Invasion

[rejectomorph]

About an hour ago, the whole neighborhood began to smell as though a giant bottle of some odoriferous fabric softener had exploded. Some alternate explanations:

a) The earth has been invaded by an alien species of plants which will render us all comatose with their soporific odor and then eat us.
b) A bus carrying a large number of either church ladies or barflies has broken down nearby, and the stranded passengers are wandering about dazed by one another's reek.
c) There's a hit out on somebody in the neighborhood.
d) Frat boys in Chico tried to get drunk on bottles of cheap perfume, and now the odor of their bloated cadavers is drifting hither across miles of suddenly dying vegetation.
e) My old standby- I've developed a brain tumor and it's causing me to experience phantom odors.

Whatever it is, I hope it goes away soon. I'd like my usual fragrance of grass, trees and skunks back, please.



Sunday Verse

The Horses

by Jorge Guillen


Shaggy and heavily natural, they stand
Immobile under their thick and cumbrous manes,
Pent in a barbed enclosure which contains,
By way of compensation, grazing-and.

Nothing disturbs them now. In slow increase
They fatten like the grass. Doomed to be idle,
To haul no cart or wagon, wear no bridle,
They grow into a vegetable peace.

Soul is the issue of so strict a fate.
They harbor visions in their waking eyes,
And with their quiet ears participate
In heaven's pure serenity, which lies
So near all things-- yet from the beasts concealed.
Serene now, superhuman, they crop their field.

-translated by Richard Wilbur

Comments

[irreparableruin.livejournal.com]

Though I can easily picture that situation, you're going to have to rule out (d). I smell no such thing here in the frat regions.

[rejectomorph]

But if I can just get the rumor started...! It'll be Mellow Yellow all over again!

[irreparableruin.livejournal.com]

Hell, if you really wanted to, I think it would be pretty easy to convince most of them to do it. Then the rumor would spread itself... and be most amusing.