Love Stinks

My 900-pound princess is a martyr to her delicate skin. We both are. Her life has been a succession of medication, steroid shots, tea-tree baths.

And now she must have a specially formulated fly spray, one that contains no caustics, only essential oils. It’s very expensive. I’d consider buying the ingredients and whipping up a batch at home, except judging from the smell, these oils are extracted from the bodies of 80-year old Kazakhstani men who make a meal of limburger cheese and cumin followed by a deep dive in a vat of Old Spice.

Vandy clearly would prefer the flies.

Worse, from my perspective, once a drop of the essential oil get on my skin, it speeds through my blood stream and then invades every pore. A simple hand wash or the passage of time does nothing to lessen the impact. So for the next two hours, Vandy and I hit the trail, smelling like two old Kazakhstani men trolling the Angeles Forest for chicks.

When it comes to perfume, I don’t even like the good stuff. People should smell like people. Only one exception I can think of -- Adrian.

He was a guy I loved in Paris – a Brit, of all things -- and wore Dior Homme. For two good reasons, the relationship couldn’t continue, but there was nothing about him that didn’t please me. And because I knew our time together was relatively short, I committed most of the moments to memory. I lived them and looked back at them all at the same time.

When I returned to the States, I brought with me a bottle of Dior Homme as a present for someone.

If one can pay through the nose, I guess one can cheat through it too.

So maybe this whole essential oil thing is just payback time. For the rest of Vandy's life, when I leave the stable and get in my car, it will be like I’m trapped in an elevator -- alone with the boys, Itkul and Toiyndyk, and my thoughts. Sometimes that makes for one long ride.