JOURNAL: Skunk Weed

1.Cigarettes Lost

The other night

While waiting for the lady of the manor to do things she needs to do before we can watch a movie, I think: Cigarette.  Cigarettes these days, I choose my spots.  

I'm walking outside for a nice smoke on the porch.  It is a beautiful night out there.

But I can't find my minty Marlboros.  I look everywhere.  I walk down to my truck, and tear that apart.  Nothing.  What the Hell?  Back upstairs.  
"I'm ready for the movie." She says.  
"Where are my cigarettes?"
"How should I know?"
(She has a point)
I circle the house a dozen times.  Nothing.
Now she wants to watch that movie, but I can't.  I can't.  All I can think about is my pack of cigarettes; it's like The Vanishing.  I can't live with this.  I might not smoke more than one cigarette tonight, but not if I know I have none.  This will eat away at me.  The only store open is ten miles away.

2.Skunks Humping

45 minutes later

I pull back into the yard with my cigarettes to find two MUSKRATS making sweet muskrat love at the foot of my porch.  An engine rev sends them skittering off into the night.  

Walking up the stairs, completely entertained by the anthropomorphic shame I've imposed on the muskrats going muskrat, (who needs Walt Disney when you live in the country?), I'm already working out the bit I'm going to tell my girlfriend about how bizarre it is that muskrats, of all animals, have shown up, like a bat flying into Bruce Wayne's window.  (Good stuff).  

3.Spraying the Perimeter

int. house

Three steps inside I have the bizarre thought that someone is smoking weed in my house.  Unless the lady of the house has recently prescripted* medicinal tobacco for cramps, I shouldn't be smelling weed, we don't partake.

Oh, wait.  Those weren't muskrats.  

(*Prescripted.  The act of aggressively fishing for drugs for a phantom malady via a doctor's scrip.  This year I'm keeping count of words I invent. That's 1.)

4.Skunk Weed Pitch

on the couch

We exchange acknowledgement of the skunk stink.  The little pricks have really done us up.  Skunks are notoriously unforgiving in their revenge for you laughing at their hump style.  

While the lady of the house goes sniffing room to room, my mind constructs a character.  A hillbilly pot dealer who drives around in a beat up Continental.  When the authorities pull him over they get giddy what with the sweet skunky telltale aroma one would expect when pulling over a rumored spliff vendor.  The coppers want to search the car.  He lets them.  They get to the trunk.  He lets them.  Inside?  Twenty dead skunks.  

"What's this about?" Questions the Cop.

"Supper.  I pick up road kill officer."

After the cops leave, our boy chuckles to himself, and lights a fat bowl.  There's a pound of hash under the carpet.

5.The Red Vase

still daydreaming

But the girl is laughing. 

"What are you laughing about?"

She points behind me.  

I don't see anything.

She says, "The vase."