Weedfish, originally uploaded by hambox.

The degradation of my mind started yesterday evening, when I held a wee one-year-old on my lap while others gave her bits of cooked salmon to hold, nibble, and smear all over herself and her human high chair. In a highly adorable fashion, of course.

Once one reeks all over with the scent of salmon, it kind of blurs the senses — everything kind of looks, tastes and feels like fish — a weird variation of the beer-google, at least in my tainted mind.

This is a problem, as I am highly sensitive to fish, and ingesting it is, let’s just say, a dicey dicey proposition.

So maybe I accidentally ate something fish-soaked last night, I don’t really know. What I do know is that the smell of salmon is following me like the eau de cologne in Hell’s duty-free shop. I laundered and scrubbed and disinfected my clothes and me last night, but almost got dizzy at the smell of my car’s interior this morning. After opening windows and wiping down steering wheel, radio knobs, etc. with Wet-naps (which I keep in my glove box for just this type of emergency), the stench remained. It followed me into my office, into the lunchroom. I started feeling a little green around the pun-intended gills.

At this point, co-workers were looking at me worriedly and speculating on my gestational status (which is, barring an immaluate, messiah-producing miracle, impossible). I wandered outside, sniffing the air. Is the ocean just particularly stinky today?

I paced around, nose twitching, and considered approaching a stranger to ask “do you smell that? something salmony?” before I realized that I was starting to look really crazy. I remedied that by putting my cellphone to my ear, so anyone witnessing my erratic behavior could just mentally excuse it as a particularly distressing call.

I am hoping that this phantom-fish syndrome will end before I resort to taping jasmine blossoms to my upper lip or affixing a foil helmet upon my troubled head. Why the helmet? Why not? It seems to be a requirement among us members of the screwloose set.