I’m the only person who can smell the inside of his nose.

You think this strange? You’re darn right it is.

Particularly when I have a cold, or a sinus infection or something, I can smell the inside of my nose.

What does it smell like? Grotty. But perversity being what it is, it’s kind of addicting. Like, I can’t describe it. I mean, why would the inside of your head smell like flowers anyway? (more about flowers later). After all, you’re smelling gooey slimy stuff oozing in the inside of your nasal passages up into your cranium, a sewer-like channel that emits from time to time muck that’s been festering, sealed off from the open air.

Despite the way the inside of my nose smells, I have to sniff some more. I don’t know why. Like it’s a narcotic. It’s not good, but you have to anyway, compulsive behavior that fulfills some inner need, some longing or emptiness. I’ll be sitting there in a sales meeting, listening to someone drone on interminably about profits of the company I work for, or lack thereof, a dreary catalog being repeated at that very same moment in thousands of offices across the country----and I’ll be ignoring it, sniffing away.

This must be a throwback to some ancient urge, lost in the mists of time, much like the brine scent women have that induces in men the compulsion to reverse Darwinistic development and swim back into a primal sea (or the womb).

The boss is talking on and on, boring, the same kind of recounting we had the week before, and the week before that. And I’m sniffing.

You think I’m crazy. But I’m the only sane person left. In our world of engines, we’re running around like chickens with our heads cut off every Monday morning simply to get somewhere we have to be so we can repeat it all over the following week.

You do it every week, week after week, and you call me crazy.

We’ve forgotten our senses.

Sight, smell, and touch.

You run to the car, and turn the key in the ignition so your tail pipe emissions can make the ozone hole bigger. You stepped on and crushed a wildflower growing between the cracks of your driveway that is a miracle of evolution. The pollen from that little buttercup took eons to evolve, fluff blown on the wind across a Jurassic swamp-filled lake where your house now sits. Tiny microbes went to work, crystallizing over centuries, intermingling with dinosaur and later primate dandruff.

It took millions of years. It grew despite your paving over it. You crushed it with your foot. Never saw.

I consider myself a sensual man. While you’re sitting in your fat easy chair reading obscenities in the newspaper, I’ll be outside, sniffing, touching, feeling, and thus, living. I have this suspicion flowers can talk, but not very loudly. They’re trying to tell us something---if we’ll take the time to hear.

You’ll see me stooping in the driveway on all fours, listening.