"Share this video with someone you'd love to visit these incredible places with."

Says the robot voiceover at the end of "12 Must See Places Before Living [sic] This World!" — a TikTok that Meade shared with me... not because I was someone he'd "love to visit these incredible places with."

He knows and I know that neither of us would feel that we must see those places/"places" and both of us know that about the other and both knew that the other would find the idealized pictures absurd.

I enjoyed the first clip — a man cartwheeling into clear turquoise water — but scoffed aloud at the notion of going all the way to the Maldives because the water there might perhaps be clear and colorful.

But the second destination provoked my horror of traveling:

  

Somehow I don't think that will be my point of view.

"Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani."

The headline for a Michelle Goldberg column. Excerpt:

“His campaign has attracted Jewish New Yorkers of all types,” wrote Jay Michaelson, a columnist at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. The rabbi who runs my son’s Hebrew school put Mamdani on his ballot, though he didn’t rank him first. And while Mamdani undoubtedly did best among left-leaning and largely secular Jews, he made a point of reaching out to others....

So it has been maddening to see people claim that Mamdani’s win was a victory for antisemitism.... Ultimately.... New York’s Democratic primary wasn’t about Israel.... 

The attacks on Mamdani during the primary were brutal, but now that he’s a national figure, those coming his way will be worse. His foes will try to leverage Jewish anxieties to smash the Democratic coalition.... But don’t forget that the vision of this city at the heart of Mamdani’s campaign — a city that embraces immigrants and hates autocrats, that’s at once earthy and cosmopolitan — is one that many Jews, myself included, find inspiring....

Earthy.  

I was moved to unearth every "earthy" in the 21-year archive of this blog. They're all quotes of other people. I've never once used the word (except for one instance, now corrected, where I clearly meant to type "earthly" ("I didn't think you would be terribly sad to see that Robert Blake has left the earthy scene")).

"In the past I would typically ignore the flowers in the local park; now I actively seek them out. And when I’m in the kitchen I’ll inhale the aromas..."

"... that are readily available in my spice rack, and I pay greater attention to the fumes emanating from the boiling pots and pans. I now consider smell training to be an essential part of my routine. I find it to be pleasantly meditative, leaving me mentally grounded in much the same way as my daily yoga. And while I cannot say that I’ve noticed a huge leap in brainpower, I am optimistic that I am protecting my brain from future decline. This morning I made my espresso as normal and sniffed the cup hopefully. For the first time since I began my smell training, the aroma hit me hard. I couldn’t help but smile when I realised that I had, quite literally, learnt to wake up and smell the coffee, and I shall never take my nose for granted again."

I'm reading "Wake up and smell the coffee — the new way to train your brain/Loss of smell can signal a decline in mental health. David Robson discovered how to improve it" (London Times).

The author is only 39, so his ability to revive his sense of smell is very different from mine. He had luck with one of those smell kits where you sniff at various essential oils — eucalyptus, lemon, rose, clove. Keep trying. Practice smelling. I've already done that. Imagine telling blind people to look harder and deaf people to listen closely. What if that worked?

"Sensient develops its natural colors starting with the seed. It has developed a variety of beets, for instance, that are larger and more saturated in color...."

"After the produce is harvested, Sensient pulps, pulverizes and strains the purple sweet potatoes, red radishes and grapes into a rainbow of extracts, powders and liquids. The process also eliminates the flavors of most of the underlying fruits, vegetables or other plants, but not all. 'You’re never going to take the taste out of strawberry juice. It’s going to be a little acidic, a little strawberry-ish. And that works well for a strawberry flavor in a kids’ cereal.... But nobody is dying for a carrot-flavored cereal.' Even though the color... doesn’t often change the taste profile... the appearance does signal certain flavors — or intensity of flavors — to consumers.... 'If you reduce the color saturation level of a drink, your mind may tell you it’s going to taste less sweet or less sour than the original color.... Duller hues may signal that this is a duller flavor or stale for some people, while for others it may signal that it’s a more natural color, something found more in nature.'..."

