Super Stink

Super powers are not just the stuff of comic books. I have seen a youtube video of Isao Machii slicing vegetables at mind blowing speeds and I have read apparently legit articles about Wim Hof, the guy that's impervious to cold. I know that there are supertasters walking among us. None of this is real news anymore. People take the incredible for granted ...

But today ... I want to share how my own life has been touched by (probably) two remarkable individuals whom I have never met, but who, it seems, were endowed with a superhuman stink power. 

Exhibit A

Witness exhibit A: one of my favorite shirts. I bought it at a thrift store only to discover after bringing it home that one of the armpits still carried the odor of the previous owner's sweat. This powerful "smell stain" has proven itself impervious to removal after many washings. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, I keep on forgetting about the smell stain and wear the shirt again without trying more drastic means of stink removal, and then I get all embarrassed when I catch of whiff of it (but of course, by then I'm out in public and it's too late to change). I imagine to myself that anyone else close by is disgusted by the odor, but would no doubt be even more grossed out if I explained, in my defense, that it's not me that stinks--it's the previous owner's super stink that just won't wash out ...

Exhibit B cannot be displayed, since I didn't take a picture of it. But this is a much more bizarre case. One day, a stomach turning stench of body odor wafted around our living room. We had a hard time, at first, tracking it down, but ultimately discovered it was emanating from the DVD of Inspector Maigret we'd checked out from the public library. The disc itself reeked as if it has spent the last several months lost in the fat folds of a 3,000-lb person--perhaps upon that person's death, the disc was discovered (and removed with tongs, I imagine) and returned to the library. I can come up with no better explanation. I also cannot find words extreme enough to describe the potency of the b.o. that somehow got onto that disc.