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decomposing sewage smell unique
Saturday, June 19 2004
I called Mr. Meat Locker before I went over to the Eagle's Nest house today because he had wanted to see how little $285,000 will buy you in today's Hurley real estate market, at least if you're misinformed or delusional. The place was so weird and funky that Mr. Meat Locker had to run home and grab his camera. Unlike most witty, interesting people, photography is how he expresses himself artistically.
Mr. Meat Locker was particularly drawn to an upstairs room whose low "cathedral ceiling" featured only a two-foot-wide band of floorspace having headroom sufficient for standing. The entrance to this room is a weird sloping portal ringed with dark brown wood trim, a portal that resembles a tilting coffin. For this reason Larry (the house's new owner) refers to it as "the coffin room."
At one point Mr. Meat Locker decided to explore the tiny basement (one of several isolated basements) that underlies the house's single bathroom. It's a horror of unmitigated funk. Afterwards the whole house had a sickeningly-sweet fragrance, a bizarre version of the decomposing sewage smell unique to this house. Mr. Eagle's Nest and I also made a tour of the back sheds on the property and discovered a couple of rooms I'd previously overlooked. Several looked like those rape rooms that George W. Bush used to talk about.
Meanwhile the two young women who have been painting various outbuildings showed up and began powerwashing the outside of the house. The powerful laserlike beam of water etched permanent scrawling lines across the punky clapboards and inspired the women to write actual words, the most impressive of which was embossed in the surface of the side road that defines the uphill boundary of the property.
Gretchen had been off doing lots of Catskill Animal Sanctuary related work, but in the evening she headed down to Stone Ridge to attend the annual silent auction held to benefit Project Cat (a shelter for homeless, abused, and indigent felines). I was supposed to have gone too, but I'd lost track of time on Eagle's Nest Road, an easy thing to do when the days are as long as they are at this time of year. I ended up riding to Stone Ridge with Mr. Eagle's Nest, who I had invited to come with me there as well.
By the time I'd arrived at the Stone Ridge Community Center, Gretchen had already blown nearly $500. She rationalized her excess by saying she'd bid on stuff that we would have had to buy anyway, which was largely true.
Unfortunately, Gretchen didn't managed to win any of the items she'd bid on in the raffle. We suspected this had something to do with a lack of randomness in the way the winning tickets were picked - they were pulled out of bags by children who seemed to be taking them off the top, a behavior that tended to favor people who had entered the raffle late, in other words not Gretchen.
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