From "No More [Synthetic] Food Dye in Froot Loops? Not So Fast. Companies make packaged food without synthetic dyes in other countries. But despite pressure from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the change isn’t likely to happen quickly in the United States" (NYT).

The senses are interwoven. Some of us, including me, have little or no sense of smell, and a lot of what is referred to as taste is really smell. For me, the look of a food or drink contributes a lot to the illusion of flavor. By the same token, if some orange food that used to be flavored artificially were flavored with something made from carrot that smelled a bit of carrot, I wouldn't notice that unwanted smell. But I would notice the duller orange, and that would cause it to taste less... orange. It's complicated. I feel a little sorry for the food companies that find themselves in such a predicament after spending so much time and effort working to please us with everything that is non-nutritional about food and drink. 

"Last August, a woman in Chicago opened her Too Good to Go bag and found seven pounds of smashed cake..."

"... (which she and her friend, the friend confessed, gobbled down). Someone who goes by Cassie Danger on Reddit reported receiving a 'corn sandwich' from a Choc O Pain in the Hoboken/Jersey City area, that is, a roll containing a handful of canned corn niblets topped with a couple of lettuce leaves."

Writes Patricia Marx in "Spoiler Alert: Leftovers for Dinner/How to host a dinner party for nine using a pre-trash haul from Too Good to Go and other food-waste apps. Carb-averse guests, beware" (The New Yorker).

Marx's 9 guests arrived and dumped out the "surprise bags" they'd ordered from the app Too Good to Go (which packages food left over from 6,987 NYC stores and restaurants):

We were just talking about instant coffee — how you don't really need to go through a whole elaborate brew-your-own coffee ritual at home.

It's an easy choice for me because I don't have enough of a sense of smell to notice the difference, but now Meade has switched to instant. How did we all get so convinced that we needed so much equipment and fooling around to make coffee?

Back in the 1970s, there was an ad campaign aimed luring young people into the then-dying practice of drinking coffee. Coffee, we were told, was "the think drink." One thing led to another I guess, and we became way more wrapped up in coffee than the International Coffee Organization could have imagined. Do you ever stop and wonder if it's worth it, this long strange coffee trip?

Today, I run across "The Case Against 'Good' Coffee/Instant coffee tastes … just OK. And that’s fine by me" by the novelist Peter C. Baker in The New York Times.

I feel compelled to disagree.

I'm reading "Robert Sapolsky Doesn’t Believe in Free Will. (But Feel Free to Disagree)/Shedding the concept 'completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy,' the Stanford biologist and neurologist argues. It might also be liberating" (NYT)

The interviewer asks, "So, whether I wore a red or blue shirt today — are you saying I didn’t really choose that?"

Sapolsky answers:

Absolutely. It can play out in the seconds before. Studies show that if you’re sitting in a room with a terrible smell, people become more socially conservative. Some of that has to do with genetics: What’s the makeup of their olfactory receptors? With childhood: What conditioning did they have to particular smells? All of that affects the outcome.

And what of those of us who have lost all or most of our sense of smell? Is this random affliction making me liberal?

Asked "Do we lose love, too, if we lose free will?" he says:

Yeah. Like: “Wow! Why? Why did this person turn out to love me? Where did that come from? And how much of that has to do with how my parents raised me, or what sort of olfactory receptor genes I have in my nose and how much I like their scent?”

Lacking a sense of smell, am I more free? I know, he'd say I'm not free at all. I lack this factor that affects other people's decision-making, but that just leaves me disproportionately affected by the remaining factors.

It seems clear, based on the whole article, that believing there is no free will makes people more liberal. You won't think people deserve the rewards and punishments that come their way. But you don't have free will to decide not to believe in free will. First, comes the desire to justify the status quo and to punish wrongdoers, and then comes the belief in free will. Take that away, and you'll run into the arms of Sapolsky.

