The Poetry of Stench

In the 1970's Susan Sontag, in her tome Illness As A Metaphor, wrote;

"Cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease."

Ponder on that for a second.

Well readers, with the promotion of Susan G. Komen for the Cure®'s new perfume line "Promise Me", I think there can be no doubt that breast cancer has indeed been fully aestheticized......in a bottle.

Add in the perfume designer's commentary.....

... and I think we can safely say that breast cancer and poetry also mix.

Last week, Nancy Brinker appeared on HSN, the Home Shopping Network, to sell this latest pink breast cancerish incarnation.  Here's the video.  All mind-numbing fifteen minutes of it.  Watch it and delight in statements like;

"....so the woman that wears this...she is constantly kind of intact..........(Editors Note: hastily adds and tapers off)....with that emotional feeling...."

Once again, Komen's timing couldn't have been more perfect when I think about what I was doing whilst Nancy Brinker was hawking cheap perfume that smells just "like you imagine pink to smell".

Whilst people were falling all over themselves to buy Nancy's boxed set for the bargain price of $39.90, I was in the emergency room of PinkBank Hospital being treated for a small, but very frightening, pneumothorax.   I couldn't smell much  because I was hooked up to oxygen all night whilst I spent the night in the ER.  The lady in the room next to me, six years out of a breast cancer diagnosis, was being investigated for possible brain metastases after dropping a knife whilst preparing dinner.

By the time my ordeal was over some 24-hours later,  all I could taste and smell was antiseptic, saline and that radioactive crap they pump into you in order to take a CAT scan.  Too bad I wasn't wearing Komen's fragrant version of breast cancer because instead my experience could have smelt like this;

Floriental and sensual no less!

There were only two good things that came out of my emergency room visit last week. First, my pneumothorax was not caused by lung mets, and second, I got to visit with Dr Cuteness again.  (Beloved wanted me to push the friendship agenda again, but I declined,  preferring to keep our relationship strictly curative......of spontaneous cardiac-thoracic issues, that is).

And the only good thing to come out of Komen's latest smelly business venture is that it serves to highlight just how stupid Komen obviously perceives "us" to be.

A fragrance designed to invoke the feelings of positive hope, energy and love to help Komen's branded breast cancer cause?

No Nancy, we've got your number.  It's at the bottom of the tv screen.

P.S.  I typed this blog-post with one-hand, because the tumors in my left brachial plexus make typing with two hands a very painful exercise right now.  I'm hoping a course of radiation will help bring me some relief on that score.  And there's nothing about that which reminds me of the scent of pink peonies, wild orchids or rosewoods!