Prelude to a Flap

There’s a new policy in the Flap Household, effective immediately:

“When you find pulsating mouse, it’s time to clean the house.”

It’s kinda my new mantra. Want some advice, Flap Nation? If you smell something bad, keep searching for the reason. Don’t let the Flap dude tell you," Oh, that’s just your sensitive nose again." Well, yeah it is, and it’s my goddamn super power so why not take advantage. It’s not every time you come flying in at the finish line of a road race I dismiss it with a “Oh, that’s just because you are a gifted runner” So don’t go all Cassandra on me with my uncanny gift of sniffing (and complaining!) about bad odors. My ability to sniff out trouble just might save this Flap family one day. It certainly saved us from having a dead mouse join our household long term.

I keep thinking about how long it must have taken that mouse to rot -- and it was more or less in sight. We have this couch that splits into two pieces. Naturally my kids take full advantage of this fact, always moving the pieces around. One section had found it’s way about ten inches away from the wall. Our dumb cat must have had her shit together one night, or maybe the mouse was drunk or something, because she got a rare notch on her Mouse Kill belt some time in early June, I’m guessing. Left its toyed-with carcass right behind the couch. One glance to the left upon walking in the room would have revealed all. But this family does precious little glancing. It does mostly guitar noodling, face book gazing and repeatedly asking for Popsicles. Leaves precious little time for checking for dead rodents behind couches.

I kept thinking the pee-pee smell was just that sharp twang a house can acquire when the weather’s been damp. Kinda like how a lake house rental smells: a blend of water-logged James Patterson paperbacks, brown-speckled ceramic mugs from the 1970s and lacquered pine paneled walls. It's not without its charms, I find.

But yesterday morning was endgame for the pee pee smell. I got backup on the “lake house effect” funk from the flappette. She walks in the living room and bam, claims she’s smelling something bad. Thank fucking god, someone else smells it, too. I was so sick of sniffing sofa cushions. I was beginning to fall prey to a whole different form of gas-lighting, if you will.

And I was getting really sidetracked with odor detection. Because the living room window had been left open the night before the morning of the big pee pee smell reveal, I had become convinced that the smell was connected to the spilled gallon of paint in the garage that the house painters discovered upon showing up for work that morning. I was envisioning a rampaging family of skunks, trashing the garage then moving on into the living room for a group spray or something. Turns out the Flap dude just slammed the garage door on the bucket and tipped it over. I think he also shattered Occam’s Razor when he pulled the door down. How the hell could I think one event had anything to do with the other?

Here’s why I didn’t just stop at There Must Be a Dead Animal in this Room when the smell wouldn’t go away. Are you ready to find out why? It’s a really sad reason. I thought I already knew what that smelled like because sadly, this isn’t our first PME (pulsating mouse event. )

A few years ago I was trying to finish both grad school AND The Deathly Hallows. A tricky combination of objectives. I would find myself on the couch reading about the final battle instead of say, writing a paper about sexual tension between Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny or whatever the hell it was I did to get my degree. But my Potter joy kept getting disturbed by a smell that made me think the gas was left on the stove. I kept checking, but even though the stove was always fine the smell wouldn’t go away. Cue to my calling Bob and insisting we lift the couch. And now cue The Blowing Curtain.

So now I know, and now everyone in the Flap nation knows: sometimes a rotting mouse smells like propane gas, other times, it kinda has a pee pee twang.

Why the two distinctly different smells of the same dead species? Does this mean there are other possible odors on the rotting mouse odor spectrum? Could be. But I think the Flap household has contributed plenty to this small arena of Rancid Home Science already. We’re all done here.

Which leads me to the positive side of this PME. That is, if you like deep rants. From this an irresistible urge to purge all my Needing a Tidy House demons has surfaced. So this long mouse rant, I can now reveal, was merely a prelude. An instigating event that benefits anyone in the Flap Nation who likes their Flaps in Deep Rant mode. It’s coming. Strap yourselves in and slap on your spelunking lamp and be warned: a little part of you ain’t coming back.