A Notebook – Since 2007
Where the nose goes
nobody knows
its downslope bent
uncurls merriment
After a bout of virus
it won’t awake
the nose laments all
smells of peppermint
At night it runs around
amid roses and fishes
lemons and cloves but
the schnoz has anosmia
In the morning it sleeps
like a cat in a ring
if it can’t smell
maybe it can sing
Thar she blows
as big as a whale
in a hurricane gale
our well placed nose
If this short tale
got up your nose
tell me please
how’s it smell?
Knowing the chance of my seeing Wormy again slim, I stayed on through the weekend at his Orange Orchid Tiki Bar, working the back room, enjoying the festival carnival. I slept in the backyard in my cowboy bedroll, with Wormy’s dog, Brigid Kildare, nestled against my legs. But in the early morning, Brigid did her dog thing, up early eating and drinking then hopping through the fence into the ice plant on the dunes and over and down to the beach where she must have rolled around on some dead gull or crab, come back wagging and nuzzling me to get up and follow. And she had rolled in some beach tar. The tar pads that stick to your feet walking the Southern California beaches are too often blamed on the oil business, the tankers docked off El Segundo, the water pipeline connected to Standard Oil, now buried under the beach and ocean, the old wood twin pier deconstructed, the rigs and drills up and down the coast dating back to the late 1800s. And the oil concerns have made a muck of maritime stuff over the years. But the tar Brigid had found and rolled around in this morning like as not was natural, floating up and washing in from natural petroleum seeps in the ocean floor. Whatever, Brigid was a smelly mess of rotting fish, dead bird, and sticky tar. I got up and walked her back down to the beach where we both got a stimulating morning wash in the salty waves, the air clear, a slight offshore breeze, a thin, faint fog already lifting as the sun came up over the dunes, orange shafts of smeared light flaring through the lazy billowing smoke puffs from the stacks of the oil refinery. Ah, she draws my ire, she does, when she does like that, comes in smelling of a red tide, Wormy said, as I explained where we’d been, Brigid now warming up deep in my bedroll.
“Brigid” is episode 50 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
– What are you doing?
– You stink!
– Before we decide if something stinks, what must we analyze?
– But you stink!
– Stink is an argument of definition.
– Pshew! Just like you to ignore cause and effect.
– I’m reminded of the story of the old factory blues.
– What’s a factory?
– A factory is a place where they make things.
– Was I made in a factory?
– You were made in a dumpster under blue neon in an alley across from a factory.
– What did they make in the factory?
– Every evening sharply at five a great whistle blew, scaring all the alley cats but me. As you know, I’m not one to flinch at noise. And after the whistle, the factory hands came out and petted me and fed me scraps from their lunch pails.
– Really? Good stuff?
– Oh, my, yes: bits of smelly tuna fish, little curds of cottage cheese, spam cans still with some fatty gel stuck to the bottom.
– Sounds delish, so why the blues?
– One day, the whistle stopped blowing, and the factory was surrounded by a fence of barbed wire. The factory hands disappeared, and a giant blue spotlight was erected to light the alley throughout the night, all but drowning out the small blue neon above the dumpster.
– What did they make in the factory?
– Golden gooses.
– Why do I smell a moral to a story coming on?
– If there is a moral to the story, it is that life stinks, but which leads to a secondary, paradoxical moral.
– I’m breathless. A double moral story.
– And the second moral is that it is the very stink of life that recalls the sweet smell of love, of who we are and where we come from.
– Ah, that story stinks!
The Coming of the Toads 