Olfactory landscape--City

Ah, that smell--a complex and swirling mixture which clings to my nose hairs and burrows into my palate to seep out later. It comes to my nose in varying proportions of diesel smoke, rain on grime-spattered pavement, ordure, sweat-varnished clothing, frying meat, wet newsprint, decaying animal carcass, burnt brake lining, vegetable oil cooked to motor oil, urine, spices unnamed and unnameable, cigarette ash, and the ozone belch of a subway tunnel. It is death, and life, and sex and waste, food and excretion, exertion, enterprise, failure and pain, an ice-pick stab through a moment in the archeology of the present. It is the city. It is a landscape of the olfactory, knowable only to dogs, or to the blind. It is hills and valleys, paths and dells of scent, secret places where gatherings happen again and again, and move apart on separate paths. It is rough, dense patches, where one must go slowly to sort the trails, and where confusion is the only emotion possible. It is clean meadows of sunlit odor, untrammeled, untouched, and seemingly without end, causing joy without explanation, and without need of any. It is disgust, and sadness, and pain of what was, or could have been.