I first realized water's uncanny ability to hide its many stinking secrets years back when an old fish died in my father's tank. My dad found its well-rotting corpse somewhere between a rock and plastic plant. As he scooped it up, its monstrous carcass emerged from the depths. As the water broke over it, a stench erupted into the air that I can only describe as:
Though we can smell the surface of the water, reekings can be muffled or hidden under the constant swirling of the universal solvent. Think of how many things live, eat, poop, and die in the ocean. Water at this very moment is hiding stinks so deep in its darkest trenches that the land creatures of this world will never experience them. Thank GOD.
Far more recently I've had to learn another property of water when introduced to stink. The way mirrors reflect light, water reflects stink. It's creepy enough when somebody breathes down the back of my neck, but when it's their breath bouncing off the surface of the water up into my nose, life just seems too cruel.
Swimming in a lane with somebody who is cruelly unaware of their own bad breath makes for a doomed, doomed practice. A rest at the wall leaves me choosing between suffocating from lungs full of pure CO2-stink combo or suffocating from holding my breath too long. Some solutions are just not realistic. The only practical thing I can manage is leaning over to the next lane for fresh air. I would just stay under water, unable to see, hear, OR smell them, but most swim practices call for time management and therefore my personal Shamu routine will probably never run.
... I forget the point of this post. I just wanted to draw me trying to be an orca. Water and smells, oh yeah. Hmm. I could just tell people that they have bad breath sometimes. Unlikely.
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