The Great Smella . . . Musculus

The olfactory senses. The smell of warm bread, baby's breath, lilacs in Spring, a football lockeroom three weeks into the season, Gary, Indiana, Darling Rendering at 36th & Ashland, and a dead mouse each have their own hegemonic allure.

I am and have been in my cubicle at Leo High School this morning and I detect the faint, but noxious aroma of a mouse who has passed.

Instead of loading Campaign Leo, foundation donations and memorials into their respective Excel spreadsheets, I am avoiding the urge to beat it the Hell out of here by offering this verbal response to Nature's course.

I shower and shave and talc and deodorize my manky frame out the necessities of good corporeal hygiene and my love of my fellow man - sometimes twice daily, if a fair woman with whom I am acquainted deigns to walk out with me.




I usually apply a liberal splash or two of Pinaud-Clubman after shave, which gives me the scent of a trip to the barber and not a bath in sissy water. As my job requires some level of good-grooming and relative proximity to gift prospects, I try not to offend the senses, well one of them anyway.

The dead mouse is undoubtedly located in the silver metal trap behind Ms. Adams door in the dexter cubicle. It will be hours before, that door can be unlocked and the newly disintegrating carcass of Wee Mousie disposed of by Ron Reynolds Chief of Maintenance.

Learned recently that the good folks of Pepsi Co. have a mouseably dissolving product - Mountain Dew:

An Illinois man sued Pepsi in 2009 after he claims he “spat out the soda to reveal a dead mouse,” the Madison County Record reports. He claims he sent the mouse to Pepsi, which then “destroyed” the remains after he allowed them to test it, according to his complaint. Most shudder-worthy, however, is that Pepsi’s lawyers also found experts to testify, based on the state of the remains sent to them that, “the mouse would have dissolved in the soda had it been in the can from the time of its bottling until the day the plaintiff drank it,” according to the Record. (It would have become a “jelly-like substance,” according to Pepsi, adds LegalNewsline.) This seems like a winning-the-battle-while-surrendering-the-war kind of strategy that hinges on winning the argument that “our product is essentially a can of battery acid.”

Odd legal tac that. Our product rots mice, but cools the throat and sweetens the tongue like a passage of Calvin to a Presbyterian.

It's not easy being me.

Now, I will ascend the stairs to the second floor, find my key to the faculty bathroom and toss what cookies I possess.