Apparently my nose has gone rogue.

Apparently it always has been doing a little bit of freelancing on the side.

They tell me my nose doesn’t work for me. Or well, that it does, but it just works a little too well and is prone to making executive decisions. For the most part, it will consult the parts of my brain I don’t speak to anymore. Granted, we had a brief torrid love affair several millenia ago. Though it ended cordially, we just don’t see each other any more, let alone communicate. Occassionally, I’ll discover we still float in strangely connecting circles like old lovers. Like the way I deal with all my vestigial relationships, I’ll do my best not to upset the balance and the calm, lest old venoms and controls return to wreck havok.

I picture them there, those lobes and cortexes, in an art déco café on the corner, reminiscing with my wisdom teeth, appendix and any of the others. The old friends and lovers you’ve outgrown and left behind, the ones you hope remember you with just enough fondness to not use you as a shinining example everytime they want to explain what a bastard is.

Sitting here in the clutter of my monkey nest that lies hidden at the centre of a monkey hive. Having just returned from a set of itinerant travels to other monkey hives. I find myself thinking of the aspects we use to spend our times being just a little bit more than monkeys without hair. Or one in particular anyway and even then I’m not very sure it is an aspect of humanity or just a cunningly envolved aspect of monkey.

Perfume, aftershave, deodorant, rollon, rolloff, artificial scent in all its forms. It’s a hydra subject in my mind and the main reason my nose has gone rogue. They murmur at me that my nose is working more levels than I’m aware and that this is just a muted version of how powerful it was when I was more monkey. Yet I’m aware of this and ready to agree with it. If only for the reason, that I allow this invisible information we all pump out by way of pheromones, to be used subconciously by my nose to make executive decisions.

The example is women and it’s an obvious one. I obviously cannot fuck or anything otherwise a woman who doesn’t smell pleasing to me. That’s just fast company though. Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Friday forgetfuls those of us non-wracked by religious guilt use to indulge in the only real playtime Adults have left. Anything longer or more important and I always have to conduct a small little test. Maybe it’s the bear in me, but if I snuffle down from right behind the ear up and down to the back of the neck and I can’t feel that invisible information punch straight through the back of my face and hook its talons into the primal and the reptile part of my brain with an old school modem dialing fuzz of cortex static. Then I know nothing will come of her. Nothing serious at least. Nothing I have to worry or think about. It has a couple of times though and I was with those people for time well past the one night thing and into years.

Reliant on this nasal Stasi as I am, I can’t say I’m much of a perfume fan. Most are too heavy, many too common, each woman becoming just a olfactory clone marked only by a change in hair or clothes. I much prefer the memory of perfume, that distant whisper women have after an hour in the sea or a night fucking. Just the slightest murmur of the artificial works for me outside of those situations. If I have a preference it’s for that woman’s natural smell. I don’t particularly want my jungle-era radar clogged up with ambergris and any variety of other animals musks, but I’ll accept the lightest dusting if social self consciousness gets in the way.

Where my nose has gone rogue on me is the latest fashion in scents being worn by the females of the species and thankfully, this segues nicely to my larger point so you won’t have to put up with much frothing at the mouth ranting from me.

I remember a time from childhood where women who did wear perfume actually smelt nice. Where the cosmetics companies making them seemed to actually an effort and there was variety and difference to the smells. A glorious time when you were very unlikely to meet a pretty blonde with an oral fixation who smells like paraquat.

Because we’ve fucking landed Ladies and Gentlemen. A century or so since the beginning of the Feminist movement and here we are with women content to wear perfume that makes them smell like cleaning products and pesticides.

Who the fuck wants to smell like Cif Lemon Fresh or Fairy Liquid original?

Who the fuck would make a perfume so damn offensive, market it in a fancy bottle with a celebrity whispering nuances. The sort of silken fluidless passionate sex the old romances seeded centuries worth of dreams in the minds of the wistful.

I’m telling you – should I find these disposable organ donors, there will be blood.

