This is my blog. My name is Jeremy Shermak and I like to write. This is just going to be my little outlet for random things. Perhaps I will keep it up; perhaps it will be a burn out mess after two posts. No matter what, ain’t techno neat?
The name “Better Than Stinky”, if you are wondering, comes from my nickname, Fresh. I have been called Fresh since the fifth grade. My great friends and even my family members call me Fresh. I am often introduced to new people as “Fresh”, who then think that I am either a pimp, rapper, or ladies man. I’m none of the above. I am, however, clean. That’s how the nickname came to be. Fifth grade, at least at my school, was the point where you moved from the elementary school to the middle school. This was a big deal of course. One major part of that was gym class because we got to wear uniforms, shower after class, and do seemingly grown up things. Of course, that is terrible timing for such a threshold. We are getting hair in weird places, everyone is afraid to look at each other’s dong – you get really good at eye contact. Of course, me, I was chubby, sweat-fearing, and always on swamp-ass patrol. I never wanted to stink. I could be chubby, shop the husky section, but heaven help me if I became stinky. To combat the stank, I wore deodorant. Ok, I lathered myself in deodorant. The night before the first gym class, my mom took my brother and me to Hooks’ Drugstore to purchase some hygiene products for the big day. I found myself this giant can of
Brut spray-on deodorant. It had to weigh about three pounds. The next day, after gym class, I proceeded to fumigate the entire locker room with Brut. My peers were choking, their eyes watering, pleading for breath, but damn I smelled good. That was of course when Mr. Finch, the gym teacher, called me into his office.
“You need to stop with the aerosol deodorant,” he said, very simply, but stern.
“Yes sir.”
That night I found myself back at Hooks’ with my mom. I bought the standard stick deodorant, likely
Speed Stick or something I had seen on my dad’s nightstand. I don’t remember the particular brand, but I do remember the scent: it was called “Fresh”.
The next day, following sweating in gym class, I entered the locker room primed to leave there smelling great. I took the “fresh” stick and applied it as if my armpits were drywall with scattered holes that needed to be filled. With each swipe, up and down, a white, creamy film covered my pits, a wall of aluminum-zirconium compound.
I placed the deodorant stick back in my locker when an unassuming kid by the name of Nate Hora walked by. He looked at me and then his eyes gazed to the deodorant. He picked it up in my locker, looked at it, and said, “wow, you must be really fresh.”
A nickname was born.
My mom always told me, "well, it's better than stinky."
A blog name was born.
Over twenty-two years later, I wear about the same amount of deodorant. I’m still Fresh and this is my blog.
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