Pumps and a Bump (ROUND 10)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Attainment 2, by Amphora Exotica
Attainment is so damn good. It likely bests Triad and Oud Maximus and many others. It gives us an EO 3 rugosa rose with smooth Indian oud and a surprise blast of musk—all on a waxy-vanillic bed of bushman candle and spiced with saffron just like in vespers. My Sultan White Rose Afgannisimo comes to mind as well: both share a bright, dewy, stemmy rose whose greenery is amplified by Omani frankinscence and thrown by ambergris—only the Ensar stays very bright with its clean ouds and vegetable-root costus sheen whereas Attainment adds in a dark and spicy rose with velvety and peppery-smoky-earthy aspects are amplified by a more growling dirty oud.
People sell this stuff not realizing that it is right on up there with the best. Malik al-Taif’s MSRP was aroudn 250. If Attainment’s MSRP of 400 is correct, then let us just say that Malik was priced correctly. Atainment is a better fragrance overall. While the stunningness of the Malki rose is unmatched in the beginning (chocolatey taif goodness), Malik has much less generic base—and the superiority of Attainment starts appearing quickly. Malik has a dry down that’s a very generic incense unoffensive but a lot like when you get in the Dev series by Olympic orchids. Attainment on the other hand seems much more artisanal and has a real interesting woodiness to it with waxiness in the bushman’s candle. So while the beginning of Attainment might not be as flooring as Malik (and even that is up for debate), the overall fragrance is better.
Castoreum synergizes with the Hindi oud and saffron for a grand leather effect that smells different than what you get at the base of many artisanals—a major plus that I might not have appreciated if I had less experience. The rose and the frankinscence combine for a really lemony effect given extra trumpet sun-glint brassiness by the civet and saffron. The ambergris and musk and spices give a salty cloud of pheromonic pull anchored down by a creamy sandalwood and bushman candle—a lovely tension between dusty and milky.
Really this is a masterclass in balancing tensions: bright and dark, animal and resin, dry and milky. The Kashmiri saffron is so unbelievably good here, like it is in Vespers. Sundar is known as the Saffron Don for a reason! Do not let labels or FOMO trick your nose. This is gold here. It was crazy that in the Facebook groups people struggled to give this away.
*Let’s workshop this piece about a dentist who--with how his hips move with that high-octane of the New Jack era--one might call the MC Hammer of Dinosaur Dental, a dental practice for young kids.
*Worked this morning mainly on the ending, where I raise the possibility that demonic possession is operative. The Newport Jazz Festival paragraph (the penultimate paragraph) is especially fun.
Pumps and a Bump
White honey had been thickening over nearly two bowlegged weeks. Through the musty rot and metallic tang of Bradford pears in their hysterical bloom, he made his mincing way across the parking lot. His dental hygienist, nosy visor hand cocked with Spring caffeination, had her squinted eye on him. “Pull somethin there, Cowboy?” she called out, waiting for him to come and unlock the door. He ran with it. “My racquetball days are done.” Her tuberose scent bubble, slutty like the blown-out pleats of a fruitful mother in the age of house doctors, turned the fermented carnality of the mating season too meaty, too rubbery, to breathe. “I guess I’m just too damn old!”
The excuse to scuttle about the clinic as if some humanoid crab, upright in mimicry of Charlie Chaplin, failed to live up to the eureka of expectation. It eased the congested throb no more than acetaminophen, the noncodeine version at least, could ease his headaches. A splintery piece of wood needed the coarsest sandpaper worked by blue-collar forearms, not the ultra-fine grit of a nail buffer worked by the gum-snapping secretary. Dr. James lived, however, in the real world: a world where crack addicts will hunt the rug for what they damn well know are but baking-soda pebbles of carpet deodorizer; a world where a broody hen will sit on a golf ball until a real egg comes along; a world where a bereaved orca will carry her decomposing calf over weeks of nosing it to the surface to “breathe.” Open to anything that might take any edge off, he continued to hold the wide stance and slight squat—even rotating ninety degrees so that his staff (“Donna,” he nodded) could pass in the hallway. He continued no matter the truth spoken by his pursed-lip exhale as soon as he shut the door to his office.
Pity would be uncalled for even if you could step into the slimy hell of his underwear, mucilage ropier than that of a girl in her terrible tweens. The bodily discomforts—the pressure of clogged-up duct work, the sharp pains shooting toward kidneys and belly button alike—swell out of his own design: holding back ensured maximal intensity (even water tastes like manna after two days of abstinence) and—yes, pragmatics played a role too—maximal speed of completion. More importantly, the very reason he put himself through the ordeal—the why that could shoulder almost any interim how—disallowed, no matter how short his fuse or how clipped his stride, descent into suffering.
