I just got back from trying to lay the foundations of my Maslow’s pyramid in Vermont, and all I have time to note is that America has an unhealthy relationship with scents… in particular, air fresheners… I was bothered by them in all the usual places — the bus toilet, the hotel shower — but then I was stalked by them in unusual places… in the car I am about to buy, saturated with an unholy stench of fake spice — my father’s old friend, a motorcycle dealer helping me with the auto hookup, found the source in one of those pine-tree-shaped mirror dingleberries, chucked it aside… then upon entering a slanty-floored old house — Bellows Falls — in which I was looking to rent a giant industrial-carpeted kitchen and two teeny adjacent rooms which the pike-faced man who would be my landlord called a living room and bedroom, there I found another pine-tree silhouette waiting at the foot of the slanty, slanty stairs like some bad hobo sign — “Don’t camp here, it stinks–“… then I started to smell them elsewhere… the floral waft of a baby at the pizza parlor… the car I rented smelled of one but tear as I might at the upholstery I couldn’t find the damnable tree… look I know Lynda Barry has said this already — and so, oddly, has John Steinbeck, whose Travels With Charlie I have been trying to make last as long as I can… long as the move… long as the UN continues to stall the US on Iraq, god willing — and they have said it better than I have (Barry: “I’ve never heard a single person ever say they loved the smell of air freshener and yet there are so many people who fill their homes with it”) — but god damn it, America, are you listening?! YOU CAN’T COVER IT ALL UP WITH AN AIR FRESHENER… did I mention once upon a time when I was still indentured to the US, working in the Bronx, when I came into the office to a nearly lethal cloud of Lysol disinfectant lingering in the unventilated hall? a particularly fragrant homeless man had come in, and one of the counselors had tried to purge the scent, not with a common odor masker but with a breathable, ingestable cloud of antibacterial poisons… and they wonder why asthma rates are so high in the Bronx… not only does everyone in this goddamn country try to cover things up with manufactured scents, they’re also too fscking ignorant to know the difference between substances of cosmetic and of hygenic use…
DEATH TO SCENTED CANDLES and all their ilk… I do not exempt the hippies and their goddamn incense… give me unwashed crotch or give me death!
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