MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 83)
scent of the day: Odor 93, by Meo Fusciuni
Odor 93 (2015, Giuseppe Imprezzabile)—a tobacco-tuberose fragrance that wrenches us into the pagan-woodland overlap between the innermost circle of the white prostitution Venn (namely, trailer-trash females, meth thin and crotch-rot commando, quick to resort to raw-dog anal with little qualms about bottle-fly swarms or even follow-through head game), on the one hand, and the innermost circle of the nerd Venn (namely, floppy-disk-era white men, Coke-bottle glasses and pocket protector, quick to freak out if you come upon them over the forest weekend LARPing in some fantasy hybrid of Arthurian legend and Dungeons & Dragons and address them by their government name instead of by “Malakor the Gloomweaver), on the other—
kicks off with spices (dweeb-pit cumin, menthol-elixir clove) sprinkled over dirty-fermented florals (creamy-indolic tuberose, fecal-tobacco narcissus) whose stemmy-twiggy facets become amplified by (1) mossy-vegetal greens (crisp-cool birch leaf, herbal-savory sage, musky-earthy patchouli) and (2) dark-leathery woods (medicinal-phenolic oud, rooty-mineralic vetiver, leaf-fire guaiac, musty-hay tobacco),
this vanilla-dusted swirl of notes mainly meant to keep the Yaaseen-level tuberose (perhaps even up there with Aztec Queen) from appearing simply as the cartoonish bubblegum common on mall perfume counters (the equivalent of waxed and douched white-meat vulva from the first world) and instead (and in honor of its sobriquet “Mistress of the Night”) in its more natural voluptuous sense (the equivalent of mucosal and Outkast-stank dark-meat vulva from the third world)
where we see its buttery-coconut sides (triangle-punctured can of condensed milk) and its fruity-honeyed sides (overripe mango dripping juice) and its green-leafy sides (florist stem cut at angle underwater in a steel-basin sink) and its mentholated-medicinal sides (Vicks VapoRub on the child’s chest, or maybe southern-gothic snatch grazed with a mothball to keep away chiggers) and its carnal-rotting sides (the mortuary-floral liminality between birth hole and shit hole) and its dusty-spicy sides (a residue of black pepper now part of a dim pantry’s dirt) and its rubbery-latex sides (those tubes of gummy plastic material, Super Elastic Bubble Plastic by Wham-O, that kids would blow air into it with a straw to make durable-moldable bubbles)—
the overall result being a white-floral woody fragrance that, in seeming to combine wizard-mage ceremonies of summoning storms or enchanting armor or so on with sex-trafficking ceremonies of skin branding or forced bukkake or so on, has me thinking of the territorial crossing of a woodland LARPing weekend with a mountain kegger party where some Merlin cosplayer finds his virginity screwed (the funny-feelings and loss of appetite even for mead perhaps strong enough to say raped) by one of the party’s herp-chirp succubae, a quick-and-dirty interaction capturing the fragrance’s mystical-mentholated-mucky aroma (almost like a Chinese apothecary full of musty wood shelves) and that might very well be the actual yeasty burnt-grimoire aroma of the real Merlin (Morgana juices soaked in his pre-electric-clipper bush and all) if you were to squat before him (ass to grass like a baseball catcher) and shake out the heat trapped under his moldy-sooty wizard cloak like a dusty blanket on the porch;
the overall result being, in other words, a minty-smoky-dirty-sweet-leathery-antique tuberose fragrance (perhaps best represented by Merlin in the 1981 film Excalibur) that arguably beats out, not only in terms of masculine growl (with its vetiver-oud-tobacco-guiac-patchouli-cumin combo, choosing to more of a smoky-green direction than Tubereuse Criminelle’s animalic-menthol direction) but in terms of over quality and allure (vintage-wood impressions beyond belief), both the vegetative-coconut-camphor Carnal Flower (best represented by the mid-2000s Kim Cattral drunk and pilled up next to her Hamptons backyard pool) and the musky-rosy-rubbery Golestan (best represented by the undeniably-gay-but-still-closeted George Michael in the “Club Tropicana” music video) and even gives Ensar’s best tuberose hitters (Musk Gardenia and Sultan Murad stand out, although I never tried Tuberose Fatale) a run for their money.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 83)
bothered for years by not crying at the funeral
needing a roommate, like a twenty-year-old, even though you have grandkids
a thorn in the culture is a mirror for the culture
radiation treatments causing new kinds of cancer
a post-trauma need to stick to something—anything—while chances still remain
the bowler hat was old but, lending it pathos in the attic for blind mice, never worn
board games and cards, crotchet, for the boring parts of a loved one’s dying
ashamed that you pray
we thank God for saving the one girl from the bloody rubble, not for the earthquake
hungry-poor
that classic line: “I’ll make you like it”
fat glorification (“Werk!”) will turn out not so myopic after all: the medical industry, pissing like a diabetic in wait for the fad to wheeze into heart-and-joint reality, holds more than just a scalpel—maybe even a miracle pill to drop with Machiavellian timing
when people whose opinion we dislike also admire a person we do, we tell ourselves that they do not know her deep down—sometimes adding an audible chuckle at how shocked they would be if they did
she could not grasp, gregarious as she was, why they excluded her from the circle— but they smelled something sour under that sugar: that every grin and hug aimed to win over any part of them, thinned even in the one holdout, still on the fence
how long have we been together, really, with so many of our hours spent thinking about what has passed and what has yet to be?
little boys dare each other to knock and ask the local witch for sugar, only to learn she is nice after all (a timeless tale)— letting them pull her nipples and plop around in her pleats
asking her why she will not even give you a chance—that might be involved
presenting opportunities only to those thought likely to follow through, another sieve
the decline of infatuation regarded as a gift
speaking to people absent from your life over a decade as if you saw them yesterday
mothers dependent on the molester’s turn-a-blind-eye cash
séancing that dreaded mania in hopes to mine it for art
thieving the teacher’s apple from hunger
with the knowledge of what is wise you can sound wise before your time
at the doormat, stamping from boots nonexistent snow
pimping out the infant to a man everyone calls “Hilt”
having to remember which mask to wear with what person
a master can see through what he projects on others from a place of need
reminding yourself that you look bad right now in the mirror only because you have body-image problems
if asking the deepest questions—what is this place and what are we doing here?— will cease being with rise of artificial intelligence only a human domain, offloading our share of the wonder—a temptation at first—will presumably become the norm
to go through being an impostor— that bumbling first step toward any greatness—is often too painful
the mystique of perfection no longer sustainable with everything recorded in HD, future prophets will make a showcase out of their imperfections
jungle ayahuasca forced the bigot to face, in jump-cut imagery whose blatant make-believe did nothing to undercut the lesson, all the care shown to the ancestors of his cherished houseplant
a convenient pretense for not engaging: telling yourself that the very thing that allows creativity to soar—namely, high-standard disciplinary pressures (always modifiable enough, of course, to fall short of demoralization)—will ruin the creativity of the child
bettered, at least for a period, by dementia’s power to free you from regrets and grievances
as if the conviction that some winnower Jesus is going to come back at the stroke of midnight were not self-centered enough, what about the blind assumption that it will be the midnight of your time zone?
