#do I smell???

[miraeism]

senior design presentation round 1 today… needing luck and prayers fr

[technically-human]

I delivered

[elminster-big-naturals]

when its 4am and the whole squad is zooted out their gourds trying to read the overhead menu in mcdonalds

[sunclown]

That one wizard from that one game and his cat 🔮✨

[inbabylontheywept]

she was dead silent on the drive home, but that was okay. sometimes, after band practice, she was just out of words. it was a short drive to her house. the only part where it actually felt weird was after i pulled up her parent’s driveway. 

after that, the silence stretched so far it smeared and left a weird residue. she kept looking at the car door like she wanted to leave, so i looked at the door too, then she looked at me, and i looked at her, and my first thought was that she was going to tell me that the door was stuck. i was used to that car always doing some damn thing. it was the car me and all my siblings had learned to drive in, and it was really beat to hell. there were dents all over the body, which we’d unsuccessfully tried fixing up with spackle. it had looked nice for maybe a week, but then the sun wrecked it - the spackle cracked up like the mud on the bottom of a dry riverbed and turned a sort of off yellow-white that made the car looked like it had been molded out of chicken shit. it also had a bullet hole it through the cabin that whistled like a toothless old man whenever the car went above 40, so loud it could drown out the radio, and a cabin that smelled so strongly of bugspray that even the arizona summer we drove everywhere we could with the windows down.

(if you have kids one day, you will maybe, possibly, begin to understand how much i loved that car.)

anyway, i was thinking about what else could possibly be wrong with the chickenshitmobile, and she just kept looking at me, and then i wondered if there was something on my face, and she just kept looking at me, and then the penny dropped and i realized she was trying to work up the nerve to break up with me. 

now, i’d seen her work up the nerve to do things like this before – it could take quite a while. and knowing it was about to happen made the waiting immediately unbearable. 

so i said hey. 

and she looked at me, very startled, and said hey back real small. like she’d been caught. and in a way, i suppose she had. 

and i said it’s okay. you can just say it. i’ll be okay.

i’m always okay. 

and she said: i’m really sorry. 

i loved her, you know? it was highschool, but teenagers are capable of love. the way people love changes over time just as much as the way they stand, or the way they talk, but things don’t stop existing just because they're different. opposite really – a thing only stops changing when it's fully gone.

and i said, nothing to be sorry for, and i meant it. she looked a little relived, and i was happy to give her that peace. then she left. i watched her make it through the front door, because that was just habit at that point, and then i sat there a while afterwards, checking how i felt. and the answer was not good, but good enough to make it home. good enough to limp on. 

so i put my car in reverse, took my last look goodbye, and immediately backed into her neighbor’s car. 

crunch. 

air bags didn't go off, which was good. i left a decent dent in the bumper of the other car. genuinely couldn’t tell if i did anything to my car – anything wrong with it just kind of blended together into the general ecosystem of hand mottled, sun cracked, chickenshit spackle. 

i checked my glove box, and my car insurance info was, of course, out of date. my phone was dead too. as a teenager, my phone was less my lifeline to my friends, and more my tether to my parents, so i wasn’t particularly conscious of keeping it charged. both my fault.

i sat there a few minutes, trying to think of the best way to handle things, and there was only one answer i could think of, and i hated that answer, so i spent a few more minutes trying and failing to think of a better one, and then a few more coming to peace with what had to be done. 

then i went back to knock on my now ex’s front door. 

her dad opened, which i was very relieved over, even if he seemed less than thrilled. he looked me over, and in a firm, but slightly apologetic way said: she does not want to see you right now. 

(i think he assumed i was going to try and talk her out of the break up?)

and i said not here for her. i just backed into your neighbor’s car, and i need to call my dad, but my phone’s dead. could i borrow yours?

and he looked at me, then back at his neighbors car, which sure enough was dented, then he looked at the chickenshitmobile, and if there was something wrong with it, it just kind of blended into the general Wrongness of the car, then back to me, and i could see him imagining the last ten minutes from my pov: getting broken up with, backing into a car, having to walk up to your exes door and borrow a phone, calling my dad to tell him that i just reversed into someone.  

and his expression shifted from stern and apologetic to truly sad, which felt more kind that i deserved. things only got here because i kept fucking up - forgot to look behind me, forgot to replace the insurance forms, forgot to charge my phone. it was my mess, but his sympathy meant the world to me. i probably would’ve cried if he said sorry, or patted me on the back or called me sport, but instead he said

stay out here – i’ll bring you a phone.

and then he left.  

i found a nice spot on the lawn in the shade under a sycamore, then settled into his grass.i was trying not to freak out, and was doing an okay job. he came out a minute or so later, not just with a phone, but a juicebox and a jar of green olives, which really threw a wrench in the whole try not to cry thing. soon as i saw those, a few tears squoze out. i was still hoping i could pass them off as Manly Tears but then he told me that he’d gotten the olives a few weeks before and had been meaning to hand them off to me, and that this was his last chance for that. then i made a sound like a horse drowning in a bog, and he patted my back pretty rough, four solid thumps, like he wasn't sure if i was crying or choking on an olive, and was trying to cover both bases at once.

then he went back inside, and i made a few more bog horse noises while finishing off the rest of the entire jar of green olives, and then i called my dad.

he was about ten minutes away that day, and luckily was home. he drove over, and we went to the neighbor’s house, and from there things actually went quite nice. the neighbor was a retired man who actually said he could fix the dent himself, no need for insurance. he said he appreciated that i didn't just drive off, and i said i was really sorry about his car, and he said he was really sorry about my car, and then he gestured to the chickenshitmobile and i laughed because it really was a disaster on wheels.

then we left.

i thought we were going to head straight home, but instead we went to a gas station, and we both got several slim jims that we folded into thick enough coils that we could put them on a hotdog bun because the growing up mormon equivalent of having a sad brewski with your dad is just choosing to make bad decisions sober. then he took me to the canals and we watched the sun turn all orange and pink, and he looked over at me and said:

brains are good at remembering bad days. so you gotta make sure that a bad day has a good part in in, so you can remember that too. remember that when you have a kid. try to do a good job on days like that - they're going to be a big part of how they remember you.

and then he gave me a big hug and said he was never going to eat another slim jim again.

