"Oh my God, the smell..."
The boyfriend was driving back last night and was calling from the outskirts of town.
Yes, the smell. Of Bakersfield.
Truth be told, living here, I don't really notice it all that much anymore. I think as a defense mechanism your brain just shuts down your sense of smell if you live here because in all honesty I can't really smell anything anymore. But you don't have to be gone long before your olfactory senses return, a day or two at most. Of course, it makes re-entry into Bako all that much more trying, as the boyfriend quickly discovered last night.
"I need to take a shower" he said when he arrived, a common feeling here.
It was around 11pm and while he was rinsing off I turned on the local news.
I long ago came to accept the fact that this city is a lawless wasteland, like "Deadwood", but the news last night was particularly gruesome:
Baby killers.
Elderly woman stabbed to death.
Police shoot a teenager.
Torture.
Meth labs.
And on and on and on.
Not to mention the tragedy of the stolen Marie Osmond Collector Dolls. Oh, the humanity.
But by far, the best story of the night was the "cat burglar":
"I was just bored and decided I wanted to be a cat burglar," Slivers told 23ABC in a jailhouse interview. "So I kicked in the window and tried to steal the lion but it was too heavy, so I stole the cat."
"I took the leopard to my hotel. I then decided I wanted the dingo so I went back and took it. I took it to Jack In The Box because I wanted to have breakfast with it."
Live here long enough and that actually starts making sense.
