Top Shelf Stories
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Top Shelf Stories
The Smell Olympics: Nothing Beats a Five-Pound Bag of Forgotten Potatoes
Top Shelf Stories with J, chris and Tony what's up everybody yo what's going on this is another episode of top shelf stories, and today I want to talk about. As some of you who listen may know, I spend every weekend at what some would call a camper, but I just call it my weekend house, um I've been there.
Speaker 1:It's a house. I'm jealous I'm jealous.
Speaker 2:It's definitely a house jealous, but uh, we've been battling flies this year what?
Speaker 1:kind of flies been battling flies this year. What kind of flies?
Speaker 2:black ones like your typical house fly they surround food and picnics.
Speaker 1:Often they have been.
Speaker 3:They don't really bite, but they're a bother. They have fucking been everywhere. Did anyone ever teach you how to flush the toilet properly?
Speaker 1:absolutely yeah that that'd be my first guess. That's where the flies might show up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, around poo yeah, so we're, we're got out of control is, uh, we went fishing and we did, we did really well and I was filleting fish outside there you go we had been battling these fucking flies all year, but when I started filleting these fish, thousands of them showed up now is this makes something that you're experiencing near and around your site, your area of sites or campground. Campground I mean my other front sites.
Speaker 1:We go on. They're fucking everywhere. You see these sticky things hanging from people's windows now and like the little sweet traps with the soda bottle upside down and stuff like that yeah, so.
Speaker 2:So I went to my local menards and I bought these little plastic bags that say fly trap on them. Oh man, and you pop the top up and you fill this bag halfway up with water and there's some little pouch that dissolves inside of it and, uh, it attracts the flies. They go in, they can't get out, you know. And it says this thing lasts for six weeks. So I put it up on a saturday afternoon, we leave sunday and there's hundreds of flies in there. Wow, and it says. It says this bag holds 20 000 flies. Wow, before it needs to be changed. And I'm like, holy shit, who counted that? It's probably a baby, yeah who's?
Speaker 1:the it's like the fly counting guy. Is the uh worm counting guy's cousin or something different? Factory right next to each other.
Speaker 2:It says it lasts six weeks, so we get back the following friday. So now you know, five days have gone by since it's been up and, uh, uh, the bag is full, full, full.
Speaker 1:20 000 flies like flies are flying in it to fly past dead flies it's bulging.
Speaker 2:It's so full of flies once you get one, once you get one person to the concert, you know everyone else comes everyone wants to go and and I go to take this bag off and go discard it in the campgrounds garbage facility and I have to shoo away hundreds of flies in a line to get into this thing.
Speaker 3:I can't imagine. I can't imagine the maggots that are around fucking smell of this thing was horrendous.
Speaker 1:It's got to be the riverbed or something I'm sure it's something I don't know like some fish, got in the river during a flood and then all died in the riverbed and just became this mush of probably.
Speaker 2:I mean, you're probably not wrong but even just schmutza from the lake, so I hung up another one. I'm like, okay, I got the bulk of them I'm gonna hang up I'm gonna hang up how many square? Miles is this campground I'm gonna hang up another one a bunch of them guys and this one's gonna last the six weeks before it gets full. Right, so the next week. This thing is so fucking full it is bulging at the seams, and is it?
Speaker 1:like a translucent bag. You can see into all these dead. You can see them all the dead gray matter towards the bottom the fucking maggots crawling up the side oh man, oh my god, it's fucking disgusting.
Speaker 2:Wow, you just keep the flies flying, so we're, we're sitting around attracting them in a stomach. We're sitting around talking about how bad this trap smells, oh, and make it worse, and it made me think of a story of the worst smell I've ever smelled in my life. What's that? And it was the only thing I've ever smelled that was worse than this fly, these fly traps, after only one week of their six week lifespan, but we're both intrigued so about eight, eight or nine years ago my wife was driving around this big, beautiful Chevy Tahoe and it was a very, very nice car and we took it everywhere.
