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tim!: The Smell of Things Today
2001
I think it's safe to say that the sense of smell is my favorite sense of the five. People who know me can attest to this. And it doesn't matter if it is good or bad, smell wise, I seem to like it just the same. My favorite smell to date is that of a passenger bus's exhaust system. Or really, what is coming out of the exhaust system. I should say it's the most nostalgic smell.
When I was seventeen I took my first solo long-distance trip on a Greyhound style bus. At this time in my life, I had put in some serious summer camp time, and other adventure-style trips during the summer months of my youth. But this was the first solo trip. It may not have been a Greyhound, technically, but the exhaust smell of a Greyhound vs. the exhaust smell of say a Trailways bus is probably indistinguishable due to the fact that their buses are likely made by the same people. The passenger bus engine is Diesel as are all of those trucks on the road, and some cars as well. And you would think that the smell emanating from the back of any Diesel engine powered thing would be similar, but aha - it's not. It didn't take too long to figure this out. A few hours at the bus station lurking around, followed by a drive on the Interstate behind an 18-wheeler or a Mercedes, and then back to the bus station for a quick fix before falling into a peaceful slumber.
The Greyhound bus while onboard has this bus smell which is surely due to all of the people who have been on that particular bus over the years, sitting in their seat for hours and hours sweating and not smoking. At least not anymore. So I think that the smell coming from the rear of the bus is not just exhaust from the combustion of Diesel fuel, but that combined with the people-air being pushed out with it to give you a unique, passenger bus/fuel exhaust smell that is really second to none.
I like this smell because I attribute it to the freedom that Greyhound Bus Lines, Inc. provided me when I made that trip from clean little Alpena, MI all the way to big dirty Philadelphia, PA to see my extended family during the yuletide season of 1988.
It's a strange thing, smelling Diesel fuel exhaust. It can't be good for you. It just can't. Some people like the smell of plain old gas as it comes out of the pump. Which really is not the inherent smell of the fuel, because the petroleum itself is odorless. The people at the gas factory add a substance like the people at the natural gas factory do, to make you know that there is a leak in the gas line somewhere, so that after you're done getting high on the fumes, you might want to go check out the source of that odor. It's too bad that the gas exhaust has Carbon Monoxide in it, making it toxic to the blood, and it's too bad that sniffing too much raw gas will kill more brain cells than you can afford to kill, because they just smell so good. I can see why you might get a little too into it for your own good. Although huffing some gas from a can in the backyard before the ever unaware Mom and Dad come home from work is different in scope maybe than the Sad Dad sitting alone in a closed garage with the engine on and the windows down, but the end effect is similar. The car/garage thing is more deliberate in the I Want To Die Today sense than is the huffing, I Will Get High Just This Once More For Free, But Really End Up With Serious Problems In 3 Years effect.
In terms of the smells the human body can deliver, certainly there is a wide range of services that can be provided to please or offend the nose, depending of course on your own personal tastes. That freaky girl on SNL who is the cheerleader who puts left hand to right armpit and right hand to left armpit for a moment and then furiously sniffs her fingertips. I can see that. If you're laughing it's either because you think it's so gross that you can't help but laugh, or because you can identify with her behavior, having done this many times before in private, and now that it's on the TV it's all ok. You don't have to hide anymore. I would venture a guess that it's the second one, and that the majority of us are doing this in private, just for the sake of curiosity. We will certainly all deny this accusation. Maybe I won't deny it.
The way I see it, it's a good thing to know your own personal range. What am I capable of. To have a categorical list of smells that your own self can offer up in case someone accuses you, you can always say, "Sorry. I know all of the smells, good and bad, that this body here is capable of, and that is not one of them."
I enjoy the discomfort of others, I admit it. Minor discomfort. The stubbed toe. My favorite all-time discomfort that I caused another person was entirely unplanned, which makes it all the better. We'll call him Derek again, and actually there are two things that happened to him. The thing with Derek was, you wanted to see him displeased, just because. He was an anus to everyone like 90% of the time. So when he got his, it was all the sweeter.
The first was when he stuck his hand in a drawer one day to fish something out, and he pulled his hand out with a large needle stuck in the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. Attached to the needle was a length of tubing which someone had once made a mini vacuum sipper thing with and then just left in the drawer. So he pulls his hand out with a look of confused horror on his pudgy little face that you just can't fake. It's one of those times when you see the scene unfolding, but you just can't believe it yet. And the blood has drained from his now sweaty but otherwise cherub face. And I'm already laughing at this visually, but then he has to pull it out, and starts to bitch about it, and hypothesize as to what might have been on this needle prior to it invading him so. I have lost my shit now and I have to leave the room to get air in my lungs.
The other moment that is dear to my heart had perfect timing. Timing that must be random in nature. You can't buy this timing.
Another lab day, standing around doing something. The victim is on the phone, which is right by the one of three doors into the room. He is on hold, and is on hold for something important because he hasn't hung up yet. I'm just standing there, when suddenly my person lets me know it's That Time again, and I casually slip out door #2, which leads directly to the hallway and then around a corner. I find out later that just as I left, with this Charlie Brown cloud still in the air, just as our victim is realizing the gravity of the situation of being trapped on the phone with this cloud just sitting there, waiting to be inhaled, just as he thinks to himself how much this sucks, it gets much worse. As my door closes, the door by the phone opens allowing the Group Leader to enter with the new Ph.D. style candidate in tow. Here is our contestant now on the phone, alone in a room that smells not-so-good, not-so-fresh anymore, and on the phone unable to say anything in his defense, not that it would matter, because they know he did it. And they give him a look of confirmation, that involuntary change in your facial muscular configuration that let's you know you've somehow let them down. Priceless to hear him tell it later that day. If you try and blame it on someone else, no matter how hard you try, no matter how innocent you are, it worsens your case by now making you a person who would do this, and then have the indecency to lie about it and try and pin it on someone else.
