Attack of the Ear Caterpillars

I was a bit distracted at last weekend’s Penn State game.  I was having a hard time focusing on the game because a “gentleman” in front of us had the nastiest ear caterpillar I’ve ever seen. I kept thinking that creature was going to attack. Chekov in “Wrath of Kahn” comes to mind, “He put... creatures... in our bodies... to control our minds.”  Okay, “gentlemen”……and ladies should you be so cursed, please invest in a nose and ear hair trimmer. They don’t cost a lot of money, are easy to use and you’ll spare humanity the horror of your freaky follicles.

However, I was only visually distracted but this was my annual Penn State Father-Daughter game and my daughter, Katie, unfortunately was sitting right behind him. In addition to his questionable grooming habits, he also had poor bathing habits so she also had a wonderful olfactory distraction of an intensely sour body odor smell for most of the game. If you’ve never experienced someone with intense body odor, it’s quite a treat. Here’s a quick story to further illustrate this unique sensation.

In the summer of 1990, my wife and I backpacked through Europe after we graduated College. We had a EuroRail pass and were taking an overnight train from Florence, Italy to Innsbruck, Austria. While we’re sitting in one of the train cabins, another couple joins us and sits opposite us. In the enclosed cabin, it only took a minute before that wonderfully intense BO smell wafted over to us. It didn’t matter whether it was the guy or girl or both who stank. We were trapped. We didn’t want to leave the cabin because the train was packed and the only other seats available were fold-downs in the aisle which we had to use for the first few hours out of Florence before the cabin seats became available. The fold-downs were extremely uncomfortable and you couldn’t sleep since you were constantly balancing yourself on them. Our options were limited. As I was debating killing the couple and dumping their bodies, I noticed from my window seat that there were air vents that ran along the base of the window. By pressing my face against the window at the right angle, I was able to keep fresh air from the vents blowing directly into my nose. Now the air from the vents was certainly not fragrant by any means but it was a helluva lot better than inhaling the other smells that permeated the cabin. So I pretended to fall asleep in this position while at the same time desperately snorting as much vent air as possible. My wife, however, was suffering. She had no air vents in her aisle seat but she’s also no dummy and immediately realized what I was doing. She gently tapped my arm and asked if we could switch seats so she could “look out the window”. I love my wife but there are times where it’s every man, woman and child for themselves. I feigned sleep and mumbled “nothing to see…..dark out”. Wrong answer. Her next arm tap was a little more emphatic and without saying a word, I knew that if I didn’t switch seats, she was likely to “Bobbitt” me that very night. So I “gallantly” switched seats with her. Wow! Once I was away from the vent their body funk was so nasty my testicles ascended back into my body to get away from the smell. Brutal night. I don’t recall when they left the train but the odor was so rank and infused in our clothes we dumped them when we reached Innsbruck.