Speaker 2:It was the family car, it was the nice car out of the two, it was the one that we always took, and my wife doesn't necessarily pick up her trash like most people would you know. She has a kid in the back all the time. He's leaving shit everywhere.
Speaker 1:It's not just your wife, if my wife does this too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's just always shit in there. There's never shit in my car. I always clean up after myself I have water bottles, but she always, you know, there's always like fucking papers receipts, fucking water bottles, you know, empty, uh, happy meal fucking you know just shit sure.
Speaker 2:So we're. We're leaving to go somewhere and her car's starting to fucking stink. I tell her I'm like, hey, you gotta clean this shit up. Something's starting to fucking smell. There's probably some fucking half-eaten cheeseburger under the kid's car seat or something. I'm like you just need to go through and clean this up.
Speaker 2:It was a mcflurry, I bet and frosty and, uh, she's like, all right, I'll, I'll, I'll get that done. A couple days later, I go back in the car with her. I'm like it's starting to fucking stink worse. Didn't she notice it? I'm like I'm like here, I'm gonna make you a deal. I'm like we are going you are going to pick up all your shit and I am going to detail this car. I'm going to shampoo the carpets, I'm going to fucking clean all your panels, I'm going to move the seats up, I'm going to take your floor mats out, I'm going to wash them, I'm going to get this thing looking spotless, but I'm not picking up your shit to do it. You're going to clean up your shit and I'm gonna fucking seems like a really good day.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna spend a whole day fucking cleaning this thing to factory new and she goes all right. So she's like I'll do that tomorrow. So another week goes by, I get in her car and then I get right, the fuck out. I take my kid out of it. I put it, I put the kid in my car and I'm like we're taking my car and she's like what's the problem? I'm like I don't understand if you're just too close to it, like you're in it, you're in this car too much. She is.
Speaker 2:You don't fucking understand what this car smells like. It is the worst fucking thing I've ever smelled in my life and she's like, she's like. No, I smell it, she's like. And I looked all over by our seats and stuff and I can't find anything that that that could possibly smell like this. Well, it's there, take the trash out. And uh, I said, did you look in the back of the?
Speaker 2:town there's something in there and she goes yeah, I looked in the back I didn't see anything. So the tahoe has a rather large cargo area, so I open it up and I'm like it's definitely back here you can do gymnastics like it is those things.
Speaker 2:It is fucking back here somewhere. So we start emptying all the shit out. You know all the fucking like bags of this, you know totes of this, all the, all the stuff that's back there, and I'm like we have to find this and I finally get to where the the back seat meets the cargo area. There's like a little drop down there and chicken nugget dude, I wish I find a fucking bag of potatoes like a five pound bag we're going up north, let's bring a bag of potatoes.
Speaker 2:How do those get lost? Well, they've been back there so long. My wife's like I don't. She's like I remember her saying it. She's like those are russets. I don't buy russets. That means your mom or my dad gave them to us and I don't remember that ever happening. You know how fucking long potatoes have to be back to to really start smelling how long were the fucking things growing out of them?
Speaker 1:in the hot, sunned car with the air conditioner back on the hot sun car with the air conditioner back down. I mean that can. I mean that can accelerate the degradation of organic material. But yeah, potatoes take quite a while to stink real bad. They do get soft and nasty. I've definitely left them and like smelted in a kitchen and had to go through the coverage and you're like, oh, there it is, that's the tater, it's like greeny mashed out.
Speaker 3:I never had a potato smell.
Speaker 2:Bro, leave one in the sun, like in an inconspicuous really bot and you'll smell it soon, guaranteed I mean it's it's definitely weeks before it gets bad, but I would imagine this this was over the course of two months, and so the bag obviously fell back there, like in this little like cubby area. So now I had to get it out and I I go to pick it up, and what do you use for that?
Speaker 2:I picked it up with my hand from the little twisted up part in front and then I I cupped underneath it to grab it, and they were put on dishwashing gloves or something oh and uh, fucking potatoes were all liquid and and I, I swear to god, I fucking cleaned that thing for two straight days and could not get the fucking smell what did you do with the sack of potatoes? I chucked them in my life and I mean Really potatoes. Potatoes is the worst smell the worst even out of shit, out of fucking shit. So I got I've got deer before.
