Keep yer nose clean!

What does this phrase mean? Well, now that I have returned to this blog from hiatus, I can assure you I've done my best to keep a clean nose.

Some picking was involved, some scratching at other times, rubbing...so is this piece of advice a reminder to be hygenic in your compulsive picking and scratching?

As we usually do, when a bit of cultural information seems to be vague, we end up out of necessity inventing or stitching together ideas that give it meaning. Our perception of "God" is the most obvious answer, which for me personally is onomatopoeia, but in order to explain that I'll have to postpone for another post.

How do I make sense of the phrase? First of all, it's not especially important that we know or attribute exact meaning to anything. Naturally, some words or phrases are only appropriate figuratively and as expressions. "Break a leg" refers to the abstract sense of good performance that is evoked better by this phrase than the director saying, "Now, I want you to go out there and do A, B, and C..." or "Don't screw up!" The vagueness both puts trust in the performer's own intuitive skills as well as calling attention to them.

Keep your nose clean. My interpretation of this dawned on me in relation to a ritual I participate in within my culture. Smoking the "peace-pipe," as pot smokers like me enjoy ironically referring to it, has two commonly reported effects: hyper self-consciousness and a distinct smell to the smoke. These two factors feed off of eachother within my consciousness whenever I'm in public because it is an illegal and somewhat taboo substance. So, having just coated my airways with THC vapor, airborne ash, and tar, the smell of pot not only sticks to my hair and clothes but the airways inside of my body. What happens then is that if I'm in public, my hyper-self-consciousness focuses much of my attention on how blatantly stoned I am to the outside observer. Am I walking funny? Are my eyes glowing red? Most importantly, do I reek of pot?

Stay with me here. In order to figure out how much I smell like pot, I have to do things like smell my clothing. But I'm sure you've had the experience as well, of smelling everything you can think to check for the source of a smell, not finding it, but nevertheless still smelling it coming from somewhere when you stop sniffing. Sometimes it's an unknown source, maybe the chair your sitting in already smelled like methane when you sat in it.

...But sometimes it's hard to place a smell because you're the source. This doesn't make you a bad person. There are many times that I'm sober and people think I'm stoned. Also many times I'm stoned and people don't realize until I say something wacky. But sometimes I'll be stoned in public and smell myself as reeking of pot while others don't seem to smell it...so what's going on and what does this have to do with the title?

All that smoke coats your breathing pathways, and I mostly breathe through my nose so most of it passes in and out of my nasal cavity--and gets stuck there. Now I usually blow my nose if I can before going out stoned, to eliminate this problem. This is my own parable equivalent to "removing the beam" from your eye before reaching to help another with the splinter in theirs. So now I'll contribute to the chaos of meaningless adages and declare "He who smelt it probably smoked it!"