my third armpit

It's a realization that I slowly came to over several months, and it finally coalesced only a few weeks ago, but the time has come for me to share my insight, arrived at after much introspection: I am the not-so-proud owner of a third armpit.

If we loosely define an armpit as a zone on which one must slather armpit deodorant, then I've discovered that my upper body has three such zones: two regular armpits, plus a third armpit, otherwise known as my chest. I had noticed it for a while without ever really thinking hard about it: at the end of the day, my armpits would still be relatively odor-free thanks to the Gillette Clear Gel deodorant that I faithfully apply daily, but there would nevertheless be an unpleasant odor wafting up from somewhere. That somewhere, as it turns out, is my chest, right around the sternum area. I found this out by sniffing different parts of the front of my shirt, pinching the fabric and pulling it close to my nose for a good whiff.

Oh, the horror. The horror.

So I now slather deodorant onto my chest as well as into my pits, in the hopes of minimizing the offending fetor. It's working, but only somewhat: I think the odor zone is larger, much larger, than just my immediate sternum. I feel sorry for my hypothetical girlfriend, whose face I might someday be inclined to press into my chest while attempting an affectionate hug. They say women react strongly to how a man smells (and some guys, alas, have no clue how they smell—I've hung around some truly stank-ass individuals); if that's true, then I should do everything I can to keep from smelling as though I've just returned from the dead.

Having a third armpit means using up my deodorant roughly 1.5 times faster than before. This realization of mine is therefore expensive in literal, monetary terms. But a man must do what a man must do, and if he's doing it for the ladies, perhaps there's a noble, chivalrous component to his actions, a karmic good that compensates for the financial pain.

I also now finally understand that Axe Deodorant commercial in which the skateboarder does his "double pits to chesty" stunt while in mid-flight. See one such video here.


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