Slobber Excerpt-7-14-2008

So Slobber walked the school hallways, head down and eyes averted. He closed off his ears to all voices but the ones within his own head. He felt only the rough fabric of his coveralls and the soft, worn feeling of his Highlander t-shirt. He smelled the cloying scents of flower and fruit enhanced perfumes worn by the girls, the speedstick, the oniony smell of armpits, and the everpresent smell of testosterone. It all blended with the smell of stale mopwater infused with ammonia and a sour mop wetted too many times, left to dry in a heap in the corner of his “building engineer” closet. He tasted the everpresent overspice of the previous night’s microwave dinner and the blood from grinding his teeth to the point of damaging his gums. He only wished he could turn off his sense of smell and taste and touch as easily as he could sight and sound, but was left with the attempt to ignore instead of push away.

Dream

The dream is always a variation of the same theme. Last night it was spraying disinfectant all over the neighbor's veranda to kill the germs and smell from cat crap. The night before, it was spraying an anti-algae spray in the "pond" in front of the the old Hotel Como to keep the algae and lichen from the lake infiltrating the rowboat area and eating the wood of the ancient rowboats, now seriously in need of several coats of paint. Before that, it was a giant can of bugspray in the tiny kithenette connected to the even tinier studio apartment at the back of the hotel because giant cockroaches, ants, and silverfish had staged a coup near the tiny refrigerator and were threatening to annex the brie and the grapes. And, before that, it was the cloying smell of father's aftershave used as an air freshener to cover the odor of decay that swelled forth like some massive sneaker wave, beginning at the hollowed out spot beneath the floorboards of the bedroom he had shared with his lover for years and years until, one morning, the poison finally worked and he just didn't wake up. That particular tableau of the theme seemed to occur more than any of the others and it was beginning to work. He began to research slow acting poisons on the internet.

Slobber is moving

Slobber is much more comfortable being 'fleshed out" , as it were, in a more private forum. So, he is moving to AppleWorks where he will have a quiet folder to himself...much less embarassment and stress when the bandages come off. However, he will be making regular appearances on Chiaroscuro--he calls them "excerpts". They will be little snatches of his growth and development, of his life and story, along with many of the characters in the school and in his town that he has yet to introduce, even to me.