Priest: Unscented

Today, I smell like a man. I really hate that.

It’s driving me completely insane–this…this stench. It’s a manly smell, like so many men I’ve smelled in my life. Hard to describe, a kind of taxi driver smell. A church deacon smell. I have to suppose some men like smelling like this because so many men do, but I hate it.

I prefer to smell like nothing; to come and go like the wind. Imperceptible, un-smellable. Priest: Unscented. Yet, here I am, smelling like a man. Every few minutes I move this way or that, and catch a whiff of myself. Horrible.

How did this happen? Well, I went to Walmart to buy deodorant and, as usual for this Walmart–an alleged “Super” center–they were out of stock for what I was looking for. I really don’t know what kind of brain-damaged idgit manages my local Walmart, but, wandering through the store you will notice how poorly stocked it is. I mean, the store is so poorly stocked, with so many holes in product areas where stuff should be, it makes you wonder if this isn’t actually a mob front for money laundering. I mean, it’s Walmart; the very name suggests they have lots of stuff.

But every blessed aisle I turn down, everything I reach for, is not there. I am reliably told this is the fault of management. Walmart, the Grand Vizier of retailing, of course, has plenty of stock. It is, however, up to the boneheads running the local store to actually *ask* them to send it over, which they don’t do until there are, not kidding, literally hundreds of holes–empty slots or peg boards where stock should be; my antiperspirant among them.

Which forced me to buy another brand, hence, my new manly smell.

This is how the crazy starts: the stink driving you nuts until you’re going after the Walmart manager with a fire ax. Somebody please hire someone competent to run this place. Any other Walmart I go to has pallets upon pallets of all kinds of things piled high. This place looks like a front for dealing crack out the back door.

And, no, it’s not the ‘hood. There is no ‘hood here. It’s gun-totin’ Colorado, where the Ford F-150 is king and you can’t find a decent pair of dress shoes no matter how hard you look.

It is the town where you can lounge up against your pickup truck in front of your marijuana dealership with your AR-15 strapped around your shoulder, your Glock-19 holstered at your hip, and there’s not a damn thing the Sheriff can say to you.

And the crowd is not at Walmart but at Big Red, where you can actually buy–no kidding–a Duster and Stetson and all the cowboy boots you want.

And. I suppose, most guys in Big Red smell like this.

First thing tomorrow, I’ll be in in Walgreens searching for my sanity. Unfortunately, by that time, my bed will smell manly, too.

6 Comments

  1. Ugh, yeah. I use unscented too, if there’s a scent I keep catching myself trying to figure out where it/s coming from (i.e. if a citrus scent, I look around to see who’s eating the orange).

  2. Trev Trev says:

    Did you buy Old Spice? It’s very manly, in a 1970s Kojak type of way. Or was it Sex Panther from Anchorman. Either way, you’re going to smell very manly. 🙂

  3. Trev Trev says:

    What’s wrong with scented deo? I like smelling fragrant I must admit. Priest: Unscented. That’s another line of business you should venture into. 🙂

  4. My preferred big box store is Target. I usually am able to find anything I’m looking for. In the past 18 months, for whatever reason, I’ve rarely been to Wal-Mart stores. They’re not in urban Detroit at all– though neither is Target. (In full disclosure, red’s my favorite color- maybe that has something to do with it.)
    I usually buy two Sure Unscented rub-on sticks at a time. For whatever reason, I’ve rarely bought spray-on deodorant. Also, using Speed-stick-type deodorants in my teen/young-adult years left my underarms discolored; it took a while to find something that didn’t burn (for a good while, I thought that was “supposed” to happen, sheesh.) [Side note: Midwestern regional big box chain Meijer has opened its first-ever urban Detroit locations (two!) in the past 18 months, ending I-don’t-know-how-many years of major-chain abandonment here. Knock on wood, the stores will stay active; right-wing message board types remain relentless in their “ghetto-folks are gonna rob the place blind/shoot up the joint, wait ‘n see–” comments, sigh…]

    Off-topic: Stay safe, Priest and friends in the Colorado Springs area! At least they did capture the maniac who shot up the Planned Parenthood clinic (though not before lives were lost, alas).

  5. So tempted to compose a wordmark for such a deodorant. I don’t have CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator templates for bottle design right now, though.

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