Moot

Sleep Tight, They’ll Bite You Regardless of Precaution.

I am very late to the QR Reader game, mostly because I only just realized one of the ways it can be personally benefiting. But that is not what this is about. I was standing on the subway, barely conscious, as most passengers usually are, when I notice a QR code among the ads above the doors in the car. Immediately, I think of capturing the code and have my iPhone interpret it for me at some future point with 3G service. My brain remembers which pocket my phone is in and a split second later my hand is fishing around for the aforementioned phone. Then I stop. I look around, feeling guilty as hell. I just become aware of why I stopped brandishing my state-of-the-art-keeping-up-with-the-jones’-phone. The QR code in question belongs to a Bed Bug exterminator/prevention advertisement. What would people think if they saw me interacting with such a banner? What would I think if I happen to be alerted to some lad fitting my description being super interested, even super technologically interested, in an advertisement littered with Bed Bug material? I would certainly come to this conclusion: that cute guy has Bed Bugs and is desperate for prevention knowledge; why else would he be so actively interested in that ad? The truth of the matter is that, yes, I did in fact have Bed Bugs almost exactly a year ago, no, I have them no longer; but I am only interested in the QR! How do I convey this to the rest of the passengers? I cannot. Therefore I did not take the picture.

Cancerous Cerebellum.

I think I have brain cancer. That, or an acute sense of smell. I remember reading somewhere that phantom smells have something to do with having cancer of the most important human organ (arguably).

Upon delving into this recent epiphany, I have also realized that perhaps it is not as bad as people say. Granted, I have never heard/read a testimonial from a brain-cancered person, but I’d imagine that it would go something like this: I don’t really feel anything for the most part, but there was this one time I thought a cat came away with the silver medal at last year’s world’s fair (2007).

Olfactory hallucination, has to be somewhat prevalent. And as far as the severity of this situation is concerned, I am about to lose all credibility. This phenomenon I have experienced has mostly occurred on the subway. I’ll give you a second to close this page down.


I was riding the 4 train downtown (for those of you familiar with New York City) rather recently and I happened to stop reading my book and take a gander at my fellow Americans (arguably). Besides noticing the older gentleman across the way, who was far too busy wiping his nose and then going back to his pizza, I became aware of my sense of smell. There is absolutely no way my nose was accurate in what it was smelling at that time. I swear on my life that I was smelling my hometown house. You may now think that my home is gross, but this is not my meaning (its scent is quite comforting actually). However improbable, it was right there, slightly above my mustache. The more loony I thought I was becoming, the more lucid my thoughts became. I ended up shutting my eyes and attempted to discern each and every smell in the air. The first one to identify itself was the slice of pizza in front of me, for obvious reasons. I also thought I could sense the old man, but this could have been vicariously through the pizza. My nose then went on to distinguish someone’s perfume along with hair product. And soon after it became increasingly difficult to detect anything else in the air; not to mention the subway’s perpetual metallic smell along with the general collection-of-people smell, tunnel smell, and overall rank-ness. Since when I first stumbled across this subway wonder, I have taken whiffs of things that could not possibly be manifest around me such as: my defunct car, my old Cobra Commander action figure, and my Xbox 360. You might think these last few things are ridiculous, and they are, but anything is possible with the odor of the subway.

On occasion I have come across subway cars that have very few people in it, and after further investigation, I realize it is because there is a lone homeless man huddled in the far corner. Isn’t it awful that stepping onto the actual subway platform is a beautiful respite in the form of air in comparison to aforementioned homeless guy?

Maybe it isn’t my brain cancer flaring up but I am indeed somehow smelling these things. But how does it make me feel that on any given moment an amalgam of scents on the subway can produce the smell of the house I lived in straight through adolescence?  Oops, I almost forgot, there was also definitely B.O. lying around somewhere that first fateful day, and that person shall remain nameless, but only because I do not know their name, otherwise, I’d rat them out in a heartbeat.