Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘smells’

Chetspeak on Sunday

“What a stench!” Bernie said in a low whisper, stench being a smell humans were capable of detecting but didn’t like. In the nation within, we have plenty of sounds we don’t like, but not really any smells. Smells are too big a world for simply liking or not liking, and besides, we get way too busy breaking down the smells, and breaking down the parts of the parts, and the parts of the parts of the parts! For example, here inside Cleotis’s crib we had big-time rotting smells, no longer a surprise to me in this city. You want a part? How about food? We had rotting fruit. How about parts of that? Rotting bananas and rotting pineapples. See the way this works? We also had rotting meat, rotting milk, rotting eggs – even humans never miss that last one. The rotting food part was actually a small part of the big smell picture, which was dominated by toilet back-up. It reminded me of a case we’d once worked involving rival septic tank companies owned by two dudes who hated each other. The ways they had of getting back at each other! But no time for that now. Sometimes the most important smells in our business are the ones that aren’t there, and this was one of those times; meaning death was not in the house.

Another quiet whisper from Bernie: “I think I smell rotten eggs.” That was Bernie: human to the max.

– from The Sound and the Furry.

Chetspeak on Sunday

Bernie brought the other pipe in from the car, set the two pipes side by side on the kitchen counter. By that time, we had all the water mopped up and everything looked ship-shape, as Bernie put it, but wasn’t Little Jazz a sort of ship? Meaning how could it be car-shaped, or tree-shaped, or any other kind of shape? I puzzled over that and then I didn’t. All I knew for sure was that I was Chet-shaped. Good enough for me, amigo.

“Look pretty much identical to me,” Bernie said. “But one’s good and one’s a piece of crap, although that quote is hearsay from Duke, which is like piling crap on crap.”

I smelled no crap in the vicinity, none at all, which was actually kind of unusual. Piles of crap would not be something I’d miss. But I believed in Bernie. Crap had to be just around the corner.

– from The Sound and the Furry.

Welcome Amber.

Life Back Then

We’re running around crazily today, me and Bernie. He has this list, all crumpled and wrinkled now. “What the hell’s celeriac?” he says.

I can’t help him.

At Vin’s Discount Liquors – Vin’s our go-to guy when it comes to booze, is also an old Army buddy of Bernie’s; and isn’t he in book 5? – we run into Otis DeWayne, pushing a full cart. Otis is our weapons expert but he’s also a Civil War reenactor, knows a lot about the past.

“If we could go back to Pilgrim times,” Bernie says, “what would be the first difference we’d notice?”

“That’s easy,” Otis says. “The smell. Everybody stank to high heaven.”

Hey! Sounds interesting!

Welcome Ben, George, Pita (with backpack, great idea).

Something In The Air

Bernie rubs his forehead. Humans do that sometimes. Are they trying to rub out what’s going on in there? What a thought! Hope I never have it again, and I probably won’t.

“Maybe I jumped in with my World Series bet a bit hastily, big guy,” Bernie says. He glances at the paper. “Bobby Jenks, Red Sox reliever, says, ‘I just flat-out stunk tonight.'”

I take a quick sniff, pick up nothing you could call actual stink, but Bobby Jenks sounds like an interesting dude.

“Wonder if I can get another bet in,” Bernie says, “kind of hedging the first one. Maybe Rangers over Phillies in the Series.”

He picks up the phone. I start panting, no particular reason.

Welcome Sadie, Mt. Evans hikers (when does the road close?), Biddie, Annie, and of course Macy the Min-Pin.