Speaker 3:That doesn't smell bad, unless it was brown, smells very bad. Does it? It does? Oh, because you cut into their fucking stomach and yeah, and everything, everything I thought you're supposed to avoid that and not pierce that there was off the meat.
Speaker 2:There was a time when I so one time my garage spelt smelt really, really fucking rancid and I was out really really fucking rancid and I was positive.
Speaker 2:A family of raccoons died in the wall, yeah, and it got to the point where my dog wouldn't go into the garage anymore. It fucking stunk and I'm like that's it. I emptied every single thing out of my garage and I'm like I have to find where this is coming from. So I put all the shit outside and now I'm going to walk around and try finding, like pinpointing where this is, and I'm ripping the fucking wall down. It was that bad. And when I'm taking everything out, I picked up a little tailgating grill and I was like this is the smell. So I opened it up and it's filled with meat. So this, this was in like july. Did you take it home from a brewers game?
Speaker 2:so just sit what happened is is my brother and I took this grill hunting back in november and he filled it up full of the meat because it was cold enough where it was going to stay refrigerated and we were going to cook all our meals on that grill. And then it didn't work out. We ended up going to restaurants and we never used any of the meat and I forgot it was in there. And when we got back from hunting I threw it in the garage and then it started, you know, thawing out march, and then april, it started its decomposition and then, and then May, it started fucking stinking a little.
Speaker 3:Burgers and brats and steaks and eggs, rice Bacon.
Speaker 2:And then come the end of June, it was fucking unbearably bad.
Speaker 3:There's no way potatoes smell worse than that.
Speaker 2:And these potatoes, I assure you there's something in them then Smelt worse, worse than that. And these potatoes, I assure, you.
Speaker 3:There's something in them, then Smelt. Worse, what kind of fucking potatoes you buy?
Speaker 1:I think potatoes would be pretty bad Dude no way.
Speaker 2:I gotta know what happened to the flies, though. Do you oh nothing. I'm still catching them this Friday I'll go take the trap down. I'm putting out a new trap every week.
Speaker 1:Why Catching 20,000 at a time? The campground should be doing this shit and hanging them like lanterns on every corner.
Speaker 2:But you know what, since I started putting them out, the flies don't come by us for any reason. They're not by our food anymore, because they just want this other thing. They just want whatever the fuck is decomposing in this trap.
Speaker 3:Okay, I mean, that's something so you're basically attracting every fucking fly in the whole campground in four miles. So you are not doing any good thing but helping your neighbors.
Speaker 1:Every animal getting hit on the highway within 20 miles is still whole Sitting on the side because there's no flies.
Speaker 3:What's that smell? What's that smell? I smell something.
Speaker 2:We're actually noticing changes in the ecosystem.
Speaker 3:That's disgusting. That's absolutely disgusting. What do you do with the bag after it fills up? Do I go throw it, burn it?
Speaker 2:No, I go throw it in the campgrounds garbage facility and let that be a treat for everybody else more flies in your old campground bro, I'm taking you, I'm bringing them from everywhere.
Speaker 1:You need one of these things. That's like a kid's swimming pool with a hot air balloon-sized bag to fill them up.
Speaker 3:They need to hold 25 billion flies. It still wouldn't be enough, probably.
Speaker 2:Every week I'm catching over 20,000 flies.
Speaker 1:That's insanity.
Speaker 2:These things are bursting at the seams, Dude that is insanity. And they're literally trying to pile in into the trap. Stop, and there's no room for them to get in. Just stop, because the last one that got in was the last one that could fit in and they all got to sit on the top of the trap and wait for the ones at the bottom to decompose to make more room for them.
Speaker 3:So when you take the trap down to tie it up to it away do they? Swarm around you like a fucking focus.
Speaker 2:I am the fly king.
