I wish stink were a color…
October 21st, 2008I wish stink were a color, so that I could capture it on paper or a fabric and show people the abomination of foulness that I have experienced here in China. I wish rank were a sound, so that I could record it to a digital device and play it back to all of those skeptics reluctant to believe the depths of noxious to which odors arrive here in the People’s Republic of Putrid.
As it is, I have no way to capture the warzone of effluvium that has mercilously besieged my olfactory senses. While I will most likely survive the stinky land in which I currently reside, hopefully returning back to my mother country with its gainfully employed laws of sanitation, I fear that the smell shock from which I have suffered will never be legitimized. The validation of all posttramatic stress incurred from months of funk whiffing, well, it’s never going to come.
Today, as I walked through the piss-soaked halls of the main building at the Songshan Shaolin Temple Xiao Long Kung Fu Training Center, it suddenly dawned on me that I will never be able to prove what I have endured here. It is an up-at-dawn, endless barrage of offensive odors that never goes away… EVER.
And the whole time I am looking around wondering if I am on a movie set, wondering if perhaps they are filming Labyrith II and the whole film is played out in the Bog of Eternal Stench. Some days I even look over my shoulder half expecting a small dog-fox goblin to appear out of the vapors, apologize for the stink, and ask if I wouldn’t mind stepping aside so that they might continue filming. But aforementioned dog-fox goblin never reveals himself, and instead I am left with an absolutely mind-fuckingly putrid cloud of rancid haunting me with no escape.
Worse yet, unless someone has ever lived in a vat of moldy pig vomit or regurgitated cat puke fermented in feces, well, no one will ever understand….
bekki