---

the year after that i went to college, which kicked my butt in new and exciting ways. and on a lot of those bad days, after a test that went sour, or a faux paus that was particularly embarrassing, or some other hardship of my new adult life, i’d stop by the gas station and pick up leathery, half jerkied hotdog before heading to the canals to watch the sun set. i’d take a bite and imagine my dad next to me, grimacing through the slim-jim wad, asking what good thing i was going use that time to remember. 

and in my head, i’d say you, dad. 

i’m going to remember you.

[breadandblankets]

so i took out the trash today like the good house husband i am not, leaving behind the rank smell of long forgotten noodles and the regrets of two people with memory issues

i, like any good tumblr citizen, remember the tales of the person who put two cups of vanilla extract in their oven so i did the sensible thing to get out two Caps of extract

just then, inspiration struck. a bolt of lightning straight from the muses themselves, if i could use vanilla extract.... who's to say i couldn't use other extracts?

i scoured the cabinets, i knew my partner had secreted away some illicit non-vanilla type extracts for baking, and i found it.

hidden in the back of the cabinet was a lone bottle of mint extract

i emptied my two caps with abandon into an (oven safe) glass dish and gleefully set the oven for 300 for an hour

all that was left now was to wait for the sins of the mind to be purged by the mighty mint leaf

ten minutes in... starting to smell kinda like a thin mint

fifteen minutes in, i take a nice deep breath of lovely scented air and i am greeted by searing burning minty pain

i launch myself towards the kitchen, every step closer to mint hell, every orifice on my face burning with the freezing righteous flame of menthol

im fumbling for the oven mitt to rid my home of this foul demon, i pry the oven open and am hit with a blast unlike anything else

i feel what that vine kid taking shots of mouthwash feels, i was seared raw, my tits were blown clean off, and it was just me and that devilish beguiling minty fresh taste

quickly dumping the rest into the sink i ran towards the door, begging for the sweet sweet smell of un-minted air

learning nothing from this encounter, i dare to try once more, with the tumblr-approved extract this time

wish me luck

[skunkes]

the restrained sniffer

[ssalballoon]

rot and ruin

this was heavily inspired by thatkorka's lovely fic! please check it out, it's such a good take on Gale's arc :')

[morganbritton132]

Eddie posts an old home video to his TikTok account. He’s not even in the video. It’s just Steve, in the early nineties, squinting at something off camera like, “Ew, look at that creature! What is that? How did that get in here?”

Then the camera pans over and it’s Mike glaring at Steve from the couch like, “Oh, fuck you.”

[gunstellations]

its sonics turn! 👅

[scribblestatic]

So, you know how lanolin smells really nice to cats?

Well, Narinder is super standoffish after he's indoctrinated, but as time goes on, he finally starts putting some of his barriers down.

He sleeps in his own hut for a while, but he can't sleep well. He's not used to sleep. The Lamb only does it because "it's comforting" or something, but he hasn't done it in so long. So really, he's just been awake the whole time and increasingly cranky about it.

So Lamb, seeing him struggle to stay awake while working in the garden, pulls him over to their hut to talk out why he's not sleeping.

But Narinder starts dozing off within moments. Because Lamb's hut smells like them. Smells like their wool. Smells like lanolin.

And it's got him slumped on Lamb's couch, third eyelid partway over his squinted eyes, pupils blown wide as he purrs and sinks his claws into their cushions.

When he wakes up several hours later, he doesn't know what the hell happened.

Lamb simply smiles and sends him back home with a new blanket, made from a recent sheer.

Narinder calls the blanket gross.

He yowls like he's going to cause Armageddon if it goes missing.

[hjartasalt]

Autistic hypersensitivity does suck ass like 99.9% of the time but also just now I was about to eat some toast that looked completely fine and safe to eat except as soon as it came out of the toaster I could smell the mould on one of the slices that just hadn't become all that visible yet so I guess there's that

[puppy-wife]

where are my sweaty girls at? the girls who get a little hot and their armpits are already soaked. the girls who spend five minutes in the sun and they're already slightly red. the girls who drop sweat while they're fucking your brains out, or getting their brains fucked out. the girls who have a shine and a sheen on their skin like they're made of pure silk and desire. the girls who sweat a lot, and they stink, and it's the most heavenly smell you could ever find. I crave the salt, let me drink you in.

[brainrotcharacters]

The thing that gets me giddy is the fact that Logan goes from "Do I know you, bub?" to "WADE! You don't have to do this!"

[the-upper-shelf]

"The intruder"

[tantamounttoflirtation]

I keep forgetting how funny the whole "did you just smell me" scene is until I watch it again. Its dead fucking silent and Hannibal comes up behind Will, looks him up and down, and slowly and hesitantly leans in to smell him like he's a glass of fine wine. And then he looks away all awkward when he's caught. Like bro what did you expect to happen???