Speaker 3:I do whatever I can to not spill that oh my gosh tony's coming out of his campground or out of his fucking place with the fucking torch or fucking flamethrower? You should get fucking flamethrower. You should get a flamethrower.
Speaker 2:Bro, there's no way. There's no way I would consider doing anything to that trap.
Speaker 3:No, I'm talking about the ones that fly out and try to kill you. Smell, intensify, that's crazy and the smoke from your campfire doesn't deter them at all. Not enough.
Speaker 1:I cannot remember something that stands out that pugnantly in my brain. No, I mean. No, I mean I have had the. You know, a mouse or a coon or something must have died, and for like two weeks it smells like death and then it goes away. I've had like basement fridge shit and basement freezer shit that you know like it dies and you didn't know it for four days and there's shit in there, whatever I've had that happen a bunch um I cleaned out my parents recyclable bin for this party this weekend that we're having that that's pretty gross yeah.
Speaker 3:And there was some dog poop in there and it was fucking hairy Not hairy from the dog's ass, hairy from fucking.
Speaker 1:Decomposition. Yes, yeah, cleaning out. The trash bin is up there and I couldn't breathe for six minutes.
Speaker 3:God, you're such a pussy.
Speaker 1:I wanted to die, but yeah, the smell of old dog shit, my dad's like shut the fuck up it poured in the bag. The smell of throw up gets me pretty bad. I can't really do throw up. That doesn't bother me, shit bothers me Someone.
Speaker 3:Human shit, yeah, especially woman shit. For some reason it smells worse than man.
Speaker 1:I literally can't take the smell of your shit.
Speaker 2:It's terrible yeah dude, I, uh, I couldn't figure out why the the circuit popped for my freezer in my garage. Oh, you lost all your meat. I did I.
Speaker 1:I've lost it three times so that's why it's like why in the last like six years jesus, you need a backup system. Don't you have a home, whole home, generator?
Speaker 2:bro, it's. It's never that. It's always something stupid.
Speaker 1:Well, this time we lost everything oh, the device itself fails on you yeah, well it.
Speaker 2:It fucking stunk real bad and we opened up the freezer and we're like, oh shit, the freezer's off, everything's fucking mush in here oh my god, I would have died and uh, I'm like, okay, well, I guess I gotta clean it out. So I clean it out, I bleach the thing, get everything already back up. It won't start back up, it won't turn back on. I'm like what the fuck is?
Speaker 3:going on with throw it away. Throw it away with the fucking rotten meat. Yeah, I know, jay, buy a new one tape it to the back of jay, it is done. I don't care if you just bought it, it's done.
Speaker 2:Thousands of dollars, yes, it's done but uh, I'm trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with this thing and I I kind of dismiss it for a day. I don't really fuck with it. The next day the fridge is all bleached out, it doesn't matter did it help with the smell? Yeah, but then it started getting stinkier and it started really fucking stinking and I don't have nothing in it. Yeah, it's been bleached out. It's I'm like what?
Speaker 1:the fuck is this.
Speaker 2:It's just like. So I'm like obviously something's fucked up with the outlet. We have a side by side, like they're like sub-zero refrigerator and freezer next to each other, so they're like big commercial units and, uh, the the refrigerator and the freezer are plugged into the same outlet and I'm like, well, why is one working and one not? What the fuck is going on with this? So I pull the freezer out to figure out what happened. You know like, did the cord get fucked up or what's the deal? Did it short out? I pull it out and in the little cubby there's like access to get to the motor. It's like just like a little cut out in the sheet metal. In the back there was a full fucking adult raccoon that had chewed through the power cord. Was he dead, electrocuted himself? He was dead there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, wow. So that one, so not all, so you clean the smell out, but the raccoon smell was the smell that continued so so I ran to god damn I ran to ace hardware because, like I'm a fucking man dude, I'll try I'll touch, I'll touch anything like things don't really creep me out so you grab that raccoon, that raccoon body with your bare hands fucking raccoon.