"The liberalization left behind a legal oddity: Marijuana use remains prohibited in public spaces...."

"Yet it’s allowed on private property.... Some have proposed social consumption spaces — 'analogous to a bar or a restaurant,' said Morgan Fox, NORML’s political director — though such sites could pose a nuisance to neighbors as well as workers. Another idea is to rescind the prohibition on smoking in public spaces, which would presumably cut consumption in cramped residential settings. It would also import the smellscape of New York City, where sidewalk pot smoking is legal. 'The number one thing I smell right now is pot,' said Mayor Eric Adams in July 2022. 'It seems like everyone is smoking a joint now, you know. Everybody has a joint.'"

Writes the Editorial Board of The Washington Post, in "A dispute over marijuana smoke raises questions for D.C. — and beyond."

Smellscape....

"Figuring out how odor perception emerges from brain activity is a complex decoding problem, but there may be multiple ways to re-create important aspects of smell for people with anosmia."

Said Mark Richardson, director of functional neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, quoted in "'Bionic nose' may help people experiencing smell loss, researchers say/Two scientists are working on a neuroprosthetic that may help millions with anosmia, such as those who lost their sense of smell because of covid" (WaPo).

I have this problem myself and would love a cure, but there is no way I would accept an implant in my head to solve this problem. We're told this device would be analogous to the cochlear implants that give people with deafness a way to have something like hearing:

Hearing through a cochlear implant is different from normal hearing and takes time to learn or relearn. However, it allows many people to recognize warning signals, understand other sounds in the environment, and understand speech in person or over the telephone.

Why would you want something like that to replace smelling — want it enough to have something surgically implanted within your skull? The WaPo article talks about an anosmia patient who misses nostalgic smells like Christmas tree, but I doubt that kind of subtlety is coming.

If you want to help me sense dangers like fire and smellable toxins, just invent a wearable device — a wristband — that gives off an alert that I can hear/see/feel. I don't need some kind of fake smell-like sense intruding into my natural experience of the world. 

I misunderstood almond milk.

I've been drinking whole milk — cow's milk — in my coffee for many years, but I wanted to go milk-free for 3 weeks just to test myself — on the off-chance that it has something to do with my loss of smell. Yesterday — Day 1 — I just had black coffee, which is fine.

But then I bought some almond milk. Today — Day 2 — I put almond milk in my coffee. Well! That's no substitute for whole milk! It looks as though I put skim milk in my coffee. Don't ask me how it tastes. I don't have a proper sense of taste. It's a look and a feeling I want. For that, almond milk is useless.

Annoying words on the label: "unrivaled creaminess." 

I guess that means unrivaled by other brands of almond milk.

"Loss or change of sense of smell or taste can lead to 'severe distress'... people... often feel 'isolated' when dismissed by clinicians."

"Daily activities such as smelling coffee and testing the flavour of food can become 'disgusting and emotionally distressing'.... [A]n estimated 5.6% of patients have smell dysfunction for at least six months and 4.4% have altered taste.... [W]hile most patients are expected to recover their sense of smell or taste within the first three months, 'a major group of patients might develop long-lasting dysfunction that requires timely identification, personalised treatment and long-term follow-up.'"

 
From "Covid study finds millions have long-term smell or taste problems/Researchers say about 5% of infected adults may develop long-lasting changes to sense of smell or taste" (The Guardian).

What is the "personalised treatment and long-term follow-up"? I've had a loss of the sense of smell for over a decade, and from what I understand, there is no treatment. I'd love for there to be more research to develop treatments, but if you don't have anything to help me, I don't want health-care money — and my own time — wasted on monitoring me.

The article refers to "the devastating effect that loss of smell and taste can have on quality of life and wellbeing." Don't overdramatize! It's as bad as it is but no worse. My life isn't devastated. How do you expect people with worse disabilities to keep their spirits up? 

