Tuesday, January 28, 2003

THE ODORS OF PERCEPTION I’m

THE ODORS OF PERCEPTION

I’m one of those folk who notice the way things smell.  I love smells.  They don’t even all have to be pretty smells, if they’re honest and not too noxious.  I catch the worst smells on the bus; sometimes someone there will smell so badly that it brings every other stranger on the bus into fellowship, choking together on the fetor, gulping down sweet fresh air when the stink has dissipated… More often, things just have smells, not good or bad, just the smell of things, and I just try to attend to that dimension of my reality.  I try to appreciate the olfactory spectra.  I have experiences all the time where I get a whiff of something and I roll back in time like Proust in a bakery… The smell of fresh blacktop sends me back to Oxford when I was six, playing in the dirty streets… the smell of sycamores and scrub pine baking in the summer sun is the smell of my summer camp, no matter where or when I smell it.  Then there’s the new smells: the smell I catch as I come around the corner to my flat and the new shop that took over from the auto parts store is venting some fumes, that new “Hemp Center” store with the mysterious back room, bursting at the seams with the redolent aroma of roasting perfume and scenting my evenings with exotic promise (unfulfilled of course, as the night ever hungers)... the smell of Geary Boulevard at night, frying garlic and simple syrup and fresh lobster in butter, blending incoherently… too many nasal entertainments to taxonomize, but nothing else smells like:
Old, old elevators
Airports
Lumberyards
Long foxtail grass dried in the sun
Warm rubber
Attics and basements
Rain - warm
Bread baking
High mountains
Subways (and underground light rail)
Wormwood and sage
My own sweat
Dawn
Taxicabs
Meat on the grill
Libraries and used bookstores
Rain - cold
Bosky dells
Menthol on steamroom rocks
The sea
Good coffee

Yeah, there’s probably more but I’m gonna let it go at that… yo smell ya later