(Lots about bodily fluids, up close and personal, and the male body, a lot of it in street talk, so inadvisable for kids and the sexually modest)
Another little posting that might — like “Struggling Actor” earlier today — go far. But it starts with recollections of pomanders from my childhood, sparking my interest in getting some for my Avant apartment. Why should I want to do this? (aside from sentimentality), you ask; I will explain. It’s all about the whizz.
Basics. From NOAD:
noun pomander [AZ: also pomander ball]: [b] a piece of fruit, typically an orange or apple, studded with cloves and hung in a closet by a ribbon for a similar purpose. [a] a ball or perforated container of sweet-smelling substances such as herbs and spices, placed in a closet, drawer, or room to perfume the air or (formerly) carried as a supposed protection against infection. [AZ: [b] is the older sense, but NOAD lists [a] first because it’s now the most frequent one]
In the West Lawn PA house of my childhood, apple pomanders, in small cups, were occasionally placed around the house in places where funky odors might accumulate — in the kitchens (there were two, one venerable, one modern), dining room, bedrooms, and of course bathrooms. Their function was to decay, giving off bursts of spicy fruit fragrance.
We made them ourselves, of course. It was something small children could learn to do, but we were happy to do it, because it made our fingers sticky and smelly.
Having conceived a desire for a few pomanders, maybe orange balls as well as apple balls (do people make them from small mangos? I’m seriously fond of mango smell and taste), but it’s pretty much the case that no one makes them commercially, because they’re short-lived. You roll your own, and my painfully disabled fingers aren’t up to that. The synthetically flavored objects I find simply repellent, so I’m currently balked.
But, you say, surely in the great scheme of things, like my kidneys tending to deteriorate, the absence of pomanders in my life is of no significance at all. Get a grip, man.
But there’s a reason for caring. It’s the whizz situation.
Whizz 1. My morning toilet rituals include washing up to avoid the plagues of Pissy Dick and Gross Fingers (from handling my dick to piss roughly every hour through the night), Crotch Pong (from sweating in my crotch pits), and Cummy Pubes (from nocturnal emissions; I jizz in my pants, spontaneously in my sleep or in half-wakefulness, or enthusiastically by my own left hand). The washing up is all about simple cleanliness, but it’s also, crucially, smell control. If I can smell my crotch lying down in my bed, then anyone could smell it on me when I get up; I have a high tolerance for my own gross smells, even — a guy thing — enjoying them, but it’s just nasty to subject other people to them.
Sniff neutrality is the goal.
But then there are the urinals. During the day I need to whizz every 20 to 30 minutes (but can go for a full hour if I’m highly focused on something; that’s pretty much the limit). So, at my nephrologist’s suggestion, I have urinals everywhere, not just the two I use during the night. So, while I am engaged in my various forms of work, I can just stand up wherever I am and piss into a urinal for, oh 30 seconds, and then get right back to my work. Eventually, when a urinal is nearly full, I’ll empty it into a toilet and scrub it out, so it doesn’t stink.
There’s a whole piss / urinal economy here, and I’ve learned how to manage it easily and efficiently (of course, pissing is pleasurable, so there’s an actual plus in there).
Again, sniff neutrality is the goal.
Fresh piss has a light smell, but it ripens in time to a pretty powerful stink, which you probably think of as the smell of piss. I think that my routines of the piss / urinal economy catch things before they get bad, but I worry a bit about pools of urine sitting in urinals all over the house. I don’t smell any evil piss, but then it would be my own, and maybe I’ve gotten inured to it.
I do have visitors, and they are universally too polite to show any awareness of the containers of piss sprinkled around the apartment (there are things you just do not admit to noticing), but I worry about offending them with smell. So I think of pomanders as counteraction, just in case. (And, remember, I like pomanders.)
Whizz 2. The very bad example. Over my life, I’ve had many occasions to visit nursing homes and hospital wards for the fragilely elderly (starting with my beloved Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother in her last days), and repeatedly found myself up against that urine smell. The sign of poor care and negligent cleaning. Abandonment of the miserable.
This means that for me, the smell of evil piss is not just men’s rooms not properly cleaned (that’s pretty much a fact of life), but the smell of death itself. I desperately do not want to have that smell around me. Especially at my advanced age.
I’ve long ago coped with the inevitability of death, learned to live each day as if it might be my last. That’s not the problem. I just don’t want to smell like death. Essence of locker room is fine. Delicious would be an even better way to go.
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