#57 – Sit on the bus and gasp for air through the wet dog smell of fellow drenched students
Smell is the sense that most embeds itself in your memory. There have been many moments where I’ve smelled a certain perfume, food, or natural aroma that transports me to a time in my childhood. Which is why the student produced smell of wet dog is so beautiful to me.
As Lynryd Skynyrd once sang “oo that smell, can’t you smell that smell,” and that smell that surrounds you is sodden, shivering students who have forgotten that dryness isn’t just a type of comedy used by humour columnists.
It brings me to a time that a part of me has forgotten and that time is the day prior.
Every morning, getting onto the bus full of soaked 20-somethings takes me all the way back to yesterday — a time full of innocence, ignorance and torrential downpour. Sitting down, I remember the simpler times of 24 hours previous where I was doing that exact same thing. This daily reminder that I haven’t had a day without rain in recent memory is like a soothing kick to the groin slowly putting you to sleep.
The description of the smell wouldn’t encompass its essence. A sweet and sour aroma that is distilled from stress, rainwater and fuck everything. It's unmistakable. Like benevolent mustard gas, it fills the iron tube with its power. The wonder of the wet-student smell is that you are adding to it, you’re partaking in the communal stinkification.
#58 – Repeat every rainy day until the end of April
The true fun of this comes from the fact that we live in Vancouver and this will be an every day occurrence. The rain just pours down forever. There’s even a point where you say to yourself “doesn’t rain turn to snow at some point or something,” and my answer is simply: not here. There will not be a dry commuter for the next four months and every bus will just smell staler and staler until we finally see the sun again in April or August. One of the two.
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