That One And Only Smell

There is exactly one building in this county where you can smoke inside. It's called "The One And Only", and if you haven't guessed that it's a bar, well, it's a bar.

This bar is about as big as three doublewide trailers mashed together, is probably built out of three doublewide trailers mashed together, and has aobut as much ventilation as your average boarded-up doublewide trailer. Right after I moved to this shithole ... uh, town... I decided to check out this bar.

I'm a smoker. I smoke about a pack every 1.5-2 days, I never smoke in my house. I do burn a LOT of nag champa incense, so my hair and clothes smell strongly of champa, and somewhat of cigarettes.

So, I go into this bar, and it's a fogbank, bad karaoke, meth-head bartender-chick, meth-head barflies, the usual cowboy-pimp-daddy drunks you see in the rural southwest, and a reek like my outside ash-can after 2 days of rain and a lit butt left on top of the drying debris to smoulder. They have ceiling fans, but I think it's only to give the drunks some entertainment while being drunk. "Wow, man lookathaswirly air! Hey, Hunny, get me another'n woodja?"

I managed to stay in there for 30 minutes, and then just couldn't get out fast enough- I felt sick from the air (and the karaoke.) I've never been back. I drank the worst coffe in the dirtiest cup I've ever seen in that bar - something told me not to touch anything that came out of their tap, and I don't think they had anything in a bottle that wasn't made from Milwaukee river water.

Anyway ...

When I got home that night, I took off my clothes, took 2 long hot showers all mashed together, and went to bed. I woke up in the night smelling something awful, couldn't figure out what it was, it smelled like ... the bar. Then I realized that it was my laundry basket. My clothes, exposed for a half hour, had filled the whole room with that "One And Only Smell" that, even as a smoker, I can never bear to smell again.