ADDED: By chance, the very next thing I read, also in The Guardian, was "I gave up hope of a cure for my chronic condition. And it’s made me happier than ever before/For 30 years, I tried to ‘fight’ it. In the end, I found relief in embracing my identity as a person with a disability" by Keith Kahn-Harris: 

Smells like travel.

I'm reading "The best travel memento smells like vacation/Science says smells evoke memories. That’s why I buy a candle on every trip" by Dayana Sarkisova (WaPo).

I'm interested in this because 1. I'm a travel skeptic, 2. I have almost no sense of smell, 3. I never buy "souvenirs," and 4. Even if I had a good sense of smell, I wouldn't want scented candles. 

And I do think: 1. Sense of smell is part of the travel experience, 2. The decision to travel entails a cost/benefit analysis and smell can be a negative or positive, 3. Scented candles bought somewhere don't really contain the smell of that place, 4. You can reinforce any memory by linking it to a sensory experience, even one that has only a random connection to that memory, 5. It would be really annoying to travel with someone who needed to take time to shop for a scented candle on every damned trip. 

Because I have almost no sense of smell: 1. I can't experience the full dimension of the difference of a foreign place,  2. I can't get too excited about the food (and even have to worry that the food could be bad, even dangerously bad, and I wouldn't know it), and 3. If I had to live with someone who was really into burning scented candles, it wouldn't affect me, unless there was a verbal component — an oh-that's-the-smell-of-Paris narrative.

"Dr. Bromage suggests a cigarette analogy: If someone were smoking, would the smell and taste of cigarettes quickly fill the air?"

"If yes, so would the virus. You’d be smart to wear a mask. If not, it’s unlikely that you’ll get infected. 'When I walk into a space, I always do that,' Dr. Bromage said. 'How high are the ceilings? Is the air moving? Can I create my own little buffer of space?'... Take a big box store with high ceilings. 'Those tend to have good ventilation and because of the high ceilings, there’s a lot of dilution,' said Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the airborne transmission of viruses. 'The risks are pretty low, unless you’re in a crowded line waiting to check out. If it’s a smaller space and crowded space, Trader Joe’s, for example, or some New York market with tiny aisles and people are really packed in there, the risk is higher.... You might want to wear a mask.'... At a restaurant, one person’s cigarette smoke at the next table over wouldn’t fill the air above yours. But you would smell someone smoking at your own table, so your direct dining companions pose the highest risk, Dr. Bromage said."

From "Should You Still Wear a Mask? Experts weigh in on where, and when, you can safely take one off" (NYT). Here in Madison, we're 10 days away from the end of our mask mandate.

As a person with an almost nonexistent sense of smell, I appreciated the wording "would the smell and taste of cigarettes quickly fill the air?" Somehow that made me think of the question, if a tree falls in the forest, and only a deaf person is there, does it make a sound? 

It's interesting to read that someone smoking at the next table in a restaurant might not matter. I don't remember reading that in the NYT back when the ancient practice of smoking in restaurants was getting snuffed out in the United States.

"Memories of the acrid scents of the hospital burn unit haunted her — she showered three times a day and cleaned her home top to bottom over and over..."

"... but she couldn’t escape the stench of rotting flesh. It radiated off her clothes, filled the RV where she lived with her family, and flavored her food. At night, the sensation of sleeping in a 'heap of bodies' kept her awake. She considered shaving her head to stop smelling her hair."

From "The Stench of Living (and Working) With Parosmia" (NY Magazine).

"A crash-course in how to smell train."

 

I'm watching that — and I ordered this — after listening to the Daily podcast, "The Forgotten Sense/What can the coronavirus's strangest symptom teach us about the mysteries of smell," and hearing about "smell training" for the first time.

I've never had covid 19 (as far as I know), but I have had a profound (but not complete) loss of the sense of smell for more than a decade. The loss of smell is getting a lot of attention these days, and it hasn't been taken very seriously in the past. That's something discussed in the podcast, and we're getting the podcast now because the symptom has become so common. Even though I look for stories on this subject all the time, I had never heard of smell training! 

