« Christmas Acrostic | Main | If within 2 minutes of arriving at work you bend down and rip your pants... »
November 28, 2004
Stench of Life
Just now flatmate Dave and I are sitting in Kayaks, a coffee shop designed to appear as a Colorado ski chalet. We have have just finished our drinks (his a fru-fru latte for which he gets no end of ribbing for being such a manly man all the rest of the time) and we are now reading. Everything is perfect and pristine, including most of the people. There is nice folk music being soothingly piped down and the only aroma is the relatively pleasant aroma of coffee (although for some I imagine that would be not so pleasant). Earlier today the same Dave and I were eating Chinese in front of Bob's Seafood and the aromas were decidedly different. I noted to Dave how the place reminded me of Pakistan, not so much because there are many fishy smelling places in the parts of Pakistan in which I lived, but because odors pleasant and foul were so much more a part of every day life. Dave, quite correctly, pointed out that there is no virtue in being unsanitary. And yet, I think that we can lose connection with life, or perhaps more accurately with nature, by our highly sanitized spaces, perhaps even our highly sanitized bodies. OK, that might be an unpleasant thought, but it is helpful to note that even these standards are simply cultural. In addition to controlling the olefactory evidence of decay and life processes, our culture also is adept at hermetically sealing off death, as is evidenced both in our mortuaries and our meat departments. Both of which are much too large topics to be addressed in this ever lengthening study break. Suffice it to say, sometimes there is nothing like the stench of death to be reminded of the glory of Life.
| By jackdas | 10:12 PM
