A lesson in word padding

Word count: 5545
Health: poor. This has turned into a full-blown cold. Yippie yay!

A list of things is a Nano writer's best friend. Two years ago, I listed out, in one page, 52 random objects that one of my characters was dreaming about. Look for it again soon....

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Good old Sal. He's always ready to help out his fellow man. I feel inside my jacket to find that I actually do have my wallet. Opening it reveals several $100 bills and the other usual items (driver's license, four credit cards, fortune cookie fortunes, Scrabble tiles of my favorite letters -- R, S, T, L, N, E, free delivery coupons from my favorite restaurants, three receipts from three different ATMs, preferred customer cards from six different grocery stores, two different shoe stores, five different gas stations and a laundromat, three different video store membership cards, free sandwich punch cards for several different delis and Vienna Beef joints, another driver's license, a photo of my lovely wife, a photo of my lovely cat and a photo of a not-so-lovely corpse.)

Let's just back up here a second and take a look at that last photo, right? I'd love to play it off and say, "Hey hey, that's right. I'm a detective and I carry around a picture of a corpse in my wallet. For...uh...you know, good luck." But I don't. I don't like corpses. I mean I really, really, really don't like corpses. I've turned green, puked, fainted or done some other things of which I will spare you the details around just about every corpse I've come near. There is no way I would keep a picture of a corpse as a souvenir and I would do almost anything to avoid taking a picture of a corpse for any reason, business related or not. You've seen those cops on television who can have these light and witty conversations while standing over a dead body. One guy's saying crap like, "Well, he just went out for a haircut." And the other guy pulls the sheet off the body and you see he's been decapitated and he says, "Looks like they took a little too much off the top." And they both laugh. Or the first guy says, "Come on, Louie, let's find the bastard who did this." Or some shit like that. Maybe there are cops like that out there, and maybe it's just their way of avoiding the really seriously disgusting and disturbing fact that the bag of blood and meat they're looking at once was a living, breathing individual. Not every death is a huge loss, mind you, but every death is, at the very least, a death.