MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 87)
scent of the day: Oud Sinharaja, by Bortnikoff
Oud Sinharaja (2020, Dmitri Bortnikoff)—a tropical-floral oud fragrance, one of the rare Bortnikoff’s where the metal cap version is an oud-amped improvement on the wood cap, centering jasmine instead of the overdone rose and setting the scene in a citrusy jungle (or, perhaps more accurately, a luthier studio in such a jungle) instead of the more expected places oud addicts still craving the dirty limits like to go (Roquefort cheese caves and sebaceous-cyst-removal clinics, tire-skid drag strips and automotive garages, bouncy houses and swim-tube pool sheds, horse stables and zoo enclosures, olive packing plants and pickling cellars)—
opens with a mall nail-salon impression (a turpentine-adjacent blend of volatile esters—nail-polish remover, the monomer constituent of acrylic-nail builders, and so on—along side white-floral perfumes radiating from clients who watch, in the Aqua-Net heyday before smartphones, Chinese women buff their feet as one might watch monkeys at a zoo)
but soon recedes—never entirely, an industrial-glue sweetness from the oud (like that of the ethyl acetate and toluene VOCs found in the top notes of industrial wood laquers and many nail products) always present even as the shoe-store citrus of Tom Ford’s Mandarino di Amalfi creeps up almost to the bitter-tart grapefruit proportions of Roja’s Burlington 1819 (only with none of the amberwoods that ruin that fragrance)—
into a bright ambery musk (furry in that grass-on-the-field peach fuzz way I like) whose narcotic florality (musky-grape jasmine sambac especially, an adult gum parallel to the adult juice box BoKu) and whose vanilla-citrus-leather aura (spicy-sweet bergamot, juicy-tart grapefruit, sticky-sweet labdanum, almond-honey benzoin) make the whole seem like a blend of Fiore D’Ambre (definite cream soda, only minus most noticeably the ambergris-opium duo) and Habit Rouge (definite margarita-powder zing, only minus most noticeably the cinnamon-rose duo),
only here we get the addition of a tropical aromas rooted not just in the oud (mango-sweet Philippine oud, fern-sweet Sri-Lankan oud) but in a cake-batter floral blend (berry-champagne magnolia and banana-coconut frangipani, just like in Oud Monarch, and perhaps—adding to this jasmine-centered aroma of almost nag-champa bubblegum, a smell similar to what I get in L’huere Exquise and even in Ensar Oud’s Ensar’s Rose Kynam Rouge—a mango-cream champaca) that—spiced with lemon-eucalyptus cardamom, a Bortnikoff signature that provides a cooling green-sausage-skin snap of camphor like it does in Musk Khabib—seems to rise from some fantastical Hawaiian lei
whose braid—here a quiet bass thrum of cedar-radiated Indian oud (cedar radiated in that same stunning way that makes Ensar’s Santal Sultan the day counterpart of Santal Royale)—imparts more of a smoked-mulch depth than any standout aroma (although a discerning nose might find the low-decibel thrum of barnyard funk to be closer to wheat bran, wheat bran perhaps touched with penicillium or aspergillus mold but none of the fishy ergot of the Salem-witch era)—
the overall result being a gorgeous jasmine-oud fragrance that, located an hour or so away from where its more tits-out and suntan-lotioned twin sister Amber Cologne sits (the breezy ambergris shores of the Indian ocean), brings me (with its much heavier dose of Sri Lankan oud, which reminds me of Triad’s chlorophyll woodiness) into the monsoon-swept Sinharaja rainforest of Sri Lanka to which this perfume pays tribute, particularly to a Buddhist altar where the exact combo of jasmine and frangipani and resinous wood has an olfactory behavior very similar to Mal Puja (a traditional offering that smells like bruised white and yellow tropical blossoms laid over the sweet smoke of burning joss sticks in a humid stone temple, Hawaiian lei but more so capturing the Sinharaja-forest spin as well as the ashy-oud drydown easily overlooked for after the early hours of grapefuit-bubblegum girlie tropicality with an almost coral-pink color like I get in Ensar’s much saltier Pink Papua);
the overall result being, in other words, a bright and invigorating oud fragrance whose rainforest florality is rich enough that the ever-present smell of hike anus and vulva pleat (a citrus-soaped synergy of Indian oud and jasmine) always seems at a distant thrum (very distant, unlike the more in your face Fleur Tabac 1 by Miyaz whose jasmine-indian-oud synergy is not only much more dense than this ethereal composition but smells in the most lovely way like Powerbait in the mouth of a creek trout), always at a distant thrum as if steady dumped into the air with each step out from the mesh crotch gusset of your trek partner’s ripstop nylon trousers (her leech socks, although over her trousers, intrusively calling to mind, in the heat and the haze and the scrotal swell, the athletic knee highs of so much 2010s porn).
