Dryer Sheets

Have you ever heard a boxer fart? I’m not talking about Tyson after too many buffalo wings. Ha, Tyson…buffalo wings. I didn’t even mean that double entendre. I mean a boxer…the dog. 8:30 on a Sunday, and my neighbor downstairs has let out her dog into her gravel, and this thing starts farting so powerfully, I can hear it through my closed window, followed by the gas-propelled pebbles hitting the glass. Impressive.

I stumble out of bed, still reeling slightly from the flu-like systems of the past two days. Striking up a conversation with myself in the mirror, I wait for the water to boil, one step closer to that magical combo of coffee and decongestants, a legalized blast of uppers and downers. The result? I’m contemplating just what kind of advanced stamping machine Campbell’s uses to churn out thousands of doughy letters on a daily basis for their alphabet soup. Would the ever consider producing a foreign-language soup, with umlauts or accented e’s? They could minimize wasted dough by just throwing in some leftover dots and stringy bits, and pass them off as whatever their customer wanted.

And why not abstract alphabet soup? Just random pieces of something, to stimulate creative thoughts in the kids. Rorschach…the soup. Or fortune teller soup. Intuitive AND nutritious. Might not have made much difference in my day, I still would’ve seen Tommy Ellison picking on me in the schoolyard. Red hair, buck teeth, braces, intelligence? I was doomed from the start. Doomed to be SEXY. I just had a couple decade-waiting period. Why do they even give you the option of rainbow-colored bands on your braces? So you can draw even more attention to the metal structure that looks like some junior architect’s sick joke?

And all this from the bathroom mirror. Why can’t I just think about sex like a normal guy? I’ll blame it on the drugs.

Can you guess this product from its ingredients?:

Aqua, alcohol, Benzoic acid, Poloxamer 407, Eucalyptol, Menthyl salicylate, Thymol, Menthol, Sodium benzoate, Caramel.

It’s Listerine. The Caramel bit kills me. In what focus group did they decide that urine was a good color for something that you swig in your mouth on a daily basis? Did they need to round out the ingredients with something that didn’t have an x,y, or z in it? It certainly wouldn’t fly as a Crayola color, that’s for sure.

It’s funny the things we’ll put in our mouths because they’re so nicely packaged and labeled. Take Coke, for instance. In the bottle, you don’t question it. But do you honestly think that if you came across a pool of fizzy black liquid, somewhere out there in the wilderness, you’d start drinking it up? If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake….

DRINK IT UP!!!

Neti time. More time with my thoughts, as salt water courses through me. Because I need more time to ponder the outrageous. Like, what the hell is Nancy Kerrigan doing on the box for my Neti pot? She looks like she’s filtering crystal meth through her nostrils. Or signing the papers on a new car. Or both.

But enough about ice queens, their bad knees, and their drug habits. My saline-saturated eyes fall on the one thing that’s been gathering dust in my kitchen since I’ve moved in: the dehydrator. Why the hell haven’t I been dehydrating everything? Forget strips of marinated meat…I wonder how long I could keep a stray cat in there. Can you reverse the effects of a dehydrated cat, like Shrinky-Dinks? You could make tabby throw rugs real quick. Or organic edible dryer sheets, using some dehydrated apricots or something...throw them in with your colored laundry. All the stuff you see in the supermarket looks like it would taste good as a summer cocktail anyways. And why not just have alcohol-scented laundry detergent? Gin and tonic fabric softener perhaps? It’s the perfect scent to bring a harmonious balance to your next AA/sexaholics mixer.

I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that I’ve been seeing a lot of redundancies in the world around me. When the line between cleaners and fruit cocktails becomes blurred, separated by an aisle or two in the supermarket, it makes you look around a bit. In this world of over-production, there should be one or the other. Ok, perfect example: commercial packing peanuts, and commercial Chinese prawn crackers. They look the same, taste the same, and are completely interchangeable. You’ve seen those corn-starch packing peanuts that dissolve in water. Just add a touch of salt, write “great with a sweet chili dip!” on the outside of the box, and you’re good to go.