Maybe my nose has gone rogue. Maybe it was never working in the first place. But here is a stunning little brunette in clothes that could crawl off her, sashay up to me with a microphone and sing “I was made for loving you” into my ear. I imagine those clothes would flick their tongue off my lobe, lips moving in that fraction away empty space that still feels like you’re physically there. Heart missing a beat and that’s only her clothes and the body they’re hiding. Borrowing terms and robbing graves that haven’t filled yet, but goddamn, she’s pretty like drugs.

Yet, as you get close, close enough to flirt or catch her attention properly you realize she smells like Flash Pine Floor Cleaner. If it’s not bad enough my women now look like they got their tan on the surface of Venus now they have to smell like industrial solvents. And as suddenly as you were taken by her, it’s gone. She’s close to being offensive to the nose, you’re almost wincing, maybe you’ve even vomited in your mouth a little bit. Your eyes are probably being stoic about watering, but you know, should you take your nose out of your pint, they may not have that preserve for you anymore.

Seriously though, have we come a hundred or so years into Feminism for the female of the species to actually want to smell like a kitchen cleaning product?

And that is where my nose has gone rogue. Spinning about making executive decisions beyond my control. As what was suddenly a spreading fuzzy connection running from the brain down trail past the bellybutton becomes a sudden balloon popped nothing. The sort of wheeze that you thought was going to be a minute long wracking cough and had braced yourself as such. Cause fuck no, there is no way I’m letting someone who smells like what my Granny used to clean drains with put it in her mouth.

Those Godless bastards who remain in the art of Perfumery obviously stopped caring a long time ago. I imagine them as glamour decked husks of liver spots and grey hair who just don’t believe in the nobility of suicide. There is something wrong here and I just can’t figure it out; just how a smell that reminds of cleaning products can completely turn off the connection of reproductive process. For a start, I’m a terrible fucking slut, I’ve spent my life living the Chuck Berry monkey gospel truth of “If it moves fuck it. If it doesn’t move, fuck it until it does, then fuck it some more.” How on Earth has close to twenty years smoking not deadened my olfactory system enough that when a woman smells like something you use to remove limescale, I can just not notice and get to what needs to be done.

I’m not even upset. I’m just amazed.

Before I ramble off into talking about the other kind of women, who wear things like rose water, just enough, so it feels like you’re fucking a giant chunk of Turkish delight. I have to draw a line in the sand before this and all the now flashback scent stampede of women who smelt of freshly completed dishwasher cycles.

Draw a line to the point I really wanted to get to about scent. The point that probably takes my previous and uses it as the shell to shoot myself in the foot. I’m writing this piece, because somewhere, someone or some group of petty minded individuals took away one of the aspects I used to hide my monkey self. Or maybe, just one of the aspects I, Monkey, used to make itself more attractive or even just be itself.

If I remember much through the cloud of repression that is my childhood it’s that every male smelt of a mixture of aftershave and tobacco. Well, almost every male. It seemed, like shaving, smoking and drinking, to be the sign of a man. Back then, most of the men smelt different. They all had their own unique signature and I guess a part of me thought, at some point, even if I didn’t want it, I’d probably have to have that too. As a kid, I was never big on the whole artifical smell thing, it got in the way. Maybe that is an indication of an animalistic nature, I don’t know, but I found people, outside of my parents, who wore scents hard to trust.

That is until eleven – cause eleven is the new brown which used to be the new black, don’t ya know. Apparently, around these parts, eleven is where it kicks in. If only, because eleven is when all my peers in school began to use spraycan deodorants. You gradually became a pariah if you weren’t doused in something highly flammable. It was probably some sort of dark hippie Mordor shadow that led my mother to forbidding me from spraying aluminium on my chest and armpits. Besides, I didn’t really like the idea of smelling like everybody else.

So it was that I spent a considerable amount of time, effort and scent burnt nostrils trying to find the smell that was right for me. I remember the moment as clear as if it was five minutes ago when I was demanding my fridge except the return of a bottle of wine. I was twelve and it was a light sapped evening of the Christmas week here in Dublin. I was sitting cross-legged in one of those small duty free toiletries shops that used to populate the back alleys and side streets of Dublin. My nose was starting to turn toward that alcohol drenched numbness you get when you’ve smelt far too many tester strips.

