If you stop by for a visit this week and think, “Ugh. What is that stench? It smells like something died in here.”

You would be right.

And, for future reference, please bookmark this page in case the question of my sanity ever arises in court. I may need defense witnesses.

You can mark this Exhibit A.

* * * * *

The first Monday back to school after the holidays means that I am highly motivated to tackle a lot of undone, or never started, What Was I Thinking? projects.

I have a list.

…In my head.

None of them get tackled. Except one. The least necessary and at best, or maybe at worst, the creepiest example of how my mind works.

In an effort to recycle and save money, it seemed like a good idea to try and create my own bird feeder suet cakes. In my freezer are baggies upon baggies of saved skin. You know, just in case.

I thought, “Why not just grind up the skins leftover from chicken and turn them into bird feeder cakes?”

I’ll tell you why. Beyond the ethics of promoting bird feeder cannibalism, I mean.

If you dump a few months worth of skin into a blender and forget to add any liquid, you will wrap that rubbery flesh around the small blades that are the propellers at the base of your blender. Your blender will make a wheezing noise and you will then belatedly add liquid and create the most repulsive slurry of pulverized bird bits plus fat imaginable. Then, as you keep pressing the “Chop” and “Ice Crush” options alternately trying to free the blockage, you smell a rank, sickening odor emerge from the depths of hell. Smoke rises from the blender base. The scent of burnt plastic mixes with the souls of the damned. This noxious stench will fill your nostrils and your house for hours! You will move the blender base to the garage–this will have no effect on how your kitchen smells.

As you spoon up the slurry and mix it with melted fat and bird seed–and try not to vomit at the sight and sensation of skin slurry sticking to your fingers–you might try to imagine a product that might be capable of what you were asking the poor Oster blender to do.

Of note: the Oster people never promised its blender could dispose of a corpse using a ‘pulverize bone’ setting. No they did not. I’m sure that is spelled out somewhere in the fine print. Meanwhile, I am wrist deep in goo and regretting my A.D.D. impulse of the day. My mind wanders…

“I wonder,” my brain says to me, “if this is how serial killers end up using lye or bleach to dissolve bodies? Or, maybe there is a blender out there that does the job…just nobody puts that on the label?”

Can you just imagine someone confessing to a bunch of homicides and then offering to provide a testimonial for Ginsu knives because of the extraordinary sharpness in handling those pesky joint ligaments? Or how about a cleaning product that does double duty–disappearing a corpse or cleaning up a crime scene…before the police get to it? Even if it does a fantastic job for the murderer–who would buy a product hawked by a killer?

There is probably a good reason market research rarely quotes serial killers’ opinions of their products. Maybe it’s blocked by trademarked copyright? Or maybe it’s that pesky rule preventing convicted criminals from profiting from their crimes? Only their lawyers know for sure.

If there is a super-powered Bone-Breaker 10,000 body crunching, wonder blender out there, the deranged killers are taking that secret to the grave…where body parts are left to feed wildlife the way nature intended.

Of note, this is the second blender I have killed doing something idiotic it wasn’t intended for. I can’t recall offhand how my previous blender met the appliance grim reaper, but I’m sure no one in their right mind expects modern appliances to double as tools of body dismemberment. It so lacks the personal touch.

…..

You Read This Far Bonus:

The A.I. Image maker wouldn’t touch the topic “Serial Killer Putting Livers Into a Blender.” Even the A.I. wouldn’t touch this subject. If you read this far, what does that say about you?