This will come as a shock to you, but I’m not as cool as you
think. No really, I’m not. By most standards, I’m middle age. I live in a suburban house with two
kids. I read the newspaper on
Sundays. I tuck in my shirts when I go
to work. I will tell my boys I love them
in front of their friends. Totally not
cool. I know that, which is why I think
I am cool anyway. My coolness trumps my
not coolness.
Until I ran out of deodorant.
Apparently I have sensitive skin. It dries up easily and I have various
splotches and odd-looking bumps courtesy of heredity. With a history of skin cancer in the family,
I have to keep an eye on this stuff, so I get it checked regularly like most
guys do with doc appointments – about every five to seven years.
I’ve been using the same deodorant since I started using
deodorant. I don’t know how I landed on
the kind I use – I don’t recall going to Walgreens and testing every brand like
the bums do. Always check your deodorant
for bum use before you buy it. You don’t
want bum pits. It covers up one smell
with quite another. Anyway, I probably
started with whatever my dad used.
The thing is; although the brand I use is common, the scent
and combo of antiperspirant/deodorant I use from that brand isn’t sold in all stores. Like Walgreens – they don’t carry it for some
reason. But my grocery store does. Every once in a blue moon, I’ll run out of
deodorant and due to sheer laziness, I’ll buy another kind if the store I’m in
when I actually remember I’m out of deodorant doesn’t have my kind.
I’ll take home this foreign brand and apply it to my sensitive
armpits. And inevitably it will cause
irritation and/or cause me to perspire (or rather not prevent me from
perspiring). I’d rather have a rash than
sweaty pits but that sucks too, so I try to always have backup of my brand
stored somewhere in my bathroom.
What happens is that I’ll tap into the backup and forget to
buy a backup for the backup and thereby possibly get stuck with nothing for my
man-stink when the backup is out. This
happened recently. I was plumb out. I scraped my armpit enough with that plastic
push-up thing and figured I should just run to the grocery store and stock
up.
I had to get a few other things like bread, milk, porn and
something for dinner that night. Kidding
on the porn, I get that for free on the World Wide Web. And then I hit the deodorant aisle and put a
couple in my basket. And then I thought
I should stock up so I grabbed four more.
Six total. I don’t know why I
grabbed six. I just did. Listen to me; I can’t explain half the shit I
do, so just go with it. Six deodorants,
bread, milk, dinner and no porn.
I headed to the front and a full service checkout lane was
wide open. The checker was a young
woman, probably in her early twenties. I
put my basket down and stood there, looking cool like I do.
Ding. There goes my
bread. Ding. The milk.
Ding ding ding. Stuff for
dinner. No ding for no porn. And then ding ding ding ding ding ding. Six deodorants to help me smell like roses
and skittles while not sweating a drip.
The young checkout girl looked at me and laughed. She said, “My dad does that.”
I smiled and said, “Does what?”
“Buys stuff like deodorant in bulk. He has a closet full of deodorant.”
I said, “Haha, yeah that is kind of funny isn’t it? Maybe your dad is really smelly and sweats a
lot.” I subconsciously put my hands in
my armpits like that Mary Pat chick from Saturday Night Live. I removed my hands and said, “I figured why
not. They don’t take up much space and I
keep running out.”
She said, “So you are going to be fine for awhile and then
after using all these you will be surprised to be empty and then come back here
to buy twelve. And then twenty and then
a hundred.”
That made me laugh. I
said, “You don’t know me!” And I shook
my fist at her in a way that made my armpit vulnerable to scrutiny. I put my arm down and said, “Well, I am a dad
too.”
She looked me in the eyes and said, “Oh, I know.”
I took my bag of milk, bread, dinner, six deodorants and no
porn and told her to peace-out, yo, and then I strutted out of there. I’m pretty sure a GILF was checking me out.
It’s cool to be uncool.