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 87)
phones to run to in fear of our own inner world
death-metal shirts from Walmart
heavy-panting CO2 suffocation in a submarine sunken to depths beyond rescue
public school attention scarcity from food scarcity
addicted to the people you hate, the world you are trying to negate
phones disconnecting us from our children and pets right there next to us
love, yes, creates death but death creates so much love—all-you-can-eat crab buffet
bum tans
who is the friend to tell a secret to if your goal is to make it public without having to do it yourself?
summer break cuts short the school-recess project: digging down to China
the curbed elation on the face of the girl in the nest of a shopping cart, clearly—just by that look she has of patient wonder—a good girl never asking for much, as her mom hands her a box of rainbow-swirl ice pops
we would be horrified hearing someone say to another, “You’re just too fucking fat for anyone to like you”— yet we think nothing of it when we say it to ourselves
how is the mother ever to insist that the child, cradled in a lap of her hospiced father for perhaps the last time before cremation, go off to bed?
simulating conversation with her, as if that would make the phone ring
strong-arming life jackets, openly, from the children of some family not your own
cars would get keyed in the days before everyone had basic internet savvy
in the frozen-food aisle holding a Hungry Man, stuck between envying the two for what they have—pregnancy belly and all— and weeping over them for what is to come, your cart squeaks
has white guilt made it so despicable even to mock the prophet in cartoons—or, for real, are we simply afraid of being blown to bits?
if the spread of stupidity (way more subtle than flat Earth or ticks dumped to make us allergic to meat) were not itself tragic enough, the second tragedy is that intelligent people then have to waste time exposing the stupidity
why jump to the conclusion that to dream only of pop icons and products to buy is no longer to dream in archetypes?
that which evolves from us with enough intelligence to mock us with penetration, righteousness, superior to any human artist
shame that you may have somehow contributed to the disease at least distracts you from the physical pain
with the absence of creatures and with the landscape the same on both sides, a head-on image of prison bars leaves us wondering if we are prisoners or imprisoners
doctors taking dictation from medical professionals taking dictation from salesmen
artists needing to be away from the work of other artists
thinking and talking only about work on one’s lunch break need not spell something bleak
technically, the existence of a being worthy of a title such as “God” must be up to that being alone— not something else (other-caused) or nothing (uncaused)
seeing the number of smoking deaths shift live on an electronic billboard
displaying your scars to back your claim that she should leave him
illiterate on the basic tenets of your own religion
being an ethical relativist only in areas convenient to your lifestyle
the soothing splendor of the Muslim call to prayer—the frisson it provokes
funerals have become rushed affairs now that death-cult attacks have us primed to retreat from public spaces
thinking that you were getting invited to a picnic because of who you are as a person, when in truth it ended up being just bait-and-switch evangelism
persistent lack of vitality is depression
defined by being the sort of person with all these books
just one bad trip, and the door is open for others
a touch-starved world where we pay strippers simply to hold us in the back room
impossible to leave the space where you spent your entire life with her
jailing holocaust deniers for being holocaust deniers
feeling bad for noticing gestures indicative of his poverty
feigning menstrual cramps so the master does not come to your quarters
in the red, comparing what we have to what we lost
nonintervention against slavery backed by proud slaves
maggot bloom from a vulva remarkably lippy
ordinances for how low pants can be worn set by people whose dislike of buttocks visuals—not dislike of blacks— trumps even their dislike of government meddling
their products of blind industry pilloried by us, the lives of bees are seen as more of a waste than ours
feeling horrible about being bored by the bible—yawning even through passages where God commands the slaughter of every Canaanite that breathes, including babies nursing at the tit, for their love of bestiality and incest and child sacrifice
feeling good forcing children out of low-wage labor despite thereby leaving them with no other option than to eke out an existence from city dumpsters
the romantic pull towards believing, and accepting, that you will be expunged
that special class of drunk, snared less by the taste and even the stupor than by the path to self-desolation
the proliferation of salesman evangelicals turning people away from smart Christians— worse, even from Jesus Christ himself
not wanting to be the only one with a death sentence, you hope your friend’s results turn out positive
getting your heart broken again so that she will at least be two heart breaks in the past
how romantic it turns out to reveal upfront that you do not want something serious
bless the mothers who teach “If he don’t hit ya, he don’t love ya!”
those for whom singing to themselves is prayer—whether they know it or not
all the gods of once good standing, add them to those of now good standing that believers reject— yeah, we have a lot of dead gods on our hands
farms where the slaughterer, mere machine, has no eyes to peer into the eyes of those it slaughters
trying to argue her back in love with you
seasoned exotic dancers do not get disconcerted when the men, cheering at times, attend to the game on screen
seismic waves of despair so suddenly upon him that he figures it is a problem with his anatomy, discernible to doctors
Asians rubbing the heads of midgets for good luck
sexually transmitted fleas
given the burden to do real work—to walk the walk—after being visited by the deity, it is tempting to doubt the experience
the feeling that silent types know more than they let on
busting out fucking graphs to argue her back in love with you
fatwas against suicide bombings conveniently unreported
chest freezers in mudrooms
all this trendy talk of how mere critical speech does violence—that allows the genuinely violent to chalk up the claims of their victims to hysteria
homes with only two spoons
sincere as pig shrieks
eating a bit more to convince yourself that you did not overeat
tracking tribes for whom footprints are as recognizable as faces
the link between the western surge in SUVs (gas-guzzling manifestos) and terrorism from the Middle East
under tarps in the storage unit rests all the paintings together with an easel and tubes of paint
the passion of your plight undermined by getting to know those from whom you keep a self-righteous distance
imagine the potential horrors if people really did believe in a paradise after death, loving death as the rest of us love life
