waiting to inhale

A close friend was recently kind enough to let me smell one of his books.
Now before you cart me off in a tumbrel, or start dialing 9-1-1, or 3-1-1, or whatever you do in a situation like this, allow me explain.

Ask any card-carrying bookworm: There is no finer fragrance than the interior of a yellowed tome with its notes of far-away lands, and an hermetically sealed universe that can only exist within the confines of a front and back cover. Some would rightfully argue that a book is a passport; a best friend; a portal into other people's fate, to be consumed as leisurely or voraciously as the reader would digest it. A good book is better than a good meal any day with nary a chance of acid reflux.

When I was a boy, I used to spend an inordinate amount of time in self-imposed solitude, living through the pages of as many books as I could get my hands on. I found myself consistently laden down with pounds of age-appropriate literature from the school library, somehow managing to later steal more adult titles from the shelves of the neighborhood bookmobile to feed my precocious quest for carnal knowledge.

Of course, there really isn't a point to any of this. Taken at face value, it is just a few paragraphs thrown together in a virtual shrine of the written word. Perhaps it is a call to arms for my fellow compatriots to continue fighting the good fight, reading the good paperback, forging forward against the wind, Oprah Book Club selection raised firmly in hand for everyone to see.
Besides, you can always sniff it later when nobody is watching.