Outbreak!

Get me Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Kevin Spacey. Cuba Gooding Jr, you stay home.

What started as a mild annoyance has suddenly turned into a public health emergency. Just like the aforementioned cast of the movie “Outbreak,” we have a wildlife problem at the Daddy Files palace. Like the Outbreak simian, we also have a problem monkey. But instead of a monkey infected with the Motaba virus, we have something worse. Much worse.

Will’s favorite thing in the whole wide world is his monkey. It’s like half stuffed animal, half little blanket in the shape of a monkey and the underneath is lined with red satin-like material. He’s had it since he was just a few months old and he can’t do anything without it.

Unfortunately, when a kid latches onto an item that hard it means it goes everywhere with him.

Monkey has been left outside, accidentally dropped in the trash, stepped on, puked on, peed on and shit on. But Will comforts himself by constantly chewing on it (after we wash the piss and shit off it obviously), and somehow the collective amount of drool and spit from his constant chomping manages to smell even worse than everything else combined. And yes, we do wash it. Oh do we wash monkey. Sometimes we wash him three times a week, but though the stench disippates for a few hours it always seems to come right back. And usually 100 times worse.

I knew it was getting bad, but until yesterday I had no idea how malodorous our monkey problem had become.

When I picked Will up at daycare I unzipped his bag and nearly passed out from the smell. It was like Monkey had been drenched in week-old sour milk, soaked in vomit and shoved up a skunk’s ass for a week. I wanted to put him directly into the washing machine when we got home, but Will wouldn’t give him up. Then Will wanted to watch The Lion King in our room, so we mercifully left Monkey on the couch.

When we came back in the living room, it was utter chaos.

As you can clearly see, the carnage is surreal. Apparently the Monkey’s stench has grown so strong he has started to harness his powers to snuff out all of Will’s other toys. The T-Rex chose extinction over dealing with the smell, Buzz Lightyear was sent to infinity and beyond, and as you can plainly see the chicken cut off his own face just so he wouldn’t have anymore olfactory senses.

Then I looked on the other couch and saw this:

Christmas Bear could stand it no longer, and decided to shuffle off this mortal coil rather than take one more tainted whiff of Monkey’s wretched stench.

It was a sad, sad day for childhood toys.

We’re considering placing a call to the US government to isolate and eventually bomb the entire town of Bourne so that Monkey’s awfulness doesn’t infect other parts of the country. Either that or we’ll wash him again and continuously douse Monkey with Febreze.

Stay safe out there.