I hope and pray that one day I can top this.
I had an idea for an invention to record smell before I ever saw the movie Harold and Maude. Honest. You see, Maude invented a device that could record smell. I didn't have the details worked out yet as just how to do this, but I had an idea. Harold and Maude was made in 1971, so not a new idea at the time, but new to me, since I first saw the movie in 1998. I'm guessing the writer/director also hadn't worked out the details yet, or he would have gotten a US patent for it and made some serious $$.
And why not? We record sight and hearing both with analogue and digital technology now. Is that it? Two out of five. There has to be a way to record the other three. If you're feeling like you need to smell, touch or taste something that isn't around, you are out of luck. Figure one of these out, and your financial woes for you and a few generations of you are now over.
This leads me to think of what would I do, had I a million dollars. Let's make it $10M to be more realistic with today's dollar. And I'd like that all at once please. Oh yeah. Still not that much, given the number of things you can buy and do over the next 40 years, maybe 50. But I could be happy with that. I don't think I would immediately quit my job. I'd like to think I could keep my life from changing drastically right away. It would be tough. It might be harder to go to work knowing you had $10M in the bank than to try and not let it change you. As long as you didn't become a severe asshole. A small asshole is understandable. An asshole with a lot of money seems like it would be so much more of an asshole than a person who was broke, and also has the misfortune of being a prick.
Surely I would give some to some people. Those who I deemed worthy in my new and temporary asshole way of deeming. And I would very likely invest a large portion of it, so that I could extend my new and temporary asshole status well into my golden years. Trust me when I say I do not need to be working at Wal-Mart or whatever Mart is around when I am 60, 70, or 80. What I would likely do is give those older citizens working at Wal-Mart at 75 years of age some of the money so they would be able to quit. The thing is though, what if they are gambling addicts and are working at Wal-Mart because they blew their wad at the tables, and would re-blow their next wad once they got it?
Yeah, forget it. It's much simpler to just keep it all to yourself and wait for the ghosts to visit you on Christmas Eve and then take it all back and be nicey nicey for your last 10 years.
This leads me to think what it will be like to be a senior citizen. I'm looking forward to it. It is a time in life when you'll be expected to do the things that doing those same things now makes you some sort of monster, a monster that should know better. You put a few generations in between and you can get away with a lot of things I'm sure. I'm looking forward to finding out what I can get away with as my age increases.
Oh I'm sorry, my sense of (fill in favorite excuse) hearing/sight/taste/touch/smell is not so good these days, you'll have to forgive me. You have to forgive me, even though I'm the dirty old man who just brushed up against you and lingered a little too long. You have to forgive me or you're the asshole here for yelling at an old man who was just trying to get that melon over there, just out of reach. I need my melon, because see here? See my colostomy bag? See the incision? You show someone your colostomy bag, and you win. Just take your melon and go. The sight of a half-full colostomy bag will end all discussion of who touched who first. It doesn't even have to be a real half-full colostomy bag. All you'd need is some chocolate pudding and a Ziploc. Maybe some rubber tubing and some tape. Sorry Mom.
I like old people, I really do. I've been trying for the past year to get a senior citizen to live with us, but my housemates will not have it. You can ask them, they'll tell you. Surely I'm only 50% into it, but I am 50% more into it than they are. I think they're cool. Except for the ones who are gambling addicts working at Wal-Mart, they might just be more trouble than not. I like it that they are older and they know. Maybe they know. Some of them know. Some of them know all of the mistakes that you and I are going to make in the next 30 years. Just like we know the mistakes that a 15 year old will make soon, or at least some of the things that are in their head; a ninety year old surely knows what I'll be going through at the age of 40. It was 50 years ago for them and it is 10 years in the future for me. That's 60 years total. So even if they die in the next year, I still have to wait 10 years to experience what they already did experience 50 years ago.
The scenery changes and that's about it. Even though my Grandmother has lived when you traveled on a train and not a plane to get around, and pre-HIV, and pre-TV, and all the rest, things were the same.
Work, family, fight, love, hate, travel, birth, death, insecurity, security, save, spend, run, walk.
There is a great photograph of my Grandmother and my Grandfather on the beach in Ocean City, NJ in the 1920s with their friends. They are young and on the beach away from home having the time of their lives, you can see it. It is a black and white photo of course. When I was a kid I used to think that when my Grandmother was young in these B/W photos, or when I saw any B/W photo, that that was how the world looked back then. It wasn't the film, it was the world that was black and white. My Grandfather used to get his hair cut every Friday after work. Every week. Maybe it was every two weeks, but still. I like the idea of that. He used to put his hands on his head with his fingers locked and stand in the driveway of his house as we were driving away and alternately flex his biceps, left then right. He was a good man. If I could go back in time, I would hang out with John Hill when he was 25 and buy him a beer.
I see the '50's apartment house
It's bleak in the 1970's sun
But I still love the '50's
And I still love the old world
I wanna keep my place in this old world
Keep my place in the arcane knowledge
And I still love the '50's and I still love the old world
(rock and roll sounds)
Alright now we say bye bye old world
Gotta help the new world
Oh bye bye
I say bye bye bye bye old world
Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Jonathan Richman, and his Modern Lovers.
Run Run Run now and buy this album, The Modern Lovers self-titled 1976 release. If you don't like it you have rock and roll problems, and we cannot be friends.
