I don’t know about you all, but I like those little dangly things that you put in cars to make them smell good. I like’em a lot. They were particularly helpful before I stopped smoking in the car, but even afterwards they cover up the smell of whatever fast food wrappers might be in my car at any given time. Clancy, on the other hand, hates them.

It’s all a little bit funny because my sense of smell is crap and hers is good. But then again, maybe that’s why. Having a diminished sense of smell, I like things that smell strongly unless they’re particularly foul. Even if they are particularly foul, sometimes I like the smell anyway. I am the only person I know that likes the smell of stink bombs, for instance. I also think that farts smell interesting rather than particularly bad.

Several months back, Clancy’s car got a strange odor in it. It was one of the rare times when I noticed something before she did. Clancy’s car is not exactly a model of cleanliness, so we figured that there was something in the car that needed to be taken out. The car was clean, but the smell remained. It really never got on her radar until she left town and came back. I guess driving a car that doesn’t smell bad opened her nose to how hers smells. We still don’t know what it is, but it seems to be coming from the air conditioner.

While she’s been gone, I’ve been hanging one little dangly fake leaf after another.

Oddly enough, my car has begun to start smelling, too. Clancy noticed it first, but I noticed it almost immediately after. It’s something recent. She thinks it smells like a pee bottle. She really hates that I ever do that and is kind of paranoid about it. Just to be sure I cleaned out the car and there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of likely culprits inside of it. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the air conditioner, though.

—

A year or so ago, a youngish girl (12 or so maybe?) knocked on our door to sell me some smell spray of some sort called DAMN. The bottle says “DAMN that pet odor! DAMN that smoke smell! DAMN it all Fo’ Sho'” or something to that effect. I ordinarily resent door-to-door salespeople and I don’t like how everything from little league to band has turned out kids into little Amway saleskids. In this case, she made no pretense about it being for some sort of charity and simply said that she’s trying to earn money to buy a bike. A little bottle of no more than a couple ounces was $5, but she assured me that one spray goes along way. Well DAMN if she wasn’t right about that. Two shots makes your eyes water and it’s been almost a year and both bottles are still half full.

—

Meanwhile, now our kitchen smells. I know why that’s happening: the trash can is overflowing. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to take it. Somehow, our trash can has become the neighborhood dump. Seems like every trash day, the garbagemen empty it out but then someone comes in and fills it back up again. A lot of times it’s beer, but lately it’s been like construction material or something. I was actually impressed the last time they did it because they managed to fill that thing so efficiently that you would think that they were a professional packer or something.

Friday is garbage day and hopefully I’ll have a place to put it then. In the meantime I might have to place it outside or something. On the other hand, the rotting whatever that’s producing the odor smells quite interesting. It really only bothers me because I know that it’s supposed to.