Dennis "The Drip" Detreich was a man who had a seriously awry nasal condition. No sooner had he arisen from the tossing and turning of his night's sleep than he was grabbing for a tissue. The morning of nose blowing had commenced. Detreich kept waste cans strewn about his apartment like decorative bric-a-brac and by morning's end half of them were at least half full. His sinuses were in a constant state of pre- as well as post-nasal drip.

Blowing his nose was, for Detreich, the all-consuming constant in his miserable life. He always wore a shirt with two pockets and, in each pocket, carried one of those pocket-sized tissue dispensers. He carried a cloth handkerchief in a rear pants pocket. He crinkled when he walked because, in both of his front pants pockets, he stuffed plastic baggies into which he crammed used tissues in case there was otherwise no trash can available. If Detreich ever stumbled and fell over, he had enough padding to prevent serious injury unless he hit his head which, sodden with snot as it was, probably could have absorbed the impact without much effect.

Although he had once been an accountant in the finance department of a well-known chain of clothing stores, his ability to attend to such minutiae as that work necessitated had ebbed away as the floodgates of his nasal passages had opened up. He then took a job at the drive-up window of a Big Bite Hamburger Heaven but his constant nose-blowing caused him to mess up orders and lose track of such detail as whether it was two Big Bites and one fries, or vice versa.

Of late, Detreich labored each day at the local Dollar Store, where he stocked shelves and purchased his tissue at an employee's twenty percent discount. He had worked there for nine and a half years but he was not destined to vest at ten. Last Thursday, one of those particularly humid days when the moisture in the air seemed to permeate everything, not the least the reddened pores of Detreich's bulbous and throbbing nose, he was found unconscious in the Dollar Store stockroom, tissue gripped like a failed lifeline in his right hand, a viscous discharge surrounding the place on the cold floor against which his pallid face was pressed.

An ambulance was called but Detreich was DOA at the hospital. Because of the unusual nature of his demise, an autopsy was performed. The coroner listed on the death certificate the cause of death in the typically impersonal fashion of the profession: Subject blew his brains out.

[Previously posted 8-7-07 at you-know-where.]

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