Cantcha Smell That Smell?

What is it with my nose and phantom smells? I dunno if y’all have this curious olfactory blip, but every once in a while, I’ll be in a place that should be fairly devoid of any specific smell-age, and allofasudden I’ll be hit in the face with a smell that makes me stop dead in my tracks and spin around and say, “Okay, who’s smokin’ the dope?”

Seriously. Usually the smells are of pot or of beer.

It happens at work usually, sometimes at the library, sometimes at the place where we hold school board meetings, and occasionally in a big-box store.

So, of course, I become a bloodhound and start sniffing around, seeing who’s in proximity and smelling them (only at work, m’kay?), trying to find the source of the smell. And, of course, in a flash, the smell disappears and I look like an idiot with my nose stuck in a pile of half-off t-shirts.

Thing is, I don’t think anyone has quaffed beer or smoked da ganja in any of those places. I think it’s some sort of sensory flashback or vicarious escapism, ‘cause I haven’t smoked since Clinton was in his first presidential term, and the beer I drink doesn’t smell like the cheap-ass shit I keep smellin’.

Of course, driving through campus this morning, any smells I encounter from now until next June actually COULD be beer, pot, really stanky B.O., or other morning-after detritus. Because the college students are coming back!!! In all their bad-driving-ness, in all their jaywalking-bad-behaviour, in all their superhero power and worldliness and cocky superiority. Which I excuse, of course, because they’re all so damn cute and sexy and innocent without their ways of the ‘actual’ world. For the next week or so, they’ll be hanging out on front lawns with tubs of beer and the inevitable water slide (yes, I’m looking forward to a taunting another time!).

You professors who read this blog are really lucky, y’know, to have fresh meat every 3 months. I don’t mean for sexual fantasies (of course that’s where MY head would be), but seeing those little bundles of hormones flutter in and out of your class and watching them be foolish and finally get some important stuff to stick in their heads. Which is more than I can say for being out in the world and having a job where it’s the same boring middle-aged men every frickin’ day and hearing their bitching and whining and trying to talk them off the ledge.

‘Spose I could go back to school and get a learned degree and become a perfesser of something (sexology?) and experience college again, over and over, for the rest of my life. Mmm…maybe too much of a temptation, offering ‘extra credit one-on-one sessions’ to the cutest boys in class. Don’t think I wouldn’t! I’d be the “Perv Professor” and they’d write me up in the underground ‘rating the professor’ pamphlets and stuff. So no, no sexy college classes for me, nuh-uh, nosirree bob. Gotta keep my distance from all the young men.

But maybe they could score me some beer and pot.