urine business

Thursday, feb. 3, 2005   |   0 comments

I am just now getting over the world’s worst cold-flu, a solid week of sweating and coughing and one-hundred-and-one degrees of separation, plus hurling. I spent the bulk of the week shivering in a sweat-wet sleeping bag on a bare, bare mattress because on day ONE of my horrible and gross illness, Marbles the Cat decided to pee all over a water-repellant puffy vest that I had made the grave error of leaving on the bed next to me. When the first whiffs of urine assaulted my sick nose, I groaningly scrambled the Marbles-enraging vest away from the safety of my bed, thereby prompting a veritable FLOOD of urine, a kiddypool sized puddle, to roll off the vest and onto my comforter, sheets, and pillow. Sick as I was, I managed to vaguely get my urine-soaked bedding stuffed into a garbage bag, which I placed in the bathtub (with hopes of keeping it clear of Marbles re-markable urges?). And then, with my last half-ounce of strength, I pulled my hulking brown check-luggage bag down from its ridiculous perch in my hall closet, pulled out the chinchilla bag stored within, unstuffed from it the sleeping bag with the broken zipper, and wrapped it around my aching body. When I awoke hours later to the sound of my phone, which rings the tauntingly inspirational theme from Rocky, I discovered that the flood of urine had extended so far as to include my phone. I tried washing it in the sink, but all that did was fritz out the wiring (for two days, every number pushed produced two separate beeps and one freaky @-sign character in the caller-ID window) — the distinct sniff of urine continued to linger no matter how I rinsed and scrubbed. Ring, ring, go away, it’s the urine phone, the urine phone, the URINE PHONE! Actually, now the urine phone suddenly smells not at all that bad? Rather it smells kind of good, like a subtle and possibly even expensive sort of lotion? Wow, and I don’t really know how this happened, but somehow lemonade has magically been made out of urine, here in the magic house of sickness and sleeping bags.