true customer tales: Laughing Boy/DMSO Guy

There's a new oddball regular who's schtick is drifting in then sitting by the sale cart leafing through books he finds irresistibly amusing, judging by his mix-tape of muted chuckling, grimacing knuckle-biting & wheezing attempts to stifle outright guffaws.  He has yet to purchase anything, but seems relatively harmless- aside from his ceaseless inappropriate laughter he keeps to himself.

Until today, when he broke his silence to give me some very important health advice.

I've spent the week harboring a ferocious cold, which threw open the doors to a rowdy gaggle of allergies and transformed me into a hacking, streaming mess.  Emerging from one of my periodic coughing fits I looked up to find Laughing Boy tearing a page from his tiny spiral notebook and proffering it to me.  While recent efforts to be more open, accepting and understanding with societies troubled underclass have been largely successful, I'm not yet enlightened enough to voluntarily accept a page of crazytimes nutscribble from a questionable source.

"Can I help you?" I asked, leaning back in my chair.

He laid his paper on the counter and pushed it toward me while giving me his pitch.

"I had a chronic cough I couldn't get rid of, and the only thing that got rid of it was inhaling DMSO through a mister bottle and a wide mouth jug.  It, uh.....it moisturizes your lungs so they can recover?  There's a book I wrote down the title of, you should read it..."

He rattled on in a similar vein for a while until I was able to wedge my thanks in and stem the flow with protestations of pressing work.

Here's the note, which I left untouched on the counter until his departure was witnessed & notarized: