matthearn.com

Can someone explain to me why you’re not allowed to smoke anywhere but a specially constructed, hermetically sealed, underground iron box, but it’s perfectly legal for people to drench themselves in cheap perfume and go out in public?

I went to church yesterday; I didn’t have to sing, so for the first time in a while, I sat in the congregation. And it was like a hyacinth was having sex with my sinuses. I thought someone must put a funeral wreath in a blender and then poured it on their clothing. My own clothing I considered burning when I get home, but instead muttered dark incantations as I ran it through the washing machine eighteen times.

Do people really not notice that they smell like a florist’s refrigerator? How dead must your olfactory nerves be that you think 7 squirts of Eau de Rabais is necessary? More to the point, why hasn’t the government intervened? I’m not normally a fan of intrusive regulation, but it seems to me that it should be illegal for someone to put on so much stinkum that it feels like someone has jabbed a hot poker into each of my nostrils, right?

The worst offenders will actually argue with you about what they’re wearing. I knew a wonderful woman who continually came choir rehearsal smelling like a cathouse, and people complained, until the director took her aside and said “You must stop wearing perfume.” She replied, “I’m not!” The next day, she once again smelled like she’d bathed in rose petals, and another choir member said, “I thought you were told not to wear perfume anymore!” Again, like Peter, she denied it, and was asked “So why do you smell like a burning rose bush?”

“Oh, that’s just my body spray,” she replied, and so we had to beat her to death with our hymnals, Your Honor.