THIS IS JUST WRONG

Coffee narratives the last few days have been kind of overwhelmingly icky, even for us.

I was fully expecting a small share of animal mishap/scatology/gross injury/whatever narratives from our Fat Cat Republican Banker, newly returned from several weeks' chasing his children's 4-H beasties around the county and then the state fairs...

But we've had hardly a word about those.

Instead, the FCRB has been regaling us with something truly nasty.

Saratoga has long been host to a particularly colorful husband and wife (?) team of "predator control" specialists, who have moonlighted as everything from motel managers to ministerial moochers, and have left truly bizarre and rather disgusting souvenirs of their tenures at each all over their wake. Thus when they ran a small local motel, one room was used, apparently, for butchering coyotes and left appropriately furry, bloody, smelly, etc. for enough time to where I believe their former employer won some sort of judgment against them after he finally dismissed them from his service.

To make a long story short, the FCRB is deeply, up to his elbows and eyeballs and poor, assaulted nostrils, involved in repossession proceedings against them, and is currently sorting through the contents of their rental storage shed, which happens to be owned by yet another of our coffee crew, the Lord Macklebrains (who is still at a loss as to how he's going to clean/disinfect/destroy the facility after FCRB has emptied it).

(Of course, slightly mollifying the LM: the shed is so completely crammed that the FCRB has found it necessary to rent an additional shed in which to sort through it all. Money helps, money helps...)

But that ain't the problem.

The FCRB is a tall and rather dapper man (when he can be talked out of wearing certain excreble, elementary school teacher-caliber ties, anyway), urbane in a redneck-y sort of way, takes a joke well, can laugh at himself... in other words, pretty much the last guy on whom I would ever wish the following:

The material with which the shed is crammed is, with the exception of a large and possibly valuable collection of like new animal traps, entirely of a highly perishable and/or flavorfully biological nature. A few furs, yes, but mostly claws, guts, buckets of bait, sealed containers of rancid coyote urine.

He and his young colleague (whom he hired to replace the individual who originally approved extending credit to the PCP [predator control pair]) have been sorting through this for at least the last few days, doggedly determined to fetch what prices they can for this in the hopes of recouping at least something for the bank – gagging and retching and googling (in the pre-internet sense) all the way.

And from the sound of it they're a long way from being finished.

And yes, they're pretty grossed out.

And yes, they feel better if they share.

I suspect I can file this, too, under things that don't happen in Chicago...