The Drain

Well, it’s been a slow week in Lake Wobegon. I mean Quito. So this week is picture week. We’re gonna post a new picture every day. How about that?

Below, you will find a picture of the drain in our living room (?). It is covered by a paper towel folded in fourths. It is always covered. If someone accidentally kicks the paper towel off the drain, we usually smell it before we see it. It used to smell bad. In the first months, before we knew what was happening, we mistakenly thought that bathroom odors were somehow drifting down the stairs. We frequently accused each other of “ripping one.”

Now, however, the smell that is occasionally allowed to escape from the fiendish hole is not simply bathroom stench. It is raw sewage meets pickled vomit meets toxic swamp. It is like a dead frog that you find underneath a wet, moldy towel that you left in a plastic bag out in your back yard. It is like a tipped port-a-john at a rowing regatta where at least three teams had gotten food poisoning at Chuck-E-Cheese’s the night before. Indeed, it is a porthole to hell itself.

If only we could blog smells.

the porthole to hell