I've often tested to see if my sense of smell is improving by sniffing at various jars in the kitchen cupboard — vanilla, balsamic vinegar, garlic powder, curry powder. I get a little something, almost nothing, but I keep hoping to get a bit more. But I'd never thought to train rather than merely test, and I've never been methodical about it. It would be more of a spontaneous reaction to thinking I'm smelling something. I'll say "I feel like I can smell the bacon." Feel like. Is it just a memory of smell? A vague warmth?! I don't know, but I hopefully sniff at a few jars and try to remember if I'm getting anything more than the last time.

The smell training is methodical. You have 4 essential oils to smell and get "mindful" about, and you do them twice a day for at least 4 months. Don't give up! Keep going for 4 months. I'll let you know how this works.

ADDED: After publishing this post, I scrolled down the front page of my blog, saw the title, and did a double take. Huh? Smell train?! 

I think most of the comments on this post are people riffing on the notion of smelling a train. Meade was kidding around acting like he could smell a train in the house, and it unlocked a memory for me, a song I had not thought about in over 60 years:

 

The title of the song is actually "In the Middle of the House." It was a minor hit in 1956, and it was something kids loved. There were a lot of novelty songs that kids loved back in the 50s. I'm not talking about children's music, such as you'd find in later decades. Just novelty songs that everyone loved. They kind of competed with rock and roll music, and, in fact, at least to me, as a kid, they made rock and roll music seem like more novelty music. What puts "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Pink Shoelaces" in different categories?

"I feel alien from myself. It’s also kind of a loneliness in the world. Like a part of me is missing, as I can no longer smell and experience the emotions of everyday basic living."

Said one person quoted in "Some Covid Survivors Haunted by Loss of Smell and Taste/As the coronavirus claims more victims, a once-rare diagnosis is receiving new attention from scientists, who fear it may affect nutrition and mental health" (NYT).

"A team of researchers in the Netherlands has discovered what may be a set of previously unidentified organs: a pair of large salivary glands..."

"... lurking in the nook where the nasal cavity meets the throat. If the findings are confirmed, this hidden wellspring of spit could mark the first identification of its kind in about three centuries. Any modern anatomy book will show just three major types of salivary glands: one set near the ears, another below the jaw and another under the tongue. 'Now, we think there is a fourth,' said Dr. Matthijs Valstar, a surgeon and researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and an author on the study, published last month in the journal Radiotherapy and Oncology."

The NYT reports. I need to make a new tag for this: anatomy. I've got a lot of old posts that can take this tag, but I hadn't made it before.

Perhaps this new structure could have something to do with the mystery of the loss of the sense of smell, something I wish researchers were more interested in.

The Oxford English Dictionary "Word of the Day" is "Dylanesque."

The (unlinkable) OED defines "Dylanesque":

Resembling or reminiscent of Bob Dylan or his work, esp. his songs or records, which are characterized by poetic, often enigmatic, lyrics, a distinctive, abrasive vocal delivery, and music rooted in traditional American styles, such as folk, blues, and country; (sometimes) spec. typical or redolent of the folk music of his early records, which combined lyrics of social protest with acoustic guitar and harmonica playing.

I read that definition out loud to Meade and — saying I thought "poetic, often enigmatic, lyrics" got to the heart of it — asked him to dredge up a "Dylanesque" line from the junkpile of his memories. He said:

And she buttoned her boot
And straightened her suit
Then she said, “Don’t get cute”

That's "Fourth Time Around."

I said the first thing that came to my mind was:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon

But I knew I only thought that because I remember Bob on "60 Minutes" saying:

I don’t know how I got to write those songs.... All those early songs were almost magically written. Ah… “Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon…” Well, try to sit down and write something like that.

If I'd really consulted the junkpile of my memories, I'd have said:

You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine

So you can see how Meade and I go together — he's got the suit getting straightened and I've got the leopard-skin pillbox hat balancing on the head. There is order over chaos in the midst of the poetic, often enigmatic.

