Over the years, my body has slowly begun to de-evolve. Physically, I am starting to go back to my caveman roots. My toenails are yellowing and are getting so hard that in order to trim them, I have to go out to the garage and grab a pair of tin snips. My eyebrows are so unruly that they don’t need to be waxed or plucked, they need to be mowed. My wife told me I was even growing hair on my back, which of course I didn’t believe. Then I looked in the mirror and saw that I didn’t have just “a little bit” of hair on my back, I had werewolf patches of hair. Besides looking like Teen Wolf, my back is also crooked now. Continuing with the BC theme, besides my hairiness and stooped stance, my breath smells like I actually ate a dinosaur. My body is seriously going Cro-Magnon.
My wife, whom I love, has to take the brunt of the new-old me. She is the one who has to see the random hair, the yellow toenails, and, the worst part, smell me. The smell is probably the hardest thing to love about me. And it is everything about me that can have a rank smell: breath, sweat, bathroom time. It’s not like she sits in the bathroom with me while I do my business, it’s just that our bathroom is attached to our house, which means that any resident at my house unfortunately knows my flavor. My wife, the self-proclaimed doctor of our household, is of the opinion that my body isn’t processing food correctly anymore.
She can tell what I ate or drank just by giving me a quick sniff. I’m not talking about smelling my breath or the bathroom air (or living room air, depending on how the air is moving through the house that day). She can smell the shirt on my back and be able to tell what I ate for dinner. Unfortunately for her, the poor thing, she has a really good sense of smell, which means I can’t get away with garlic or anything from a taco truck. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t marry a younger woman or a rich girl, just a lady who had some sort of hazardous materials accident and lost her sense of smell.
My wife and I recently went to Reno, Nev., the Biggest Little City in the World—which needs to change its slogan to the Dirtiest Little City in Nevada—and found ourselves at a casino that had a huge buffet. My wife doesn’t do buffet. She has this conspiracy theory that people go to the buffet just to sneeze in her food. I don’t care who sneezes in my food as long as the food is prime rib. Somehow, in a moment of weakness, she agreed to hit the buffet with me. She made the ultimate salad, and I made the ultimate meat and potato tray with macaroni and cheese as garnish. We ate until we were both sick.
The next day my wife and I went for a walk around the piles of garbage strewn around the city of Reno. For whatever reason, my wife decided she would rather enjoy the smell of the urine-soaked sidewalks than be within six feet of me. Every time I got near her and spoke, she began to wave her hand in front of her nose. She said I had “dairy breath, meat sweats, and beer farts.” She couldn’t stand to be downwind from me. Proclaiming that I smelled like dairy breath, meat sweats, and beer farts may have been the most offensive thing she has ever said to me. Her response was that the stench coming off me was the most offensive thing she has ever smelled.
The crazy part was I couldn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. Then I thought about the night before and had to agree that I had consumed great amounts of all of those ingredients to cook up a batch of dairy breath, meat sweats, and beer farts. I was a potpourri of male stank. I didn’t want to stink. We were on this great out-of-town trip, staying in a hotel. Hotel rooms make normal, everyday wives act like prostitutes. I needed to smell good. I didn’t want my wife to be offended by my mere presence.
I headed back to the hotel and jumped into the shower. I scrubbed my body clean, brushed my teeth, and did my best to de-funk myself. It was an improvement, but nothing I did in the shower could help the four pounds of day-old meat trapped somewhere between my stomach and my bowels. Any wrong turn and my body would expel the half-digested food out of either end. My non-doctor wife may have had the correct prognosis. My body wasn’t processing food the same anymore, especially meat. Even my hair reeked of meat. My gas was so bad it was even making my eyes water.
I suggested we go spend some time in the hotel pool. Surely, 10,000 gallons of water could disguise my stench. The pool plan was working and everything was great. The weather was hot, and the pool cocktail server kept bringing my wife and me drinks. My wife loves to enjoy cocktails in the pool. Drinking makes her have to go to the bathroom a lot, but swimming allows her to continue her drinking and socializing uninterrupted. The reason for this, just so you know in case you ever go swimming with her, is that she has never been inside a pool in her life that she didn’t pee in. Her bathing suit should come with a warning label that reads, “If you’re swimming with me, you’re swimming with pee.”
But it wasn’t my wife’s dirty little swimming habit that caused us problems in the pool. Eventually my body had to get rid of some gas from the cow I was still attempting to digest. I thought I could discreetly let one go underwater. A bubble came up and caused a grown man 20 yards away to pass out. We decided to pack our bags and we left Reno, the Smelliest Little City in Nevada.
Rob’s wife has decided she is going to change his diet; he can’t eat anything that mooed before it was cooked.
