Olfactory Distractions

"At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction."

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Back by myself in the Lower East Side after spending the Easter weekend with P at the Cliff in Canandaigua. Not sure what happened, but the world sort of caught up with me around the middle of yesterday afternoon as I was driving through mist in eastern Pennsylvania, and by bedtime I was reliving videos of my war and lost in a pretty bad place.

Still there, actually. But life makes its demands, no one cares how things are feeling in my universe right now. So you rise up out of the trench and keep walking forward.

I'm guessing it was the news over the weekend, the obscenities and vile threats of war crimes from that person. I miss the world that existed before he was a major player in it. I miss not feeling myself filled with rage at every grinning "He Is Risen!" Facebook post featuring my longtime panhandle neighbors who voted for him and are outside their church before adjourning to ham and yams while we blow up neighborhoods halfway across the planet. "He is risen"? If you thought that one through you might not be so excited about the implications.

So let's talk about something else, shall we?

I lazily decided this morning to snap a photo out the window here on Houston Street of the Bradford pear that's exploded in bloom in the median, attended by a scattering of daffodils.

Maybe it's the pollen, but I'm starting to lose the ability to take pictures out the window this time of day, fighting the reflection of the dust coating the outside of these windows.

Back when I attended law school the first time at UGA in the 1990s, the old campus was thick with Bradford pears. That's the first time I ever heard them referred to as "cum trees" by one of my classmates on the way to lunch one afternoon.

"I mean, haven't you noticed how they smell?" he asked, as if this explained everything.

I have to say I never could detect the slightly fishy smell I'm told these trees emit when they're in bloom. I also had no idea what a male discharge smelled like, and still don't. So I must take their word for it that the aroma of a Bradford pear on a spring morning and the aroma of a teenage boy's bedroom the evening before laundry day are about the same.

In other news, with the mass migration of our best and brightest scientists back to their homelands at the behest of Stephen Miller, those who remain have concentrated their efforts on a question that has profound consequences for the species: among men and women, whose flatulence smells worse?

I am not making this up.

https://archive.ph/VCYlH

In fairness to MAGA, apparently this gastroenterologist and his team have been working on the answer for years, inserting tubes into their subjects' keisters to collect gas samples and subject them to chromatography to evaluate the composition and concentration of bad smelling substances. If you can't or won't spare five minutes of your day on the article, I'll save you the trouble by spilling the results: women's flatulence smells worse, but on volume there's a lot less of it, making this odorific battle of the genders a tie.

I found the whole thing a revelation because I was taught that women did not do this at all. Who knew?

Time to let go of this distraction and slog into what's next.