Speaker 2:That thing freaked me out a little bit so I ran to ace hardware and got a grabber stick one of the old people and I fucking pulled him out by his fucking jaw and pulled him out and I threw him in my neighbor's bushes also nice I grow good tomatoes in them, bushes yeah, oh my god, disgusting I just I just threw that one in the woods behind my house do you think I'm like?
Speaker 3:do you think like it attracted?
Speaker 2:yeah, the coyote came and ate that fucking thing.
Speaker 1:Speaking of coons, they were in our campsite we were camping last weekend over fourth of july. It was late at night. It's just sitting around a fire, but far enough away from the fire, that fucking thing. Speaking of coons, they were in our campsite. We were camping last weekend over 4th of July. It was late at night and it's just sitting around a fire, but far enough away from the fire. It's not giving you any heat, but just enough kind of light. So we were like in the shadow areas and this coon comes walking by and it looks like it's carrying another, like baby coon in its mouth and we flash a light on it. It's coon in its mouth and we flash a light on it. It's just three of us at the time, or maybe even just two of us left flash a light on it and it scurries off, but I'm like it left its baby there in the puddle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dude, it's baby, it left it yeah, don't you ever ride in airplanes where it tells you save yourself first.
Speaker 1:It was a mask it wasn't baby, it was a full loaf of bread. It was carrying its bone that it had found somewhere inside of the campground that it was scurrying past us with. But the side of it was like country hearth or something and it looked like two eyes to me in the reflection of my drunken eyes. Yeah, the Coons are wild, man, they'll get into anything.
Speaker 2:You know, we smoked a bunch of chickens and we put all the bones in the garbage and it was like 5 pm and we left for a little bit and came back and the raccoons had knocked over the garbage and took all the fucking bones. Yeah, they're nuts, dude, and this was just fucking dirty Half of the day.
Speaker 2:It wasn't even nighttime yet, what the marrow. So we took that, we picked up all the shit that they didn't take and took the garbage up to the dumpster, put it by the fly trap I put in there a couple hours earlier and come back to the campsite and there's a fucking 25-pound raccoon.
Speaker 1:Just sitting there waiting, just sitting there waiting, Thinking food's going to come again because there was food before Broad daylight and he's just staring at us.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah the daylight ones are the ones that have the rabies did you pull out your uh strap? No, dude I I fucking.
Speaker 2:The little neighbor girl was on the golf cart, it was all. There's like eight of us and we're all standing there and, uh, the fucking, just like I think she's like 11 she's standing there. She's like what are we gonna do about this raccoon? And she picked up her her water to take a drink and I grabbed the water out of her hand and I fucking whipped it at the raccoon and fucking hit it in the face. It ran away yeah yeah, why'd you just?
Speaker 2:run it over with your fucking uh dude, it was over by, like my well, you don't remember what my campsite looks like, but it was over by like my grills and stuff like I can't just drive over, it couldn't get this uh my gun was all the way in my car this guy, that would you have shot it, though, if you had the gun.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this guy we go camping with.
Speaker 1:He normally has in his camping gear a pellet pistol to shoot them.
Speaker 3:Can you shoot like would you get in trouble? Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:I would immediately get ejected from the park indefinitely.
Speaker 3:Oh, so then you wouldn't be fucking shooting that thing, then I would contemplate it. You wouldn't do it, I don't think you would do it. I would go on the defense of being that places your fucking second life I would be using the defense of.
Speaker 2:I was fearing for my life.
Speaker 3:Daytime raccoons means definite rabies. So you're saying you're going to give it the it charged me.
Speaker 2:It's coming right for me.
Speaker 1:He's saving the park, just like he is with the flies.
Speaker 3:I had little children in my car.
Speaker 1:I had to defend myself Speaking of flies, why aren't you putting like five of these things on your site?
Speaker 2:when you're not there, oh man 100,000 flies 0.1 million flies.
Speaker 3:Chris, every fucking fly would come there.
Speaker 1:He would be the fly king. Yeah, so I'm thinking there's no point of putting them up when you're not there well, I can't take them down we're talking about.