By the way, I'm working on writing up my post for the 1964 entry in my "imaginary music project," and by chance it contains a ridiculous Dylan lyric:

Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp...
You always responded when I needed your help

Is that Dylanesque? It's not enigmatic. It's just a very ordinary statement about a relationship —  "You always responded when I needed your help" — and daring to put the least possible effort into finding a rhyme for "help."

The best advice re song lyrics and "help" — which only has 2 other rhymes ("whelp" and "yelp") — is don't put it at the end of a line. When The Beatles wrote a whole song "Help," they kept it at the beginning of lines, and made the words at the ends of lines all easy to rhyme ("down," "way," "ways," "insecure").

Do The Beatles have their own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary? Yes, but it's just "Beatle" — "Applied attributively to the hair-style or other characteristics of ‘The Beatles’ or of their imitators." The examples — all from the mid-60s — are about things other than poetry: "the Beatle cut," "Beatle fans," "Beatle wallpapers," "Beatle wigs."

And that sends me back to the enigmatic junkpile of Dylan lyrics. Dylan has 5 song lyrics with "wig" (and if you can name all 5 you get a Bob Dylan merit badge):

1 & 2 (the same line is in 2 different songs): "... they’re beatin’ the devil out of a guy/Who’s wearing a powder-blue wig..."

3. "... Jezebel the nun she violently knits/A bald wig for Jack the Ripper..."

4. "I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind/I’m no pig without a wig/I hope you treat me kind..."

5. "She took off her wheel, took off her bell/Took off her wig, said, 'How do I smell?'"

I wish I knew, but I've got this anosmia/I wish I could wake up and smell the cosmea...

IN THE COMMENTS: khematite remembers a 6th Bob Dylan "wig" lyric (which was obscured from my search because it's "wig-hat" (and I've always found that a funny expression, because a wig is a kind of hat, isn't it?))?

I sat with my high-heeled sneakers on
Waiting to play tennis in the noonday sun
I had my white shorts rolled up past my waist
And my wig-hat was falling in my face
But they wouldn’t let me on the tennis court

Hey! Man in shorts! Bob Dylan in shorts. Has that ever even happened?

I'm going to say no.

"Many people report a particular scent appearing around this time of year; some describe it as melancholy, while others associate it with more pleasant harvest-type smells."

"The scent of autumn can be as much an emotional shift as it is a herald of the waning daylight.... But where does this smell come from?... When the leaves fall, they die. As they take their last breath, they “exhale” all sorts of gases through tiny holes known as stomata. Among these compounds released are terpene and isoprenoids, common ingredients in the oils that coat plants. Terpenes are hydrocarbons, meaning their main ingredients are hydrogen and carbon. Pinene, a species of terpene, smells like — you guessed it — pine. It’s a main ingredient to the saplike resin that repairs the bark of conifers and pine trees. Occasionally, these gas molecules excreted by plants — known as volatile organic compounds — interact with variants of nitrous oxide. This can lead to ozone production, which can smell a bit like chlorine or the exhaust of a dryer vent. In addition to the release of gases contained within dying vegetation, two other effects contribute to the emotion-evoking scent that accompanies a northwest autumn breeze: decomposing plant matter, and pollutants trapped at the ground levels during the fall months. The soil in most parts of the world is rich in Geotrichum candidum, a fungus that causes rotting and decomposition of fruits and vegetables and dense plant matter. In fact, Geotrichum candidum has been sampled on all seven continents. This is just one of many species that erodes away as deceased organisms, the chemical reactions of which contribute to the smell of 'fall.'"

From "The scent of a season: Explaining the aromas of fall" (WaPo).

With my greatly diminished sense of smell, I wonder what emotions I miss. Melancholy? There's a deep dimension to autumn, and I have forgotten it.

Does it smell funny in here?

