An Open Letter to the Eau de Parfumed One Whose Cloying Perfume Left Me Hallucinatory and Naked at t
Dear Eau de Parfumed One:
I deeply appreciate the way your Dior Hypnotic Poison permeated my being so completely at the holiday party the other night. We get it, you can afford very expensive perfume, but it’s overpowering scent made it impossible to taste the delightful bacon wrapped scallops – I could only taste the candy-sweet notes of nail polish remover after our encounter. Not to worry, I don’t need my sense of smell or taste for anything important. I realize that your need to pack my olfactory senses like a Chinatown bus, is your way of saying “Hi, I’m here,” or if you were a cat, “Hi, please smell my butt, I think I like you.” Might I be so bold to say that I enjoy the earthy scent of my cat’s butt more than the exotic saccharin fruit notes of your toilet water.
After an hour-long headache, I wondered if you had volunteered to be a human air freshener as a hostess gift, because not even a Glade plug-in pumps out that much artificial sweetness and brain numbing chemicals. I could track your movement around the party by nose, but honestly, I was only trying to occupy a room that didn’t make me dizzy and blurry eyed, but you managed to spread your scent throughout the house like an animal marking his territory.
I even sought the gasoline fumes of the garage to cancel out the poisonous nightmare that bloomed in my head, but your smelly essence had breached the metal fire door into the garage. The upside? I got to meet JFK who gave me a Swedish massage while we discussed the current state of our democracy. Alas, I spent way too much time explaining Twitter. I came to my senses laying naked on the garage floor alone.
I extend my apologies to the host and to the smelly one for my rude behavior. My choking and gasping for breath were so gauche. I didn’t mean to ruin your good time when the paramedics crashed the party and carted me out on a stretcher all naked and blue. It was embarrassingly self-serving and attention-getting on my part, I must learn to keep my asthma in check.
Even now, two weeks after the party, I am unable to enjoy the simple aroma of toast and coffee, exhaust fumes on my commute to work, or ammonia and bleach when I clean my bathroom. Your hypnotic poison has burned its memory permanently into my nasal membranes.
Happy holidays,
Naked and Confused
