I smell.

When you live in a big city, there are just a lot of weird smells to deal with; there's no getting around it.  I suspect this is why city-dwellers have more trouble dealing with stress.

They're not all bad smells.  The subway line A today had the exact same smell as the last time I smelt a deep early-morning fog, managing to somehow evoke a burnt smell and a cold smell and a humid smell all at the same time.  It is a cousin of the smell of when they put a humidifier in your room.  THAT was what I smelled every time the doors opened all along South America's oldest subway line today.  And I don't remember it from before, and it wasn't happening on the other lines, and it wasn't foggy.  But the smell is incredible.

The dogs of Eduardo Guzmán, on the other hand, smell exactly as disgusting as always.  He has at least 5 or 6, and probably more, some of which are tied to the wall in the living room and the rest of which (at least, of the visible ones) live in the patio outside and in the bathroom on the other side of it.  Eduardo, who's 54 years old but seems much younger and is one of those people whose corpulence seems to signal not sloth but strength, grabs the two most excitable of the patio dogs by the scruff of the neck (collars? please.) while I cross over to the bathroom, shoo the dogs out, and hold my nose while I pee because those dogs smell awful.  Most smells of decay I would define as gradual; their stink is more broad than acute.  But these dogs have an urgency to their rottenness, as if this pungency, like something yellow and living and malignant, were an assault developed over the evolutionary eons to startle primordial man into washing his dog.

Yeah, there are a lot of smells, and you can almost tell how far out you are in the city by what smells surround you.  All kinds of transport smells, all the different vehicles' kinds of smoke and fuel.  All kinds of food smells, predominated by pizza and empanadas.  That weird moldy must in the staircase of my hostel that I remembered from some of the apartments I lived in as a missionary.  Unknown (and best left unguessed) smells.  Dust.  And of course the smells of every kind of people -- you're familiar with the pastime of people-watching, but stuffing yourself into a full train forces upon you the singular experience of people-smelling, which can be almost as fascinating, if less pleasant (I make no pretense at being a wonderful subject for this activity.  I did laundry for the first time yesterday.  I've been busy, okay?  I bought some mints.)  How do my synapses deal with all this unexpected information arriving from sense receptors that aren't used to this volume of activity?  I tell you, the human brain is a marvel, and so is the human city.  Let's not forget the nose either.