MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 94)
scent of the day: 2am, by mesOUD
Here we have perhaps the ultimate tobacco-ambergris fragrance, at least the ultimate tobacco-ambergris fragrance that goes in a Chinese apothecary direction. The rum and plum and warm spices (many elements of Chinese five spice), the mouth puckering tannins and medicinality, together here in 2am bring me back to an old memory I had long forgotten. 2Am, especially in the beginning where that herbal-booze impression is strong, gives me the smell of this liquid I bought from a mail-order catalog I—like so many other martial arts enthusiast in the 80s and 90s—used to be obsessed with: Asian World of Martial Arts. It was a thick physical color magazine. It might have had articles too even though its main function was to sell a massive inventory of martial arts related things. I had bought nunchuckus and a pair of sais from there. I bought ninja stars and sparing gear—the whole nine, wishing I could afford the Chinese wooden dummies.
One thing I bought from AWMA was this liquid in a plastic squeeze bottle with chinese characters on the front. It had a distinct smell and 2am is very much reminiscent of that. The ointment was for conditioning knuckles. I believe it was an ointment for “Iron Palm” training called: Dit Da Jow—an herb-infused liquid liniment used in traditional Chinese martial arts to condition bones, tendons, and ligaments, as well as to heal impact trauma from rigorous striking practice by promotes blood circulation and reduces swelling. It was raisin-like and clovey but with a vinous vibe that would have made me, if I wasnt just nine years old and had my mind now, of port wine. Indeed, its name literally translates as “fall-and-hit wine.” I cannot remember the characters but looking it up likely the bottle featured stylized Chinese characters for 鐵掌 (Tie Zhang / Iron Palm) or a classic logo of a striking hand. My strongest memory, my most persistent memory, is of the smell. It was a boozy raisin clove scent that I get here with 2am.
The combination of high-proof alcohol, fermented sweetness, medicinal herbs, and deep pungent woods—that is the root of the connection to 2am’s connection to Dit Da Jow. Instead of a generic perfume alcohol opening, 2am uses heavy, dark, thick liquor accords: rum, cognac. The fermented, molasses undertone of dark rum and the aged, oak-barrel heat of cognac—that must be what makes me think of that opening boozy slap from the Chinese liniment. Infiltered tobacco and cigar leaves have a dried-plum and raisin-like aroma when unlit. I get that in both products. And when you add 2am’s bitter cocao element, there is this sticky dark fruity paste effect (a pasty frutiiness like I get in many Elkhaldi by the way) and it really gives that feel I remember getting from Dit Da Jow: cinnamon and dates stewed in sour alcohol. Yes, there is a sourness, a vinous tartness, that runs through both. In 2am I think the explanation is how the fermented facets (especially from the oud and the cognac) work with the urinous-tangy edge of the castoreum.
Difference recipes are used to create Iron Palm liniments. But they all have an astringent medicinal-camphor edge designed to wake up the skin and move stagnant blood. I get that here definitley in 2am. The hemp and the skunk introduce volatile terpenes: green, bitter, sulfurous herbality. That is the centerpiece of the herbal connection between the two products. Many Dit Da Jow recipes include animal products or at least heavy-musk-like herbs to make the formula “penetrate the bones.” And so the animalic bend of the herbality is another similarity. The clove that 2am has really drives that herbality into a dental menthol halitotic direction—not too dissimilar to what I get from Ensar’s Tigerweood 91 but also very similar to what I get in the eugenol-heaby compounds (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, star anise) that is common in my Iron palm recopies (again, to help the product “penetrate the bones”). And the combo of all these—animalics (skunk, castoreum), greenery and spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg), and woods (various ouds)—really mimic the harsh bite of raw chinese roots and barks that must have been in the Iron Palm liniment.
