
Except the smell.
When I used to smoke, I couldn’t smell the stuff on myself or others. Don’t know if you just get so used to it that you tune it out, or if the smoke does something to dull your olfactory system. Regardless, you just tend not to notice.
But fucking Christ… The Marlboro Man himself would have jumped off his fucking billboard and sponge-bathed this chick with his own leathery hands if she came within 50 yards of him.
In my smoking heyday, I lived in a three bedroom, second story apartment with three other smokers. We never allowed cigarette smoking inside the apartment, so we (and countless visitors) used to light up on the back porch. We kept a 5-gallon bucket out there, half-filled with water, to play the part of Ashtray.
During one drunken/stoned night, I went out to the back porch with a couple of friends and enjoyed a nice, smooth, soothing smoke*, then tossed the butt into the bucket, adding it to the 3-4 months worth that were already floating in there. By that point, there were already enough cigarettes in the bucket to keep a small child afloat, and the once clear water had turned into a color nearly identical to the used tobacco in the floating fags.
Then, in my drunken stoniness, I decided that I would attempt to stand on the edge of the smoke bucket. Cowboys might be able to last eight seconds on a bull, but they do that sober. Shouldn’t surprise anybody that I lasted about half that long on the bucket.
So it fell, dumping about 3 gallons of putrid smoke water all over our patio, soaking the feet of the innocent bystanders too drunk/stoned to get out of the way in time.
Oh, and I think I mentioned we were on the second story…
Which, of course, means we had neighbors below us. Neighbors with a patio. With furniture on it. And a BBQ grill. And with gravity being the unfortunately constant force she is, they soon had a waterfall to match. A nasty, brown, tobacco-y waterfall… People like that smokey flavor, right? Right?!
Ten years later, I can still remember that smell. That horrible, tear-inducing, straight-out-of-the-fiery-depths-of-Hell smell.
And that’s what the lady on the train smelled like. Like she shampooed with concentrated, four-month-old tobacco bucket water, conditioned with bong-water, and rinsed with the contents of an old West spitoon.
And she kept doing this Buffy-Summers-on-the-dance-floor hair-toss a few inches from my face that made sure I got the full effect. Repeatedly. For the entire trip.
So tomorrow, guess who’s fat ass will be planted firmly on his bike seat, come Hell or high, smokey water?
*Speaking of smoking… Don’t do it. Just learned over the weekend that an acquaintance of mine was diagnosed with oral cancer a couple of weeks back and just had half his tongue amputated. He graduated a year after me, so he’s only about 33 years old.
