Day of Hell Gate, 10th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): A dog's sense of smell is famously extraordinary. Ineluctable modality of scent: Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Cats' superpower is their hearing, but they can still smell far more than we humans.  

Actually, almost any animal has a better sense of smell than we humans, and that's probably a good thing. We humans stink. Far more than we probably know because of our weak noses. If we knew how badly we smelled, we'd stop fucking and that would be that for the species. Sexual attraction requires a certain suspension of disbelief as we ignore our partners' halitosis, their mole-covered backs, traces of urine and excrement remaining near the genitals. If on top of all that, we could smell each other as well as our pets can, there wouldn't be any more people to care for those pets.

They say that wild beasts fear people, "they're more afraid of us than we are of them," but bears may run away simply because we smell so repulsive. We're not on the menu of the food chain more often because of the way we stink. That's probably an evolutionary adaptation, a defense mechanism. The hominids that smelled worse survived more often to pass down their smelly genes and the hominids that couldn't smell the other hominids were more likely to engage in that genetic sharing.

It's raining again and I've cancelled my alternate-day walk. The rainy weather let up for a few days just long enough to let me get in two walks for a total of 19.1 miles (a Hayes). Now it's teasing me - rain interspersed with sunlight tempting me, taunting me, to go outside. But the precipitation probability from now (two-ish in the pm) to sunset ranges from 30 to 80%, and since my walks take two-and-a-half to three hours, I'm not risking it. Walking in the rain may sound romantic, but in practice it is not.

However, as I look at the 10-day forecast, I better get used to it, or else start taking much shorter walks.