The Stank

I went to the convenience store the other day to buy lottery tickets - because you can't win if you don't play - and right when I walked in I noticed that the place smelled like beef jerky. And I'm not talking sort of in passing, or that it was mildly reminiscent of the spices in beef jerky, the entire place smelled like it was the store room at the beef jerky factory. The stank was so overpowering that it almost brought tears to my eyes, and I have a pretty strong constitution regarding offensive odors. I asked the guys behind the counter and they hadn't noticed a thing. I'm sure when they left for the day they smelled like they'd snapped into a Slim Jim.
   The next day I went to work out and the place smelled like blown insulation. Not the pink fiberglass kind, the paper pulp kind they blow into the attic crawl spaces that instantly starts to smell like the flooded basement of an old newspaper publisher. Not overpowering, but strong enough that I noticed people taking a sniff and looking around when they walked in.
   After that, of course, I started noticing all sorts of aromas. Either I'm noticing smells more or smells around here are becoming more pronounced, but either way, in the past few days I've tagged distinct smells to different locations. And here are a few of them:

   Beef jerky - the convenience store at Colorado and Hill.
   Sewer gas - the intersection of Green and El Molino, SE corner. It's always smelled right there, ever since I've lived in the neighborhood.
   Corn flakes - all of Altadena, North of Washington on Fair Oaks.
   Rotten cantaloupe - the Metro station at Olive Ave. in Burbank.
   Funk so strong it'll make you faint - my fencing glove. To me it smells like home...
   Feet - the parking garage of my apartment building. Like somebody changed their wet socks and left them hanging from the exposed pipes.
   Bad meat or good cheese - the toner store. Something's spoiled, or just about to go bad in there, and they don't even sell food.
   Paper insulation - my gym.
   Tacos - the sushi restaurant down by the Apple store in Old Town. Yeah, tacos... weird.
   Butterscotch pudding - the Target on Colorado between Hudson and Oak Knoll, but not in the grocery section, which might make sense. Up in men's clothes.
   Scotch tape - the stairs leading up from the street to the Trader Joe's at Lake and Hudson. Like somebody wrapped a thousand presents right there.