I have a sense of smell that borders on being scientifically freakish. I could tell you, with pin-point accuracy, where you’ve been since you rolled out of bed, just by smelling the lapel on your jacket. No man has or will ever cheat on me because they know I’ll smell their mess 10 miles away.

I spend a small fortune every month on Febreeze plug-ins. A few years ago, my family had to intervene and send me off to addiction camp because I was spending all my money at Ye Olde Candle Shoppe every Friday. (That’s when their votives were on sale for 50 cents.)

So due to this mutation, I have strong reactions to olfactory hiccups. Sometimes I’ll catch a whiff of the cinder-block shower room from summer camp and get the strong urge to put on my $1 flip-flop shower shoes that my mom forced me to take so I wouldn’t catch the Foot Funk. Bowling alleys give me the dry heaves. And don’t even LET me smell a foot… I’ll come undone. Then I’ll commence to berating you for being a nasty person and suggest you go bathe. Immediately.

But the smell that evokes the strongest reaction is……*drum roll please*…..cat poop. They say these olfactory memories can go back as far as infant-hood. Even after an exhaustive search, I can’t determine where the initial cat poop smell originated. Maybe someone threw it on me as a child. Or forced me to eat it. Or something. All I know is that I go Charles Manson crazy when I catch the slightest whiff of feline fecal matter.

I start by finding the perpetrator and dragging her to the scene. Then I start smacking her in the face, while gritting me teeth…”God! You filthy animal! What is WRONG with you?! It smells like cancer up in here!”

Then I stick her face in it and tell her to knock it off before I throw her out the back door. This is highly disturbing for someone to watch. I’ve seen family and friends get up and walk out…no, BACK out of my house with a frightened look in their eye.

Most of my cats have been mentally challenged or hookers in heat, so the cat poop smell is like lighting an already-festering fuse of angry madness.
My current cat (New post for a different day) is all of the above plus a few more…depression being her Achilles paw. I’m not exactly sure WHAT is lurking in her colon, but it’s not fit for man or beast. I don’t know how she can walk around with that toxic mess up in her like that. About a year ago, the proverbial straw knocked the camel down and paralyzed it. I’d had it. The cat’s life was in jeapordy and something had to be done before the Humane Society showed up.

I’m not exactly sure how it happened because I was caught in a haze of hate…but I housebroke the cat. She now goes to the door when she has to make an environmentally hazardous waste deposit. Then when she’s done, she jumps up on the back door and hangs by her claws, bobbing up and down like a muppet until you see her.

When I let her in, I tell her how stupid she looks hanging on the door like that.