Baboon Palace

I always do my laundry on Sunday morning. Outside of work, it’s one of the few true regularities in my routine. It’s not that I look forward to it exactly, but I do like having my whole wardrobe clean and readily at hand. There are two laundromats within a block of my house, one of them is run by an old, deaf recovering alcoholic. He’s a nice guy, but he moves very slowly and it’s a bit difficult making yourself understood and so I always feel bad about asking for change, because he’s usually outside smoking and it really seems like a lot of effort for him to parse the request and fish through his pockets for the correct denominations. So I usually just go to the other one. It’s cleaner and brighter, and it’s serviced by two friendly asian teenagers who spend all day instant-messaging.

Today, however, when I returned from the coffee shop to put my clothes in the dryer, a homeless man was stripping down his layers and stuffing them in a washer about fifteen feet away from me. The tang of rancid body odour and stale cigarettes, comingled with an undeniably fecal effluvium, was truly overpowering. It was inescapable, and I actually literally threw up a little bit in my mouth. Tossing my clothes in the nearest dryer as quickly as I could, gagging and choking uncontrollably, eyes watering, I ran out gasping. It was so pungent and foul that I’m afraid it’s permanently tainted my olfactory sense.

Now, I’ve been to the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo, so I’m no stranger to offensive-smelling humans. I’ve been around gamers. (A friend of mine used to work in a game store — Warhammer, D&D, Magic:The Gathering and all that — and he told me once his least favorite part of the job was having to pull the particularly unwashed roleplayers aside and give them the talk about hygiene.) But Jesus, this was in an entirely different realm altogether. If apartheid had a smell, this would be it. That’s the only way I can decribe it: it smelt like racist oppression; its pungency was positively hegemonic, and deeply unjust.

And that, friends, the story of the worst thing I ever smelled, thanks for reading. :(

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.