Speaker 3:Oh, once you set it up, yeah why would I take it?
Speaker 1:down so you don't have a fucking shit bag full of them to take away. No dude, it's become fun I was just gonna say you're having fun with this yeah, friday's, up for the flies. I pour myself a bourbon and handle the fly, you're gonna have like a, a fly tub where you cut it down into the tub instead of a bag to carry to the trash I gotta find out what the concoction is.
Speaker 2:Just make your own draws in miles worth of flies every week.
Speaker 3:So you got this. You got the smell of potatoes, the smell of rotten meat and now you have the smell of fucking a weekend full of flies, or a whole week, because you don't go there every week, right? I mean, you go there weekends, but you don't go there during the week. No, so there's a whole week of rotten flies, just fucking barricading themselves.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, just boiling in the sun.
Speaker 3:Yes, my God. How does that?
Speaker 2:not kill you, Dude. It's the best. I love it. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I'm going to tell you what.
Speaker 2:Between the smell of the flies, you know the rotten meat, the dead raccoon, the fucking brats and burgers in the grill for seven months, know all that shit. It just it is what it is. But the the fucking smell of the potatoes, it's etched into my brain. I can't believe, like I can close my eyes I can close my eyes and and almost taste the smell let me think about this for a second.
Speaker 3:What is in a potato starch? I know so, but like what makes it so rotten.
Speaker 1:That would smell worse than meat think about potatoes are so rotten they grow themselves out of themselves. I I get that.
Speaker 3:That's why I thought like how big were the fucking stems growing out of it. But you said it was just liquid it was just mush, but why does it smell worse than meat? I don't know. I don't understand that. It makes no fucking sense.
Speaker 2:Let's think back to the old meat.
Speaker 1:I think it's a combination of the heat, the bag being in a bag. It was a sealed bag, but it should have had holes if they're all liquid.
Speaker 2:They got holes in them, so kids don't suffer. So when?
Speaker 3:you picked that fucking liquid shit up. They dripped out of the holes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when you picked that fucking liquid shit up, they dripped out of the holes. Yeah, oh, my God, the potatoes actually oozed between my fingers.
Speaker 3:Oh, my God.
Speaker 2:Did you do it with bare hands? Yeah, I didn't think it was going to be an issue like that, fucking Christ.
Speaker 3:You had to be dripping it in the car.
Speaker 2:Yeah, two days of cleaning that car oh gross. We ended up having to start it on fire. That's so bad, we drove it into the lake, next to the fucking, so the only the only good nicholas cage movie ever made face off was a movie called lord of war.
Speaker 3:Oh, that was a great movie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like it, I did and if you remember he smuggled all his weapons and put in shipping containers that the door half was filled with rotten potatoes because he even said in there that they smell so bad. Customs will not dare check that fucking container.
Speaker 3:I don't remember that. Yeah, that's a good movie, though Anyone want to see a good movie Lord of War or something Lord of War?
Speaker 2:Isn't that a true story too? Yes, it was. Nicolas Cage supplied guns to both sides in real life.
Speaker 1:Nicolas Cage is such a badass.
Speaker 3:I don't like him. I don't really like him either, either, but that was a good movie.
Speaker 2:All right, cue the music. That's another one. Tell us on the internet about a smell you've smelled.
Speaker 1:Yeah, reach out to us, send us a text, send me a dm can you?
Speaker 2:can you smell of the time you found rotten potatoes?
Speaker 1:We are hiring at Top Shelf Stories. The pay is zero, but we will say your name on every podcast.
Speaker 2:We need a new tech guy.
Speaker 1:We need somebody to do advertising for us.
Speaker 3:And we'll give you a free t-shirt we got t-shirts A free stick Every time we do the podcast, we get dinner.
Speaker 1:I'll buy dinner every time, or Tony will buy it one of the two of us. It's like we do. It's just be ordered an extra five or six wings. That's all you need.
Speaker 3:That's all you need. That's all you need, because I don't eat, never, never, will Never have. Thank you and good night.
