Ode of Alienation

It's the little things that send you into despair.

Never buy the knock off brand of Oil Of Olay. It will only smell like the cheap 99 cent suntan lotion that your mother used to buy from the 99 cent store.

She'd lather the stuff on you and your brother in globs. But as soon as you jumped in the ocean the cheap paste would rinse off and leave you both with giant blisters on your shoulders that the free clinic doctor would need to pop with needled syringes.

The nursing staff would remember how many times this had happened before and mother would try and play it off. But you always caught the concerned stares of the experienced nurses out of the corner of your eyes, and somehow those stares were worse statements of mother's incompetence than the painful burns that distorted your gait out of the clinic.