Scent of a Man

My wife likes to say that I have a "bridge brain."

I don't know what her precise definition would be (perhaps she will regale us appropriately in the comments section while she is "working" at her "job") but a bridge brain is something that enables me to enjoy shopping for clothes with/for her at Anthropologie, talk openly about my feelings, obsess over what belts go with what socks, and generally know what members of the opposite sex are talking about a high percentage of the time.

Having a bridge brain, I realized this morning with some dismay, does not, however, enable me to understand perfume commercials.

Every time I am watching television and a perfume commercial comes on, I feel like I am on drugs. Bombarded with visuals and sounds I don't understand-- waves crashing over a small dog, the woman in gold throwing her necklaces and bracelets and shit all over the floor, a girl in a crinoline dress and cat-eye sunglasses ascending heavenward clutching balloons, WASPy people at a wedding giddily chasing each other around Nags Head, Matthew McConaughey-- I am left feeling a variety of unkind and unpleasant emotions ranging from embarrassment to desperate confusion and an acute sense of vertigo.

This must be what it's like for thirty-something women who happen to walk into a room where a "Three Stooges" short is playing on the TV.

I like my bridge brain. I really do. I think it's something I have that lots of men don't have and maybe some wish they did. I think it helps me communicate well with my wife, my mother and sisters, and my female readers (I guess you're really the judge of that, my little Canadian harem) but I sometimes wish it better equipped me to fathom what the hell is going on in the average perfume commercial.

I definitely understand the six-second bit at the very end where the breathy, slightly and ambiguously-accented forty-something-year-old tells you to buy the so-and-so bag-o'-fun from Macy's for $75.50 (a $100.00 value). That I understand. I don't understand cello music playing while two Mer-people undulate against each other in a green lagoon.

You foreign readers will probably tell me that I'm "too American" and potentially unsophisticated to comprehend the creativity that is exuded by scent commercial directors, how they're really producing the artistic equivalent of a 22 second Fellini film, but I'm just not so sure. Those of you who do drugs will inevitably tell me that I need to start doing drugs and that, once I do, I'll get the commercials-- just like doing shrooms in the early 1970s helped you understand Terry Gilliam's "Monty Python" animation sequences.

Or maybe I just need to start wearing cologne. Of course, I never understood that either. Why shower, get all clean and nice smelling, and then apply a hyper-expensive liquid to yourself that makes you smell like my Great Uncle Martin's liquor cabinet?

I know. Some bridge brain, right?