It is great being a guy. Since the sixties left leaning pundits have claimed, other than the innate prejudicial and violent tendencies of men, the two sexes are virtually identical. I beg to differ because the differences are bigger than that. For example, in the area of special senses women have six; hearing, sight, taste, touch, smell and guilt. Men have five; hearing, sight, taste, touch but the sense of smell is optional and is only turned on as needed. Let me explain.

Tuesday evening I was enjoying a glass of wine after dinner and I walked into the bedroom to get my boots. I was about to set my wine glass on the dresser when I remembered I am never to place a glass on a wood surface without a coaster. (See, I can be trained.) I looked for something to use as a coaster, but as Druann had recently straightened the dresser top, there was nothing readily at hand for such a purpose.

Not afraid to improvise, I quickly untied my satin neckerchief and tossed it on the dresser top as a coaster. Unfortunately, while stretching to pat myself on the back for my creativity, I spilled my wine. Recalling other training sessions concerning the expediency of cleaning up spills, I knew I shouldn’t ignore the accident. (Besides, a liquid spill on the dresser top is too far from the floor to blame on the dog.)

I frantically searched for something to sop-up the wine pool before it drained into my wife’s underwear drawer. A wicker basket full of our running gear was nearby, but high-tech fabrics won’t soak up anything, so that was no use. Then I spied the fleece headband my wife wears on our cold morning runs. I grabbed it and soaked up the entire wine tsunami.

Being a guy lacking the sixth sense of overwhelming guilt about miniscule mishaps, I tossed the headband back into our running basket and walked back to the dinner table. I purged the incident from my mind before going to bed.

The alarm clock blasted us awake at 4:00 the next morning for another routine day in the Kerns house. Sleepily we chugged our coffee and dressed for a cold morning run. Before long, we hopped in the pickup to drive to Laurel’s new stadium for a track workout with our running friends.

As we were bouncing down the driveway, I noticed my trophy wife sniffing her gloves, then her reflector vest, then her running shirt. “Do you smell beer?” She asked as she sniffed her gloves and reflector vest a second time.

“No, I don’t smell anything,” I said as I looked at the headband neatly encircling her forehead. “Why do you ask?”

“Something smells like beer,” she whined as she began a third round of glove and vest sniffing.

Thinking I could make myself appear smarter than I really was, I leaned towards my wife, sniffed and said, “That’s not beer. I smell a chardonnay…probably a Sonoma valley wine; 2008 I think.” In retrospect, naming the year was laying it on just a little thick and she spun and glared at me.

“What did you do?” She asked.

“Why do you always think I have done something just because I may know the answer to your question?” I meekly asked while frantically thinking how to change the subject. Realizing I had no escape, I spilled the beans about spilling the wine.

Later that morning, while running in endless, meaningless, monotonous circles around the track (it’s like farming a center pivot), my mind started wandering. This is when I reached the conclusion that men’s sense of smell is optional. If a guy were to put on a dry baseball cap that had been previously soaked in beer they wouldn’t have smelled a thing. At the very best, their subconscious may have kicked in prompting them to say, “Dang, for some reason I’ve got a hankering for a beer this morning.”

So why am I telling you this and how is it related to politics? No particular reason, it’s just something I had to get off my mind, but the title made you read the whole thing didn’t it?