I can’t remember (read: I’m too lazy to search previous posts too look) if I previously mentioned that I go through the refrigerators at work on Monday mornings at about 4:30 AM, dauntlessly poking my nose into all sorts of barely-contained evil to keep the lunch room safe from baggies of God Knows What that my colleagues drag in from the gutter. I’m not currently sure which lunchroom behavior I find more irritating and/or perplexing- the people who insist on keeping a jar of mayonnaise or peanut putter by itself in a huge plastic bag, or the people who save things like the freakin’ parsley garnish and lemon wedge from their takeout meal, bread crusts, or three grapes in a styrofoam container. For a week. Would it have killed you fuckers to have polished these scraps off instead of leaving them to develop a fœtor in the fridge? I shudder to think what some of your kitchens look like at home.

I ran riot through the refrigerators this morning, with even more zeal than usual, since I won’t be here next Monday. Today’s notable finds were the Dalmatian-style provolone cheese and the Mystery Grab Bag of Sticky Stink that some thoughtless cad had left behind. I won’t go into the details on that last one, but let’s just say that after that experience, I’m about to finance some therapist’s third home in Aspen.

The real apex (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of this morning’s actions in the War on Rot, however, was the bag of bubbly, frothing fruit mash. This menacing sack of fermenting slime had either somehow escaped my vigilance last week, or someone had stashed it under their desk all last week to give the sugars the warm environment they needed in order to decompose more effectively. The expanding gas given off by the putrefying purée was just beginning to pull the seams of the Ziploc bag taut, though there was still some "give" to it; it hadn’t yet reached that critical point where the labile matter inside is straining at the limits of its plastic prison, a dangerous, overstuffed pillow-shaped bomb of pestiferous, alcoholic pus, an artifact from some elder, forgotten lunch, as mysterious as the statues of Easter Island, only capable of provoking a much more visceral response of disgust rather than awe. The sort of thing that makes hard men quail and send in the robots while they cower like whimpering schoolchildren behind reinforced concrete, hoping against hope that it’s all just a bad dream.

Mercifully, though, it hadn’t reached that point. It was, however, well on its way to turning into a sack of strawberry pruno, make no mistake. As tempting as it would have been to sample the wares and spend the rest of the day enjoying a psychotic episode, I pitched it into the trash. If you read a "weird news" item about a garbage truck or dumpster spontaneously detonating in the next few days, you’ll know the real reason.