BOed

wow - so i was doing laundry late last night and as I went off to put my clothes in the drier, one of my neighbors came out of the laundry room, having just started his clothes a-washing. We exchanged casual greetings and went our separate ways. Then I entered the laundry room...

...There were these crazy guys who used to live down at the other corner of our floor, and we hung out with them for awhile one quarter. Bathing in cologne was apparently the requisite for entering their fraternity of 3rd floor Persian coolness, because I swear that's what they did. You could tell that Idean had been in a room up to 45 minutes later. They were a hugging, kissing people. Which meant that from the first hello, I gave up trying to smell like a girl forever.

...This laundry room experience was a lingering male signature of quite another kind. I didn't know it was possible for such a pungent BO to travel that far and that successfully from a human body. and stay in the room. for hours. Because after his laundry had been running for a full 40 minutes, with fresh-scented soap swishing around in the machines with his whites, I went to retrieve my clothes. The detergent-and-fabric-softener smell of laundromats everywhere had a new, perverted twist. Much like a glade air freshener on a crowded Delhi train, I imagine. No longer a simple smell of clean, the artificial fragrances overlaid the sour ripeness of a manly life lived in complete freedom from deodorant and any female persuasions towards its adoption. Thinking of the repelled womanly whiles that could possibly explain the commanding scent, I wondered that perhaps the strength of this bodily factor might be a circular testament to its very existence - maybe this man's BO is his only physiological excretion with any staying power.

But that was unfair. At least he was approaching hygiene by doing his laundry. Soap and deodorant couldn't be far behind...right?