Deliver Me from Evil

I have a pair of rednecks tearing apart my kitchen ceiling. There's dust everywhere, but they smell like unwashed Sasquatch asscracks. It's seriously fucking disgusting.

I'm so unbelieveably tired, when I got home from class today, I actually fell asleep on the floor while looking to see if my cat was hiding under my bed.

This week is already turning into hell on earth, and it'll take at least three more days before the rednecks are done putting the new pipes in. Yay fucking yay.

...

On a more positive note, though, a strange pair of keys appeared while the ceiling was being torn apart. Apparently, they were literally in the ceiling--above the wooden lathes...not the useless foam drop ceiling tiles. They're clearly very old, and may very well open the secret door to nowhere in the corner of my basement. (I shit you not: there really is a mysterious little closet or something in the corner of my basement that has never, to my knowledge, been opened anytime in my lifetime.) I bet it leads to wherever I am truly from. If so, I can't wait to go home for real.

I'd better be able to sleep 20 hours a day and kill as many people as I want there.

Mmmmm....Hospital smell.

Hospitals don't smell like they used to, anymore. They don't smell like oldskool antiseptic (betadyne and rubbing alcohol) and fresh, well-worn linens and sunwarmed varnish any longer--they just smell like nothing. Beyond antiseptic. They have no odors whatsoever. This unaccountably depresses me.

I just took a pair of aspirin, and just for a second, the taste of the aspirin in my mouth was exactly like the smell of a corridor I remember at the Uniontown Hospital when I was a child. It was in this little annex by the emergency room...just an average hallway in which there were a number of various doctors' offices or small clinics or testing labs or something. I recall, vaguely, that my grandmother or grandfather had to be taken to one of those offices for some reason, and I tagged along. I couldn't've been more than nine or ten.

It was early afternoon, and I was wandering along the hall, probably bored out of my gourd because my grandparent's appointment was taking forever as usual. The walls were the same color as some of the walls in my gradeschool: a pale, gentle blue with the heaters running along their bottoms and the windowsills painted a bland, generic tan. The windows were just like old school windows, too--metal frames, with little sideways latches you twisted to pull the lower panes open--and both warm sun and a slightly warm breeze were leaking in through them. There was a quiet shush of voices in offices, and a nurse strolled by in an old white nurse's uniform.

And the air, warm and dry and clean, smelled like aspirin taste. Not bitter and acrid like aspirin that's started to melt on your tongue, mind you--but strangely etheric, astringent and vaporous, like some sort of unearthly coughdrop you take to fume open the third eye of your memory.

I really miss that smell. I spent so much damned time in the hospital in my youth (either myself, or because one or both of my grandparents were in there) that I actually equate that oldtime hospital smell with better days. I think this in some way explains my love of old hospitals and old medical equipment.