You.
Yes, you.
Stop what you’re doing and listen close, this is a public service announcement.
Before we begin, please know that I didn’t plan on doing this.
Everything had been going great, this morning:
I jumped out of bed with bright eyes and positive thoughts, took a quick cold shower, hopped in the car and drove to the coffee shop to write an email full of inspiration and insight and well-wishes for all.
I took my favorite seat, opened my laptop, and allowed the first sip of a fresh oat milk cappuccino to wash away the final residues of a restful sleep.
Then I opened Evernote, and started to write.
Two paragraphs in, I was just beginning to touch that beautiful flow state where the words pour out of my mind onto the page, no thinking, just doing, pure, effortless…
Wait:
What the f*ck is that?
A smell slams into my senses, sending my delicate flow state into a tailspin.
I look up from my laptop, dazed, desperately trying to find the source of this egregious assault on my faculties.
Then I see him.
Ten feet away — ten feet away! — a man has just entered the coffee shop, wearing a cologne that smells like it was cooked in a nuclear reactor.
Dawg, where did you even buy that sh!t?
Did you make it in a bathtub?
And why, please tell me why, you felt the need to bathe in it before your morning trip to the café?
If you smell that bad, check your damn diet homie.
Perfuming a turd doesn’t turn it into an appetizer.
I’m guessing you wanna smell good for the ladies, but ladies who like the smell of toilet bowl cleaner probably aren’t the type of ladies you wanna smell good for.
And when you hypothetically take these hypothetical ladies home, are you gonna be handing out free gas masks at the front door?
Bro, please just sit by the window over there.
You can’t wear Pesticide for Men in public and expect people not to keep a safe distance.
That sh!t is offensive.
I was in such a good rhythm, now I can’t even remember what I was supposed to be writing about.
Either I’m having another acid flashback, or you might be wearing a neurotoxin, because the words on my screen are starting to look like hieroglyphics.
Now here I am, at a different coffee shop ten minutes across town (yes, I literally got up and left), writing a totally different email than I wanted to write.
But I guess it was meant to be, because this might be the most important email I’ve ever written:
Fellas, stop it with the damn cologne.
Ladies, put the perfume down.
Humans don’t smell bad by default, we smell bad because we live like lunatics:
We fill our body with toxic food that rots inside of us until it seeps out through our pores, so we cover ourselves in soaps and sprays and chemistry experiments gone wrong to mask the smell of stuff that shouldn’t be inside of us in the first place.
Dr. Bronner’s unscented should be all you need, and if you need more, there’s a bigger problem at play.
Get your sh!t togther, people.
PSA over.
– T
