Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Wall of smell

Some 720 California men's room experiences are so searingly painful that it takes several days to find the words to describe them.

Last Friday was a bad day for the third floor men's room.

Smell is about context. Your brain can handle a horrible odor if it can make sense of it. For example, if you enter a morgue, your brain is ready for the stench of rotting corpse.

But when you walk into a men's restroom, your brain doesn't know what to do with a tangy, smoky barbecue smell. And then you realize--nobody is cooking ribs in this location, rather, somebody's colon is profoundly broken. It is not a smell that can be produced by the physically fit.

It was so bad, I actually had my first synesthesia experience (where one experiences smell as a color or image.) This is what I saw.

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