i always feel just a little bit like a pervert...

...in the deodorant aisle at duane reade.

for years and years and years, since i hit puberty like a brick wall, i have been using right guard. after too many years to mention, i've been experimenting with deodorants a bit... first, i bought into that bullshit ad campaign for axe, but it smells feminine. (REALLY feminine.) tried tag, same thing, and the scents had irksome names. then i went to right guard's version of body spray in this bullet / dildo shaped can (maybe that's why... hmm... paging dr. freud...) but it's oil based, i'd think, and after slipping in my undershirt and scrubbing my pit hair in the shower, i ended that affair. hit up adidas, all three scents (which smell, essentially, the same), and thought i was there.... brand loyal to the shoes, why not the anti-stink potions that stank pretty good themselves? well, i was wet and stinky by noon. (but had a great burning feeling i kind of dug. kept me going back initially.) i even tried the new old-spice-for-the-under-seventy-set body spray, but it IS old spice... i'm not old enough to buy any old spice anything, and i couldn't get past that. so, tonight i dropped the f-bomb repeatedly when i realized it was time to head to this exercise in odoriferousness that is duane reade.

i get there and see right guard abandoned their dildo line and launched a new body spray with ambiguous 'masculine' names like all the others. immediately, i started spraying the air and moved my head in to smell the contents. i did this several times before i realize it's pointless and it makes me look kind of weird. then i spray my fingers and smell them. now i really do feel like a pervert. don't quite know why, but i do. first i'm bobbing my head like an over-eager prostitute, then i start smelling my fingers. i looked like a freak. and it's all for naught, really, as with every other deodorant line, all the differences are subtle at best. (should i travel with coffee beans on such trips?) i felt dirty like i was doing something wrong, like i was a dirty pervert getting off on scents in duane reade, like i was taking something so intimate and blasting it into the public's view, akin to jerking off. when a hipster looked at me like i was the freak, and when a japanese family booked out of the deodorant aisle when i finished my antics, i turned purple and grabbed two different bottles (surely not the ones i used as testers) and proceeded to check out. the pleasant and attentive checker, who watched my little auto-pleasuring, starts in:

'these ain't the ones you sprayed.'
'debit.'
'i said, these aint...'
'yes, i have my club card. oh look, found it.'
[bleep]
'next time, you take the ones you spray.'

i felt like my dirty little secret was about to be broadcasted for all to hear. i was on surveillance tapes smelling the air and my fingers, people saw me, i feel like that dirty that just won't wash off, like paying too much at morton-williams. and after all that, i will let you know how the right guard non-dildo line works. let's hope for the best, i can't go through this again.