TheBanyanTree: Pepe le Who?

[SarahAnne Hazlewood]

I stink.

Quite literally, at the moment, and I'm in a quandry.

A stinking quandry, if you will.

My bathroom also stinks.  Meaning that I will,
perforce, continue to stink until the magic cinnamon
candle and the ceiling fan that spins round and round
but is vented to, well, nowhere, actually, can work
some miracle and leave me with a bathroom that does
not induce gagging.

It was the gagging that started all of this.

The dog is not terribly clever and often ends up
sticky, muddy, or vaguely aromatic.  This time,
however, she came home from a midnight jail break (Hey
- she said she had to pee.  She didn't say she was
gonna come back when she was done!) with a fairly
distinctive smell.  

Not overwhelmingly strong, but definitely intense.  

I tried to feed her and just lowering my head that
much closer...well, if I had eaten any breakfast I
would have lost it.

It is, to give my best description, the smell of
deadness.

My reaction is so intense and sudden that I can only
guess it is some primal instinct that says "if you
smell something that rotten you better empty your
stomach just in case what you smell is what you ate"

Skunk comes to mind.  

I've never been sprayed, so I don't know what a full
dose of the stuff smells like.  Of course I know the
essence of dead skunk laying on the side of the road
as you drive by.  I also know that's just the tip of
the olfactory iceberg when it comes to skunk funk.

I'm trying to imagine that smells were colors.  If you
took the 'color' of skunk stink and increased the
intensity without changing the hue, would it smell
like this?

In humorous stories and cartoons (my primary basis for
scientific information about skunk encounters) they
say things like "you could smell him a mile away" or
"he stinks to high heaven".  That seems to indicate
the volume of the smell, if you were, rather than the
intensity.

So maybe it wasn't a skunk.  Maybe it is the smell of
death - a generic dead-thing-as-play-toy remainder.

She was banished outside all day.  With staff
meetings, soccer tournaments, and moving vans there
was no time to investigate further.

So I arrive home tonight knowing that I have to banish
the dog to the cold, wet, Oregon night or I have to
bathe her.

Sigh.

I guess I used up all my uber-bitch energy at the
staff meeting.  I decided on the bath.

Now I'm pretty good at bathing the dog.  I know which
parts to do first so she stays mellow.  I know to let
her play with the shower head while I lather so she's
not too bored.  I know that when I get near her ears
I'd better be pretty close to finished.  I know the
little head lowering, feet bracing, shoulder shrug
that means she's going to shake and I usually whip the
shower curtain over in time to catch most of the
spray.  I remember to wash her collar at the same time
so that it isn't still stinky.

In general she stays pretty clean for a farm dog and I
only get sorta damp in the process.

Even so, I now stink.

And so does the bathroom.

And so, sadly enough, does Sparki - pretty much to the
same degree she did before I started.

Which makes me wonder if the stink is gonna stick to
me as well.

Does tomato juice really work?  And what if it's not
actually skunk?  Then will the tomato juice help, or
will I just smell like "dead-thing parmesano"?

There are over 150 students from 6 Internationl
Schools who will be arriving at my school tomorrow
morning to play soccer.  The Oregon International
Schools Organization (OISO) spring Invitational.

I will be greeting them.  And their parents.  And the
various consuls and honorary consuls and Lufthansa
executives - many of them eager to check out the
American woman who has replaced the school's founder
(who is quite infamous).

And I will welcome them in 7 languages and I will
award prizes in two.

And I had worked the butterflies out of my stomach
about all of that.  

But now I'm wondering how I'm going to remain downwind
of all those people all day long.  And if I don't want
my stomach to start turning somersaults again I must
find a way to stay downwind of myself.

-sash (Smelling As Skunk in Heat)


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