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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2015 at 6:52 pm and is filed under About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.