Existential Odor

(6)

Recent science in this regard suggests that you lose the sense of smell first. If that is the case then both Kootch and I are not suspect. Kootch complains that my clothes smell bad, and that even I smell bad. She might be right. But I am unable to corroborate her findings: I have sniffed my underarms daily since her startling charge and I find their smells very interesting, in fact very pleasing: I love the smell of my underarms! I hate to admit this of course, but I am a journalist: I have to tell the truth.

Furthermore I have smelled my shirts and found them interesting, not objectionable. But I recently allowed Kootch to wash my shirts, and when she returned them to me I smelled them again and found them, 'antiseptic.' I told Kootch that 'this must have been the way Jenny reacted to the time you washed her 'nigh-nigh.' She laughed.

Poor Jenny! She dragged that dirty blanket around for years, sucking her thumb like the cartoon character in (?). Jenny must have inherited my genes. (I remember my girl friend in Charleston (Anne Bellinger) telling me that she liked my smell, and also that she thought I had 'beautiful hands.' She was correct in both cases, of course, but at the time I thought she was joshing me. Just in case she was giving me a hint I began to use an underarm deodorant.))

Kootch must have remembered Jenny's unreasonable attraction to a soiled blanket which she carried around for years, her 'security blanket.' Kootch eventually washed the fragrant thing and Jenny was outraged! Jenny immediately threw it into the dirty clothes hamper and would not retreive it for days. Even when she got it out of there and smelled it she was not pleased. Since our last discussion of smells Kootch has not bothered me in this regard.

I see Kootch's obsession with 'smelly correctness' as Japanese psychology gone awry. This 'psychology' is evident in Modern American Culture too, of course, and represents a cultural aberration driven by modern chemistry. I am waiting for the day - and I have not much doubt this day will come - when there will be a pill available which will make all our farts smell nice.