I’m sitting in Cellar’s Market right now because I hate the smell.  I used to write here fairly often during lunch (in this cafeteria beneath the Chicago Board of Trade; find the pun), but I stopped coming because of the odor. It's the scent of a disparate array of lousy food trapped beneath a nine-foot ceiling.  The décor is ugly; plus it’s, you know, all in a windowless cellar.  Though I could always find a table to write at, I just couldn’t handle the stank.

Lately my sense of smell has been bugging me.  I’ve always thought that it was weak, but now I wonder if I am downright myopic, nostrilly speaking.  On New Year’s Eve my girlfriend and I made dinner at her apartment and I bought/brought many of the ingredients.  When I produced some Gruyere, she said, “Whoa, that is one stinky cheese.” Though mine was the hand holding it and she stood four feet away, I could smell nothing.  Not until I unwrapped it, sliced it, and held it right above my lip could I detect a scent.  Faintly.

Sure, I may have been a bit stuffed up.  In fact, I have been since mid-October.  But this moment troubled me.  At last, perhaps understandably, I began to wonder if something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and if so, whether I’d be able to smell it.

Right now on 97.9 the Loop, Chicago’s classic rock station, it’s Manfred Mann covering Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light.”  Now it’s Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Tightrope.”  Now it’s “Sweet Emotion,” by a band that I refuse to name.

Take any classic rock band, from major to minor, from The Who to Foghat, and it’s safe to say that their hits have played on FM stations throughout America every single day for 40 years straight.  Take any commercial FM station in the country, and odds are the playlist does not deviate—ever—from a narrow selection of hits.  Most of my co-workers (the majority is around 60% to 75%, depending on the day/station) are A-OK with this.  It’s probably just white noise to them, a barely-noticed, pleasant hum; but for me and a few others, we feel like Manuel Noriega hiding in his Panamanian compound while US Army Psyops blasts G ‘n’ R at us.

I bet I have heard all of the songs on this station— all of them—hundreds of times.  Some songs (“Satisfaction,” “Purple Haze”) have to be up in the thousands.  This is the format for all commercial radio stations: play songs over and over and over * ∞+1.  Play them until the psychologically weak among us want to stab ourselves in the ears with the nearest letter opener.