2am is the only fragrance to awaken this forgotten memory of my experiences with Dit Da Jow. That suggests how unique it might be even though I have many tobacco fragrances. It comes with a spice and herbality more in the Royal Tobacco dimension. But 2am is more boozy and its dark tobacco is clear in more of the artisanal way we get from Tabac Dore or Sultan Pasha’s tobacco attars. The ambergris and the quality oud here really mark out the difference—not just on paper but in smell. Some oud varieties used here merge with the ambergris to create an oceanic feel, especially in the drydown, that Royal Tobacco does not have. Royal Tobacco goes to vanilla ash whereas this goes to sweet sea-salt crust.
This saltiness brings me to the difference between 2am and Dit Da Jow. 2am has much more of a salty brine from the ambergris. In the dry down, when so much of that boozy herbal connection drops away, we get a real salted leather impression—very mineralic and even metallic because of combo of castoreum and ambergris. The ambergris here in fact gives the best ambergris creations we get from Ensar a run for their money. I did not attend to that oceanic side of this perfume, a stark similarity to Black Gris, when I first wore it. The base of castoreum and ambergris really does feel like an Ensar. Also Dit Da Jow, while bringing to mind tobacco via clovey-raisin smells like we get in frags like History of Indonesian Oud, lacks 2am’s bold and overt tobacco note—like literal crushed cigar. While both are somewhat purple in olfactory hue, Iron Palm was a but more red medicinal whereas 2am—because of the strong rooty orris I get (unlisted)—is more violet tinted. It would not surprise me if both violet and orris butter are in here. This gives me another strong Ensar connection, sort of like a cross between Iris Ghalia and Purple Kinam—especially toward the latter since 2am gives me a buttered popcorn pyrazine nuttiness like I get in Purple Kinam (in both the popcorn, unlike with the pyrazine popcorn of Tabac Dore, seems smothered in a butter spiked with some sweet nectar that turns the hue purple. So yes, You are basically getting Ensar-level quality at a fraction of the price. It is wild when you think about it.
2am tobacco makes me appreciate Tabac Tabou by Perfume d’Empire—a much cheaper alternative to 2am. But Tabac Tabou is clearly working with inferior ingredients. Tabac Tabou is better blended. Tabac Tabou goes more in a dark honey over hay direction of elegance. 2am, on the contrary, goes into a medicinal-herbs and animalics over cigars direction of garage band lo fi. And again there is that orris purple rootiness and the stunning ambergris. The ambergris plus the tobacco is precisely what you would have thought Sir Winston would have smelled like.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 93)
the cheapest daycare
junkies envying your vascularity
“free kittins,” misspelled on the box, outside the supermarket
graffiti beautiful enough no longer to be a misdemeanor
barely off the streets but buying jewelry with the extra cash
never having land lines even when people still had land lines
drunks belligerent about not being drunk
that the dead haunt the living is one thing, but even more disturbing is that they are reduced to doing so merely by making doll eyes blink for night janitors
“shyster psychic” is not a pleonasm like “tuna fish” or “pin number” if shysterism requires conscious awareness of being a fraud (self-hypnosis can cut rather deep)— and yet the bond remains as tight as renate and chordate if any awareness suffices
bird-feeder electrified for the quarreling squirrels
an amygdala event that divides your memory into before and after
ashamed enough of a depressive episode that you say you have the flu
okay with getting sex only because you are a fetish
doing a college major structured to shame you
life gets ruined when you agonize over the inevitable subblivion— and the same goes with love
killing war enemies is acceptable, but taking a shit or piss on them while huddled in a corner is not?
safe injection sites
cattle fed candies that did not make the cut and unsold leftovers from Halloween
robots counseling you to self-knowledge
it is important not to let false stereotypes get out of hand, so—if we really are going to play the race game—always remember which race commits the most school shootings
the scholar’s bane: the desire to be right trumping the desire to cultivate happy relationships
were we all psycho, we could play with our kids without any need to dehumanize the people that we wipe out or even just perform surgery on
the experimenter’s bad vibes may be preventing the mystic from bending the spoon in the lab— but what is most rational to believe even if so?
