Not Safe For Smelling

I know smells. I even love them. Someone once asked me "what's kimchi?" and I said: You know that smell you complain about when I open my fridge, that I refuse to do anything about? That's kimchi. I did not define kimchi in substance, no. I honored it in its odor. And yes, I love it.

I also appreciate human b.o. in moderation. In fact it seems wrong to me when someone smells overpoweringly of deodorant. As a friend once put it, "it smells of desperation, doesn't it?" I'll take an armpit taqueria over a miasma of Axe any day.

However, today on my way into midtown I smelled something that made me almost churl. For the first time in my life, I pulled over on the sidewalk and held my spasmodic gut (sober, mind you) as I recovered from a stink so vicious it ought to be criminalized. I was nasally raped.

I was walking atop a subway grate when a gust blew upward carrying with it the smell of human pus, if human pus were cooked in industrial vats under infrared lights by subway hobos who hadn't ever showered before.

You know that classic shot in The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe pushing down her white dress-skirt? Well I was wearing a dress too, and pushing down the draft with my eyes half-closed in poisoned delirium, but it was not sexy. I think I contracted Gonorrhea of the nostrils. Do you capitalize Gonorrhea?

Oh btw, there's this awesome profile of the guy who invented Wii (who also designed Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong and Zelda).