Do you smell something?

I've managed to avoid it since 2009, but now I had to do it. My spouse and I had to go to a... shopping mall on the weekend.

We are replacing the doors on our laundry cupboard with curtains because it was difficult for me and my walker to get around the wooden doors while doing laundry. So we needed fabric and something to hang it on. We managed to avoid the inevitable trip to the mall for a few months... but the prominent place of the laundry machines in the hallway in the middle of our condo was getting too unsightly. So we ventured out...

We buy most stuff online. Recently we got a whole pile of turtlenecks and t-shirts from an end of season sale. While I was unpacking them I read the country of origin on all the packages: Jordan, China, Indonesia, and one other more exotic country. The unsettling part about it was that all of the clothes smelt the same.

Different areas of the planet. Same scent.

I washed all of the clothes before we wore any of them. I don't know what was on all of them to make them smell the same... but, yeesh.

When we were in the shopping mall on the weekend... there was no scent there either. The fabric store is next to the food court. There was no scent there.

The stale air being forced around everyone in the shopping mall had no scent.

The noise that makes your shoulders tense was there. The bad lighting that makes it painful when you walk outside into the sunlight afterwards was there. The surfaces that look like you could wash them with a fire hose without damaging them, even though they don't look like they've ever been washed, were there.

But there was nothing to smell. All those people, all that "food", and no scent. This is artificial, it has to be. And really, really creepy.

Humans are predators. We are the apex predators on the planet, nothing can live if we want to kill it. A very important sense for predators is smell. It subconsciously helps us move around in our world when we can use all of our senses. Deadening our ability to smell our environment is just creepy.

We spent a couple of hours in Stanley Park after our trip into the creepy shopping mall. We had some coffee. We reunited with our sense of smell.

So now we are recovered from our journey to the shopping mall... maybe we can wait 5 years before the next visit. We hope.