So I’m driving in my car¹ and I’m thinking to myself, “Hey, you know what? You haven’t really done a Thing That Rules or a Thing That Sucks in a while. Maybe you should get on that.” Easy enough in principle, but what do you do when nothing particularly shitty (or awesome) comes to mind? You can’t just pluck something that sucks (or rules) right out of the ether! You have to notice something, process it, and then actually come up with something – ideally something entertaining – to say about it. Sure, I could look out the window right now, see a tree, and be like “You know what? That tree sucks. Look at it out there, blowing around in the wind. Look at those shitty leaves. Oh, wow – they’re green. How… pedestrian.” And yeah, the tree outside my window does kind of suck, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it would make a good Thing That Sucks.

So I was sitting there in traffic, trying to cull something from the dregs of my brain that might be noteworthy. Something amazing or something truly awful. I would’ve taken anything, really, but I kept coming up blank. Nothing. Zilch. Then just at the moment when I was ready to give up, I drove over a dead skunk that was smeared all over the road. The smell came wafting in all at once, and I squinted my eyes, rolled up my window, and thought to myself “Well whatdya know? Serendipity rules.”

On a similar note, dead skunks suck.

¹ It’s been bumming me out that a good chunk of my anecdotes lately have revolved around stuff that I’ve seen while stuck rush hour traffic. Traffic is unequivocally the most boring thing in the entire world. The fact that I manage to find even marginally noteworthy things to blather about while stuck in it is either a testament to my keen powers of observation or proof that I’m living an unbelievably mundane life. I’m pretty sure I know which one it is, too. I’ll give you a hint: I often eat lunch at the Corner Bakery twice within the same week.

(edit: as karmic retribution for this post, this morning found me stuck in gridlock on a stretch of highway where a truck full of pig guts spilled its cargo on July 1. The road is still visibly greasy and the smell is still unbearable.)