Deodorant

Where BO Man so often strikes...

When I go to the store, the only thing I’m thinking about is food. That’s my primary motivation to go to the store – find more delicious things that I’ll be able to eat. Eating is fun for me, like a very simple yet delicious arcade game, and going to Market of Choice to buy more food is like going to the front counter at the arcade to get more tokens. Buying laundry soap or a toothbrush doesn’t even factor into what I’m thinking about, because as soon as I go into an aisle that isn’t full of opportunities for me to eat stuff but rather to clean stuff, what I’m doing stops being fun and exciting and becomes a chore.

When I run out of Pop Tarts, I’ll gladly go right out to the store and buy some more, because then I get to play the game where I try to decide what bland fruit flavor I’ll be numbly shoving into my mouth on the bus to class every morning. When I run out of toothpaste, though, I think, “Ah, I’ll have to get more toothpaste when I go to the store.” And then, the next time I go to the store, I’m so busy deciding what kind of Newman’s Own pasta sauce to get that I completely space on the toothpaste.

And then, that night when it’s time to brush my teeth, I remember that I’m out of toothpaste and squeeze the completely flattened toothpaste tube as hard as I can, hoping that if I squeeze with enough intensity it’ll open a wormhole inside the tube leading to an alternate dimension completely filled with Aim toothpaste, which will then squirt onto my toothbrush. Whenever that doesn’t happen (it never does), I just use my roommate’s. I do the same thing with shampoo. If my roommates figure this out, I’m in deep shit, so nobody tell them, okay?

However, the one place where I’m unwilling to mooch off my roommates is also perhaps the most necessary personal hygiene item of all: Deodorant. My roommates and I don’t have a strong enough relationship that we’re comfortable swabbing the same thing around under our armpits, but deodorant is also not the sort of thing you can get away with not using. I ride public transportation everywhere and will occasionally mouth the words I’m thinking; having an inoffensive odor is the only thing between me and the people who hang out at the transit mall all night.

It’s not that I’m even an especially foul smelling person – I pride myself on my ability to avoid all activities that could cause me to break a sweat. I wear deodorant out of a certain civic responsibility – it’s something we all do, as humans, whether we deem it necessary or not, if we want to be in society. Just like how immunization shots theoretically protect us by surrounding us with people who are unable to spread disease, the Deodorant Social Contract protects us by surrounding us with people who are unable to stink. And the people who refuse to wear deodorant are a lot like the people who refuse to let their children get immunized in that they’re insane douchewhales who nobody wants to be around.

So when I woke up this morning and found that I was out of deodorant, I grudgingly marched off to the store to refill my supply, worried the entire time that in spite of having just showered I might begin sweating profusely in the 15 minutes between leaving the house and obtaining the deodorant, creating a stink bad enough to permeate my shirt, my sweatshirt, and my jacket.*

*Like all other bizarre things about me, this obsession can be traced back to my parents. My mother, for her entire life, has been doing battle with a nefarious individual she calls ‘B.O. Man.’ He takes many different appearances but always winds up near my mother in a confined space, his suffocating Body Odor enveloping himself and the surrounding area like a celestial gas giant. He’s The Joker to Mom’s Batman, and throughout my childhood she made it known to me that people who smell bad are bad all the way to the core.

However, the only deodorant available at Market of Choice was the scented variety, whereas I am an ‘Unscented’ man, through and through. I wear deodorant because I want to not smell like anything – I find it highly unlikely that smelling like a pine forest will do much for your social or professional life beyond let everyone know that you’re wearing deodorant, a product which I appreciate for its subtlety in eliminating bad smells, not its ability to replace them with new, supposedly better ones.

And who are you trying to kid anyway, you with your ‘Ocean Breeze’ scented deodorant? You think we actually believe you’ve got the ocean in your armpits? Or maybe you want us to think that you just naturally smell like Lincoln City? You disgust me.

Alas, my options were limited – I had to go to work soon and I couldn’t go deodorant free under any circumstances. So I bit the bullet and bought the ‘Fresh’ variety of Speed Stick, figuring it was probably the least obtrusive out of all the available options.

And I’ve been sitting here in the checkout room smelling Fresh all afternoon – a foul, artificial odor that smells like wearing a wide brimmed baseball cap and riding a longboard. It’s really pretty awful. I’m considering doing a bunch of jumping jacks just so I can sweat some and balance it all out.

If this is what being fresh smells like, I’m going to have to seriously evaluate major parts of Will Smith’s acting career.

Truman Capps’ life got flip turned upside down…