MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 84)
scent of the day: Mandodari, by Prin
Another femme fatale fragrance—a classic floral chypre, but with a Thai twist: my favorite vibe and my favorite style, especially when it has that Thai twist. The coffee really stands out on this wear. It avoids the nasty synthetic vibe coffee takes on in so many fragrances. In that way, it sidesteps the pitfalls of Follow and Kasturi Cola—both nice scents, but with something slightly off about the coffee—and instead joins the ranks of Oud Luwak, which (although it brings in a peanut butter vibe) also handles coffee beautifully. Still, the coffee here is closer in ingredient quality to what we get in Little Song, another excellent execution.
You know how they make coffee ice cream? This is almost like a coffee-floral soap that some pyromaniac bedwetter was trying to set on fire before moving on, with his M-80 firecrackers, to the asshole of the house cat—the final element in the psychopathy trifecta.
This is less creamy and more coffee-forward than Mandodarix2. Both give you a soapy vintage aldehydic sheen over a creamy tropical floral heart. But the creaminess and tropicality—leaning more into a carnal coconut direction—are stronger in Mandodarix2. And in Mandodarix2 the floral elements really sing, especially with the added Jasmine Absolute and Orange Flower Absolute boosting the carnal quality of the civet into something closer to Dusita’s Oud Infini. I would assume, even though I did not do a side-by-side, that I love the evolved form more.
As my perfume journey has settled away from gathering and more into reflecting, I realize that while I like pretty much all things—even sweet gourmands—the floral-animalic chypres, even more so than their masculine leather-animalic counterparts, are my absolute favorites. It is amazing to reflect on the level of skank women wore decades back. It really is unbelievable—Golden Girl WAP.
I don’t know why I love smelling like a bombastic Cruella de Vil—a Cruella, yes, with an insane vabbing problem. But I absolutely do. It fits my personality. Before these sorts of terms were hijacked and politicized into nonsense by cancellers and SJWs, I would happily have identified as “two-spirit” in the Native American sense. I am a caregiver and homemaker who writes poetry, and yet I am interested in bodybuilding, sports, and bedroom dominance. Since I was very young, I had an inordinate fetish for pussy too. And I just like women. I could never whack it to a guy eating a girl out; a girl has to be eating the girl out. As I was telling my friends since fifth grade, I would be a trans lesbian before I would ever do sexual activity with a guy. I think that factors in somehow to my love of fragrances like these.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. Yes, this fragrance is glutted with girlie florals—sweet-tea champaca, coconut-pineapple frangipani, buttered-mushroom gardenia, labia-pleat tuberose—and an opium accord (smoky, dusty, resinous) that brings to mind girlie-bent perfumes such as my beloved Fiore D’Ambre. It also has a cumin note, one that hangs around until the end (contributing a dustiness to the leather and making it ruggedly butch). And yes, this cumin cannot help but evoke Rochas Femme just as its strong aldehydes in the beginning brings to mind Chanel No. 5. But still, even with all that, this fragrance—especially with the coffee, tobacco, and moss facets—is a lot more unisex than I have made it sound, more masculien than perhaps my favorite scent of all time: Salome.
A leather note emerges nicely. That, alongside the coffee and moss and civet and tropical florals, explains much of the overlap with Zoologist Civet in the base, just as the civet and aldehydes explain much of the overlap with Sacred Scarab earlier on.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 84)
the first pussy fart on Earth
infant suckling forced into clitoral grammar—what more explosive semiotic violence?
all the stories about chancing upon someone famous
that plink of a beer can BB-gunned off a fence
as an excuse to keep on having her excuse, her story had to be that we were all mean to her
think of the struggle that people who will live into the hundreds (five hundred, maybe even a thousand)—think of the struggle they are bound to have with mortality, the daily haunting of it
seeing a Jew or a Muslim manipulate others for personal gain—our extra fury speaks not only to the hypocrisy but to our naive myopia (religions, no less than ants, carve turf), if not to our desperation to see ourselves as beyond the hunger of root and claw
typically the better you are at being funny, the closer you come to tipping over into meanness
the sweetness of alcohol, how it allows even the most neurotic to be present—to belong to now
graffitiing the confederate statues is way better than tearing them down— the racist persons depicted surely would like neither, but one thing is clear: the racist logos running through each of them begs for them to be torn down
the energy-suck of so much lying
best for profit is for treatment to go on for life
assigning guilt to a whole group, especially one whose members did not ask to join, has repeatedly been a harbinger of atrocity
is there solace, or merely more angst, to be gotten witnessing the ignorance of children and birds— all giggling and chirping—to man-made horrors?
a dialysis center in almost every strip mall
cognitive faculties employed to argue for the reliability of those cognitive faculties
your mother dragging pajamaed you throughout the city in search of him: the cheater, “the whoremaster fuck”
despite not allowing for retirement, the silver lining of an adjunct life spent more on freeways than in classrooms teaching brainless courses is freedom to think with a depth often only allowed for in retirement
the founder population on Mars, in nerve already so different from most of us—how might they deviate from us over centuries?
worship of a being who created us in play might be warranted, but perhaps not a being who created us in play to escape boredom
acceptance of gay marriage harms straight marriage in what other way than that it empowers gays to end, or avoid in the first place, their straight marriages?
nights spent switching the safety setting on the rifle—too fearful of either option to stay asleep for long, if even you get there
people ruling out that nonhuman species are aware of mortality on absurd grounds: funerals are necessary for such awareness
wanting to believe her claim that nothing is wrong—not just because she is family but because your own time is too precious
our dreams of the foreign might suggest a beyond to our horizons, but that beyond need not be beyond the natural world
