kilz.

My office smells like paint fumes right now. I've had to deal with office construction several times, and I find that as a general rule, it sucks. It's loud and in the way. And sometimes it smells. They've been tearing apart our building for about three weeks now, and I've actually been impressed at their quick progress. Several times I've considered working from home to get away from the noise, but then I put my headphones on and power on through. Less distracting than the noise is the guy in the cube next to me saying, "Woooo! Yeah, don't hold back!" every time there's a racket.

But the paint fumes are something else. I hear smell is the sense most powerfully associated with memory, and paint fumes are the key to a very powerful memory from the summer before my senior year of college.

My first apartment was a crappy basement with lots of character. We loved it, because the location was fantastic, the rent was dirt cheap, and we were the types that could handle odd things like sloping kitchen floors. When we were moving out, we had to paint the whole place antique white, because we had painted it a variety of bright colors that were not really allowed in the lease. Before we used the actual paint, we had to apply a layer of Kilz, a hardcore primer meant to kill all the mold that we'd been breathing in for two years.

Being in the basement, there were two windows in the whole place and no other kind of ventilation whatsoever. Kilz is already a very pungent product, and the lack of odor escape route made the fumes headache-inducing. I should tell those kids that huff paint to get high to invest in some Kilz. That stuff messed with my head. Aside from making it ache something awful, I had a really hard time focusing on what I was doing. I remember sitting in the corner of my room, painting the wall. I would do that for maybe thirty seconds before I would stop and sit there for a couple of minutes, not doing anything. Then I would remember what I was supposed to be doing and I would start painting again, only to stop and stare into space again a few seconds later.

Later that evening, I watched TV with my roommates, who had also been painting with Kilz that day. Despite my throbbing head, whatever was on TV was extraordinarily funny. We were all literally rolling on the floor with laughter. But then again, I had been pretty entertained actually watching paint dry earlier. I can only assume that when kids stick their faces in some paint to get high, that they then watch TV instead of try to finish any sort of task. I would like to further say to those kids that they shouldn't be doing that at all, or they might end up like this guy.

The Kilz incident came screaming back to me this morning as I sat in my smelly cube. Thinking about the kind of code I might write when under the influence of Kilz, I emailed my coworkers that I would be working from home for the rest of the day.