Bill's Musings

Having just returned from a vacation, I hopped into my truck for the first time in over a week. My truck sat in the sun, in the intense heat we had here while I was away, all sealed up like a Ziploc bag. It was pretty hot inside, so I put on the air conditioning full-blast, and drove off.

After about 30 seconds, however, I noticed something. Inside my truck, it smelled like an old Dorito chip, only worse. More like a bunch of old Dorito chips, sitting in an old bag of diapers. That’s about the best I can describe it without getting overly graphic. So, I did what came naturally: I opened the windows.

I parked the truck at work, leaving the windows cracked open to vent out the truck. After work, I drove off again. It seemed to have dramatically improved the smell, so I closed the windows and put the a/c back on. Within a minute, the smell returned. Only it seemed to have grown worse. So, I re-opened the windows, and again parked it with the windows cracked open a bit to vent it out.

The next morning, I rode away again, and realised, again, that the truck now smelled like an old jock-strap covered in fungus. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how this could be happening. There was no food or drink left in the truck. It was relatively clean in there. So I pulled over, and searched the truck to see where this smell could be emanating from. And then, after looking around for a bit, I found it. My son had left his old running shoes under my seat.

Running shoes have been a boon to mankind. They have enabled your average person to wear comfortable footwear, and be active in so many ways. All walks of life (pun intended) have worn these shoes, for all kinds of reasons. My kids have worn them literally until the fall apart. So, in that way, we generally get our money’s worth with them. There is, however, an unpleasant side-effect with these runners:  they eventually develop shoe odour (or S.O.). They get S.O. from your feet, which sometimes have Foot Odour (also called F.O.)

No, S.O. comes from F.O. We’ve established that. It’s a fundamental fact of life and science and teenager-hood. But, I always thought that the O should either stay with the F or the S. However, it would appear that if a particular set of events occur, say an especially stinky set of shoes, and the Greenhouse Effect of your vehicle lying untouched and sealed up for a week’s time in high summer, the O becomes something totally unintended and thus renders itself impervious to any kind of effective odour-fighting techniques presently known to man.

We once had to burn Mackie’s shoes in our campfire because the landfill was refusing to take them without a signed, authorized note from those in charge of such things. That fire lasted for days, and singlehandedly took care of the local mosquito population for a week. The fire had a sick, greenish tone to it. I had to use a puffer for a month to recover from that one.

Well, these shoes outstripped Mackie’s old shoes. I threw them in the bed of my truck, and drove off, thinking that would be the end of it. Looking in my rear-view mirror, I saw a man on an e-bike veer into a pole. Then, two kids eating a Mister Freeze on the sidewalk passed out. It wasn’t long before crows and seagulls were following my truck, trying to see just where this ‘dump-on-wheels’ was going to end up. You could almost see a trail of odour wafting from my vehicle, much like Pepé le Pew would in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

And so, I did the only thing I could think of doing: I got my kids to put them in a double-bagged garbage bag, threw in a box of Bounce for good measure, and put this in my neighbour’s garbage can. That’ll tech her for having a nicer house.