Wall of smell

Some 720 California men's room experiences are so searingly painful that it takes several days to find the words to describe them.

Last Friday was a bad day for the third floor men's room.

Smell is about context. Your brain can handle a horrible odor if it can make sense of it. For example, if you enter a morgue, your brain is ready for the stench of rotting corpse.

But when you walk into a men's restroom, your brain doesn't know what to do with a tangy, smoky barbecue smell. And then you realize--nobody is cooking ribs in this location, rather, somebody's colon is profoundly broken. It is not a smell that can be produced by the physically fit.

It was so bad, I actually had my first synesthesia experience (where one experiences smell as a color or image.) This is what I saw.