About the moment. From my 8/17 posting “Cool nights”, on my greatly increased prednisone dosage:
it seems to me that my already unusually keen senses of smell and taste have heightened; all my food is fabulous, especially if jazzed up to be even more bitter, more sour, more aggressively fermented, or more spicy than before, and I’m now getting stronger sniff bulletins from my environment
About the background. I am a scent / taste oriented person, in general and specifically for the scents and tastes of the male body. So I am keenly aware of the smell of men’s sex sweat, a clear pheromonal signal (usually communicated below the level of consciousness) of arousal, of making wood. Meanwhile, people have individual body scents, largely a matter of ordinary sweat interacting with resident bacteria on the skin; sexual hormones play a significant role here — some guys are then said to smell of testosterone (though the actual chemistry is more complex than that), or (as several men have said of me, I am pleased to report) like the essence of locker room: distilled locker room. So it has been since the thunderstorm of early puberty
On the taste side, I’m a supertaster, one strongly inclined to extreme taste experiences, seeking out and embracing bitter, sour, umami, and spicy. On the scent side, it’s everything, not just male bodies, though my ability to sniff out hard-ons — not perfect, but still quite striking — was indeed handy when I was on the sexual marketplace (and now provides the premise for a most enjoyable recurrent sex dream).
More generally, though, I get sniff bulletins with basic body scents, sweat types (base, exertion, arousal, anxiety, fear), deodorants, and fragrances all mingled (and interacting), sometimes allowing me to identify specific people with a sniff. But mostly just enriching the information I get from my eyes and ears.
About my elevator life here at the independent living community Avant. My apartment is on the third floor. Reception is on the first (ground) floor, which is where I need to go to get my mail, pick up packages, take delivery of groceries and of meals from restaurants, and meet transportation to medical appointments. (And go the dining room, but that hasn’t happened for a while.) I spend a lot of time on that elevator.
And then I get sniff bulletins about who’s on it with me at the moment and who’s been on it before me. Many many bulletins. Nothing overwhelming; the women use subtle perfumes, the men very light cologne or neutral deodorant or just go unretouched.
Then I got on the elevator with a janitor coming up from the parking garage after unloading a truck of furniture, and he was mildly sweaty, giving off a scent that was stunningly like my man Jacques’s exertion sweat — oh god, do I break into tears of a lost love or grin like an idiot at recovering that love, even if only for a moment? I was of course impassive; my face showed nothing.
By now I’ve displayed myself enough for everybody to know that I’m a fag; my rainbow flag theme in clothing is appreciated vocally by the female staff, ignored by the male staff (though they all, including this janitor, recognize me as a good guy and sometimes do favors for me), and the basis for a light rain of microaggressive contempt from some of the residents. (I’ll try to talk more about that in another posting, but it’s a deeply painful subject, complexly tied up with social class as well as the stigmatized outsider status of gay men. Which once, long ago, sent me into a near-suicidal depression, and left me with a PTSD I’ve managed to moderate some but not heal.)
The important thing in this story, however, is that I got to smell Jacques again. And that was wonderful.
(No, I’m not going to try to get that janitor to exert himself on some task for me so that I can get more of the smell. That would be truly creepy, not to mention disrespectful of him.)
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