When is it okay to shout "Fire!" and cause a panic? Brett looks more like he's smelling... not smoke but ... woman?!?... oh, I don't know, but now, I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and I see:

People have indeed falsely shouted "Fire!" in crowded public venues and caused panics on numerous occasions, such as at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall of London in 1856, a theater in New York's Harlem neighborhood in 1884, and in the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, which left 73 dead. In the Shiloh Baptist Church disaster of 1902, over 100 people died when "fight" was misheard as "fire" in a crowded church causing a panic and stampede.

In contrast, in the Brooklyn Theatre fire of 1876, the actors initially falsely claimed that the fire was part of the performance, in an attempt to avoid a panic. However, this delayed the evacuation and made the resulting panic far more severe....

In his introductory remarks to a 2006 debate in defense of free speech, writer Christopher Hitchens parodied the Holmes judgement by opening "Fire! Fire, fire ... fire. Now you've heard it", before condemning the famous analogy as "the fatuous verdict of the greatly over-praised Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes." Hitchens argued that the socialists imprisoned by the court's decision "were the ones shouting fire when there really was a fire in a very crowded theatre indeed.... [W]ho's going to decide?"

When it's not a real fire, but a political situation, who's to say the perception of a smoldering fire is wrong? Me, I have very little sense of smell, so I've got to rely on other people to alert me about literal smells that signal danger. In the metaphorical realm, where the "smell" is of a developing political problem, those who "smell" it earliest could either be wrong or really giving us a useful early warning that we can pay attention to, contemplate, and maybe do something about before it's too late.

As for the smell of a woman — the smell I imagine Brett Kavanaugh to be screwing up his face about — I tried googling that...



"You know what's kept me goin' all these years? The thought that one day... never mind... silly. Just the thought that maybe one day, I'd -- I could have a woman's arms wrapped around me... and her legs wrapped around me.... That I could wake up in the morning and she'd still be there. Smell of her. All funky and warm. I finally gave up on it." That's the key "smell" quote from "Scent of a Woman."

These days, the idea that you'll wake up one morning with "a woman's arms wrapped around me... all funky and warm" feels metaphorical and horrible. Life was going so well. You were climbing the heights. What a good man you are, admired by all, up and up you go, and then you wake up one morning and she is "still... there..." and she's "wrapped around" you all right. Smell of her.

ADDED: What am I really saying here? Have I bitten off more than I can chew? It's my Kavanaugh gnaw.

AND: I am genuinely working my way toward what I want to say about Kavanaugh's predicament. The most straightforward thing I can say — and I have only figured this out after writing this post to pre-chew things — is:

1. This seat on the Court is especially important because of the threat to women's rights. Justice Kennedy was the 5th vote in key right-of-privacy cases, and women's continuing domain over our own bodies is at stake.

2. Kavanaugh has used his relationship to real-life women as some assurance that he will do right by women. We've heard much talk about his coaching girls' basketball and his hiring of female law clerks. He has forefronted his goodness with women, putting it in issue to meet very specific, important questions we have about him.

3. It's not a case of whether it would be fair to prosecute him for sexual assault after so many years and with this little evidence, but a question whether this person should be confirmed to take Justice Kennedy's seat on the Court and to have power for a lifetime to make decisions that will quite specifically determine the scope of women's rights. He has no right to the seat that's comparable to a right to remain free from criminal penalties.

4. Why should we Americans accept this man's power over us? He's been portrayed as a super-human paragon, and I don't think that can be the standard for who can be on the Supreme Court. It's dangerous to go looking for paragons. Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works.

5. I assume all of the Senators are thinking primarily of their own power and how all of this will play in the November elections and in future elections. They are power-seekers and Kavanaugh is a power seeker. I am not seeking power. I am wary of the people who exercise power. I don't trust any of them, and I find it very hard to decide whom to trust here. It's tempting to say, it's wrong to use this device to defeat Kavanaugh. But to say that is to join everyone who insists on thinking of this all in terms of partisan politics. I'm having flashbacks to the Bill Clinton era, when I saw so many fake feminists put party politics first. I didn't. I didn't do it then, and I'm not going to do it now.