The Cigarette Turtle (No-Mystery Hangout)

No mystery again this week. Just Shane, Josh, and Kim around the table, and a conversation that gets away fromall three of them inside of ten minutes.

It starts with a word. Shane had lunch with a friend who mentioned that growing up she was not allowed to say the F word or, of all things, crevice. Crevice. That sets off an hour of collateral damage, plus a real conversation about the words that were banned in their own houses. Sucks. Shut up. Hell. Anything that even rhymed with a cuss word. Josh confesses to crawling under the bunk beds to practice swearing where Jesus was the only witness, and Shane remembers the one night in the back of Grandma's Buick when he was handed actual permission to repeat every word their aunt had said, and used it.

Which is the on-ramp to a full Grandma episode. Her purse was stocked like a pharmacy, which is how Shane once got handed two blood pressure pills in the middle of a sermon instead of Tylenol. When he asked if he was going to be okay, she said, "We'll find out." She kept the good candy bars in her panty drawer, right next to a cow taser. And years after she quit smoking, their uncle found a pile of cigarette butts in the grass under her bedroom window, told her a stranger must have been standing out there watching her sleep, and got to watch her stare at the ceiling and say, "Huh. That's weird." The rest of the evidence turned up much later, inside a heavy stone turtle that came apart in his hands. Zoinks.

Shane also finally tells the Eagles Theater story. He accepted a calendar invite with no description, showed up for what he assumed was a normal evening downtown, and looked up to see his own name on the screen between two doctorates. Two hundred people. Doors closing. A panel on community food needs that nobody had mentioned he was speaking on. What he said up there came out of nowhere and turned out to be the most honest thing in the episode: go to the people who are barely making it, because they are the ones who know what next week feels like. That opens into food bank boxes full of things they could not cook with the gas shut off, and a carton of peanut butter milk nobody in this family has recovered from.

Everything else lands where it lands. Josh's tarantula molted and then earned its keep by clearing a man out of his living room. The hissing cockroach Shane's college roommate kept spent a weekend in the freezer and survived it. Death cap mushrooms after the floods. Stop signs in this state you cannot see around until you are already in the intersection. A nine person salt water hot tub that dropped six thousand dollars because somebody drilled one light two inches too low. Josh talking honestly about labels and where he actually lands on them. And Kim stating for the record, more than once, that she is never calling Shane Dr. Waters.

The postcard wall has room on it. PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992.

Pull up a chair in the bunker. The only thing getting unmasked this week is Grandma.

What you'll hear in this episode:

The words they were not allowed to say as kids, and the one night in Grandma's Buick when Shane got permission to say all of them

Grandma's purse pharmacy, the good candy bars stored next to a cow taser, and the hollow stone turtle where the cigarette butts went

The Eagles Theater panel Shane got ambushed onto, and the food bank answer he came up with on the spot

A tarantula that molted and then cleared a man out of Josh's living room, plus the hissing cockroach that survived a weekend in a freezer

A nine person salt water hot tub discounted six thousand dollars over one crooked light

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