Gym ablutions

From the left: my gym bag, my Dopp kit, my toothbrush holder, my toothbrush.

Not pictured: the back seat of my car, which is the outer shell of the Russian nesting dolls that are the essential elements of my post-workout ablutions.

(Russian nesting dolls. That's sure a random metaphor. I wonder how in the dickens something like that popped into my head.)

Anyway, my point is nobody ever touches or needs to touch -- or even really has access to -- this stuff. Not my parents. Not my sister. Not our neighbors. Not our cat.

And let's be serious here: Everyone knows a cat can't drive a stick shift. She has no opposable thumb strength to pull the stick into reverse -- which is hard for me even when I'm not holding a Diet Coke and texting -- and her clutch foot is always in the air in case she needs to lick her butt. So she has no readily available access to the inside of my car, which she's terrified of anyway because the inside of my car to her is the sole gateway to the fiery pits of hell at the V. E. T.

Which begins me to the root of this very unsettling mystery I'm about to gross you out with: In the last few days, my toothbrush and my toothbrush holder -- the very ones pictured here, which have been Russian-nesting-dolled (there's that out-of-nowhere metaphor again) in the back seat of my car since time immemorial (which, come to think of it, might have something to do with the problem) -- have started to smell the same way my formerly favorite shoes did when Bitch Kitty (allegedly, which I say here solely to preclude any tedious defamation lawsuits) peed in them. Which is a feat even Houdini couldn't accomplish, and he had opposable thumbs. And plenty of motive now that I've implied he may have tried to or possibly did pee on my fully nested toothbrush.

Let me take a very important moment here to be uncompromisingly clear about something: I noticed this pee smell well before my defiled toothbrush came anywhere near my toothpaste or my mouth. My only regretful act was putting it (in my similarly defiled toothbrush holder) back in my Dopp kit with the errant belief that these actions would remind me to buy new oral-hygiene implements to replace them. Which took me three unfortunate attempts at brushing my teeth to accomplish. And thank goodness I have a lot of sugar-free mints at work. Which is an unsettling confession for an entirely different post.

Anyway! The toothbrush and toothbrush holder have now been discarded and replaced, the Dopp kit (which still just smelled like soap and trepidation) has been scrubbed, the cat is on lockdown, but the mystery of the peefiled toothbrush remains unsolved to this day.

And that, my friends, is why you should use toothpaste with whitening powers. Just in case.