The memory of the exact moment I found that little black topped weirdly opaque glass bottle will be forever seared into my memory. At least that is until dementia takes me. It didn’t just smell right, it smelt perfect; it smelt like me. Somehow, someone, had managed to capture what I wanted to smell like before I’d even smelt like that.

It was Dunhill Edition or Dunhill Black and I would smell like that for the next seventeen years. I would smell like that for longer than I hadn’t. It would drench into the very essence of me, that if I dreamt, I smelt like that, even now, when I dream, I still smell like that. I enhanced that smell with tobacco and alcohol. I must have done something right, for the main compliment I would receive from females over the years would be “Oh you smell great”. Which is great really, you can get over the fact they never say something like “You handsome piece of hot shit or “Good God I could get lost in your eyes” because smell sears itself into peoples minds. Which is probably for years after the fact, I would get emails and sms’ from ex-girlfriends and flings saying things like “I miss your smell” or “Something just reminded me of your smell and now I’m thinking of you mmm”. Which is great if you’ve got the charm of a bag of rattling weasals and the looks of a bloated corpse the cops look at and start a pool on whether the crack or gin did it.

But, sometimes not so good when the paranoia grips and you get suspicious of what your smell is getting up to when you’re asleep, has it developed sentience? Did you pick it or did it pick you? And it’s always kind of telling they make a point of saying they only miss the smell and not you. Then again, fuck it, you never did wear it for other people, you wore it because whatever was in it, whatever effect it had on your nostrils, you were utterly addicted to it.

I remember when it started to get hard to find, when people would have to bring it to me from abroad, when I could only find it in the shops. I thought this was just because it was a rarer type of smell, of the more exclusive sort. I would never have thought Dunhill would have the audacity to discontinue it. Yet this is exactly what I would find one day when with dwindling reserves, I went on a particularly arduous search for it. A very nice lady at a perfume counter would inform me that they’d stopped making it almost three years previously and that all I’d been buying was the dwindling afterstock left in shops and warehouses.

I must have looked upset, because she asked me how long I’d been wearing it. “Since I was a kid, fifteen sixteen years. I don’t know what to do now.”. The ever increasing look of upset coupled with my words must have had a profound effect on her, because she came around from behind the counter and without giving me a chance to say yes or no, swept me up into a big hug filled with patting and comforting words.

She kept me there, I don’t know how long, chatting to me about new smells, teasing me about needing to change but admitting understanding as to why I didn’t want to. Laughing at my comments on the new scents and reminiscing on how fine a product the Dunhill Edition had been. As it turned out, she had been a fan also. She phoned a warehouse for me to see if they had any stock in a corner somewhere. She even offered to get me a cup of coffee. I really didn’t think I looked that upset, but I must have. So I left, ambling sort of aimless and lost about the city, knowing that I only had one and a half bottles left. In the middle of a crumbling relationship, I’m not sure what upset me more, the loss of the woman or the fresh knowledge that I may never smell like myself ever again.

Sadness turned to hate as it so often does. Those bastards, those fucking bastards had taken my smell from me. I’d been loyal, I had a Dunhill bathrobe, a Dunhill bag and this is how they’d repaid me? By making a replacement scent that smelt like something I’d spray into a room to kill bluebottles? I’ve tried every scent they’ve come up with since, from the one that smells like a cocktail made from cheap white label gin and concentrate juice to the one that smells oven cleaner. They have come up with nothing worthwhile. Nothing even approaching the scent I wore or the few others they also discontinued.

I could suffer the fools who want to smell like paraquat, if I had my smell back. I might even be able to find a work around the women who have heady strains of what I imagine the Andromeda Strain smells like. If there was just one usable, workable smell that I didn’t feel I was using as poor substitute. Tommy Hilfiger, Armani, Calvin Klein, nothing they make is of any use and it would seem the subtle art of perfumery is all but lost to making sure we all smell the same. It is a wonderful future we’re mapping out for ourselves; one where we have maybe the same six or eight sets of clothing to choose our uniform from. Where we will have battered ourselves so far into conformity that even scent has become something we only really have a primary colours like selection of.

I have three quarters of a bottle left.

When I want to smell like myself again, when I want memories to be clear and solid and not gossamer ghosts lacking any real substance.

I put a little on, just a little.

Just to smell like myself again.