Chapter 9

The five stages of body odor are essentially: preventative, accumulative, obstinate, uncontrolled, and beyond repair. Preventative describes the stage where an individual strives to control their BO on a daily basis by showering and using deodorant or otherwise paying attention to their personal hygiene. Accumulative is the stage where an individual has a mild or publicly noticeable odor due to socially acceptable circumstances such as a weekend of binge drinking, a week-long camping trip, or a few days of home improvement activity. Any odor during this period of usually 2 – 5 days and given that the appearance of the individual coincides with their current activity, is strong and bad-smelling but socially accepted due to the conditions under which they occur. The next stage however, is obsitance, where an individual's activity does not coincide with their noticeable level of body odor. This would occur if a person has reached the accumulative stage from a long weekend of inactivity or inattention to personal hygiene simply because they have not taken the time to do anything about it. Then, they decide that they are going to visit a public place such as a grocery store or shopping mall and everyone around them turns their nose in disgust because these people stink like shit, yet they are dressed in normal clothes and are walking around without concern and wonder why others are curt with them or do not want to deal with them otherwise. If the individual's body odor goes unchecked at this point, they may have a malfunctioning brain given that they are unable to detect their own level of stinkiness. The obstinate person may finally do something about their condition either on their own or by virtue of the fact that they shower themselves before going to work on the next available weekday. However, the uncontrolled individual, due to their inability to detect or otherwise pay attention to their own personal hygiene, may not have the fortunate situation of having a job or other event in their life that would require them to bathe or wash themselves before going out into public. The only thing that would help an uncontrolled individual's body odor is the fact that they will probably get picked up by the police for some criminal offense and be forced to wash themselves when sent to jail. The final stage of body odor is called beyond repair because the conditions that would warrant such stage are usually so extreme that it would take a miracle to be able so drastically change the person's situation so that they would be able to maintain their personal hygiene. An example of this extreme situation would be homelessness. Chuck smelled so bad, that he couldn't even bring himself to the homeless shelter for assistance. He smelled like a toilet and sewer. He smelled like the lobby of the No-Tell Motel known for its hourly rates and no questions asked. Chuck had pissed himself so many times, his pants were crusty with dried urea salts. He shat in his drawers so many times that their original color was unidentifiable. He knew that he smelled, but he was powerless to control it. Chuck had reached the fifth and final stage of body odor, it was beyond repair.