many waiters are willing to share tips about how to avoid paying—walking out during big parties, say—if only you ask
wondering, some days, whose life this is
shocked when mere fry cooks or janitors, seen as too lazy to aspire for the American Dream, prove perspicacious about art and fine wines
faking a need to hit the bathroom first, and then banging back the half-full drinks left behind after the restaurant gathering
arresting the guys that you grew up with, and then their children too
absconding with the sou-sou
town-hall rage
undressing her even as she warns that she cannot love you
the professor failed merely because she failed to open herself to vulnerability
medical emergencies causing you to swerve
parking-lot revenge rape after a heated town-hall meeting
survivalist-pullout manufacturing the very erosion of social stability feared
part of you desires that bond with your spouse destroyed when you came out as gay
freed from a state of mind through describing it in writing
live feeds of the sky in the monitor windows of survivalist bunkers
not just terror, straight anger, at the impermanence
creating art on a desert island
one-generation street drugs are killer
waking up to the local news reporting your apartment on fire
guidebooks to foreign destinations better than the actual journey: all anticipation, no bodily discomfort
the perks are good, no doubt—but it has to suck, in the early morning hours at least, having won top prize only because you self identify as black
deep in a hallucinogenic trip or deep in a bout of depression— worried you will be stuck this way
the burden of the call to act is an incentive not to recognize the problem
that gray-space of when to stop CPR
disappointment with the travel for which we so longed
sitting on her couch, the ghost tries in vain to hug his grieving wife
but what would become of you, your art, were you no longer despairing, neurotic?
the importance of mere lipstick among the women in that city besieged by snipers and bombs
in front of your dead friend’s house tossing a ball, almost expecting him to burst through the front door
grateful for the child you wished was never born
to show a strong wage gap between the two groups, ignore the differences in their typical professions— performance studies versus petroleum engineering
a losing struggle to stop slipping into daydreams about your new crush
that they do it only for the money does not prove that the work is exploitative
a goal of getting laid, in real life
loogie hocking banned in Hong Kong, where throat clearing has become almost a white noise in the smog air
unsure whether this is your last lap or second-to-last, are you one to run it as if it were not the last?
if you attend to how much everyone checks their own face in mirrors, would you check yours so much?
she has budded enough that you feel uneasy with the old talk to her parents of how their hands will soon be full
staying together for the kids but then learning, when they leave, all the strife was because of them
their release captured by news cameras in the lot, some of the first-graders skip as parents scan to find their child alive
not mailing that letter, weeks in the making, after learning that she has a husband
places where the mere attempt at GED classes is a point of boast to older relatives, but something that you hide elsewhere (not to seem too uppity)
show-me-where-this-is-illegal thinking versus would-this-be-okay- to-subject-my-mother-to? thinking
burying someone alive gives them time to think about what they have done, but will they use that time otherwise?
figuring out which of you gets which friends after the breakup
unable even to visit the place where you were—or think you were—once so happy
the view from even a balcony makes our activities seem antlike
scrutiny incited by that very gesture of looking down and away to evade scrutiny
waking up standing up
erectus ancestors who smiled at faces as infants were more likely to enjoy protections, and so now infants smile at faces and, for extra reasons, adults—in anxiety too buried to seem like anxiety—spot faces even where none exist (as in clouds and star clusters)
even if the light at death is just retinal flaring or the overhead ER light, why must that be incompatible with that light being Love?
counter narratives concerning how the protest was staged
sheepish about flaming the mouth of a pipe shared with someone with HIV
with slipping clicks, the dog snap-snaps at pussy spray with the chomps of hose play, those throaty sounds— that of the Hebrew “Chaim”: Hahyim, Hahyim, Hayhim
marijuana as a gateway drug when resultant legal penalties increase a teen’s negative stress
the more our economy becomes cashless the more the preference shifts for drugs that can be purchased with credit cards