Slashing an “x” through another numbered box on his calendar—that, a sign of edging closer to the pulpotomy date circled in the telling blue of a telling crayon, had been relief enough, much better relief than breathwork (“bullshit-ass box breaths”) or a cold shower at night. A freezer pack and ass elevation on the arm of the sofa while watching The Late Show—no, he would never try that again. It sounded perfect on paper. But it neglected, like so many otherwise sound theories, the human element. The physical nudge of the weight, rebounding the throb like a seat-belt sash during an anxiety attack, all by itself turned his chronic semi into a calf-killing captive bolt hellbent on veal. Adding in the spiritual shove of seeing his procreative center lit up in isolation, pedestaled as if he were the living muse of Michelangelo’s Apollonian marble, conjured an insistent voice—demonic in tone but divine in mission—whispering how much he would enjoy catching in his mouth the warm clotted cream of candy-coated raindrops.
Timing was everything here. And he had really pushed it this time. Docking windows like these were already tight. And given the drum-and-bass pulse of his procreative productions, a secretory pace that would put a teen jock to shame, he had started his no-fap fast too early for sanity. More than one of his Dino Dental pens—a stegosaurus, a triceratops, and the kid-favorite T. rex—busted apart, the cheap things, into the doohickey springs of steampunk as his ballpoint slashed into the month underneath.
Five days out—whimpers oozing from his every motion—some muse led his hand to scribble the line that would be cryptic to almost anyone who found it in the back of his planner: “What is bluer than desiring what would be unreceptive even were it not wrong to fill?” Four days out—coccyx the only contact he would allow with the stool he otherwise liked to roll and spin around in to pull giggles from anxious Dino Dental patients—the clock in his office seemed to tick louder, a dilation between seconds ratcheted so open in its splay that he might have suspected an office prank were this not his first rodeo. Three days out—stride wide-set like a spaghetti western gunslinger now with manga hemorrhoids—his sockets throbbed from the baseline bruxism and, as if he had been grinding the reproductive innards of jasmine and tuberose, his back teeth felt afloat in goo, a gamey nectar of rutting fertility no swallow could clear. Two days out—the final dam well beyond dignity and just shy of failure—he had begun to brim over at all times, a steady spill of backlog okra slime not just from the urethra but from a rectum kicked into overdrive by the sheer structural weight of a prostate at the physiological limit of its own swell.
One day out—John Cougar Mellencamp, extra gravelly through the ceiling speakers, ordering his lover to make it hurt so good (a fishnet plea, as anyone who has lived could see, for rough testicle smacks at the right moment)—he rammed a shopping cart with the full brunt of his own instead of waiting, as he normally would, for the lady to come back and move it from the middle of the aisle: the clank, and the subsequent tumbling of the Progresso soup display, drawing every eye to his keyed-up comment: “Let’s just fuck common courtesy, huh?” Even in sleep, more the twilight shuteye of a nerve-racked boxer on the eve of a title event (the Mellencamp lyrics, about a manhandler too young to have such a suckling score to settle with vas deferens, still looping in his head), he held a kegel—pelvic floor white as his toe knuckles—to keep the structure from unzipping too soon, his eventual dip into dreamland—just before the alarm clock and still to the damn lyrics—circling the riddling phenomenon (common to old ladies and glaciers alike) of something becoming such a compact white that it looks blue.
Come the keeling point of achy-breaky reckoning, the release of the overwound spring, it made sense that—even with a ballistic bluster furious enough to displace a ceiling tile, and then in the second contraction splat the wall across the room—he let not one albuminous clot less than all he had to give fill the patient. That the mouth—well past the hard palate and all its ribbed pleasure—was a consolation cavity did not undermine his resolve, a resolve reflective of a completionism sufficient all by itself for an autism diagnosis. The other two cavities—too damning for anything beyond a stinky pinkie—were more delectable, of course. That is why, in fact, on the previous visit, during another procedure of moaning midazolam, he had been damn sure to imprint them on a huff glove ziplocked (knowingly in vain, and so as expected from creatures who rage against the dying even of the most absurd light) to preserve that perineal funk that buzzed him to the emotional overflow of a cat tail quivering at the base or of a birthday girl squealing in her panties over the Tamagotchi, a civet tang that would let a mind like his know where her fingers go when the door’s closed: circling self-play that every trophy hunter like him at some level translates—OshKosh B’gosh and butterfly barrettes be damned—as “Bitch’s begging for it.” But the difference between this hole and the others was like the difference between the third best vodka and the ones above it. His nature was to work with what he had anyway. Even if—like so many times before—he had only the girl’s hand to work with, a mid-shelf hand he had to tighten and work for the tranquilized girl (in the best cases taking on its own groggy autonomy, a good two or three primed-spinal-cord pumps before needing direction again), he would have made the best of it—a headcase enough to attribute agency to what was all him (“Oh, you’re fuckin gettin it huh?”) and even using the other hand to palpate his testicles, limpness of the wrist making the forehand fingers drag with clingy stutters and the backhand fingers whip with fiendish sass (“Ooh, you playin doctor now huh? Fuuuck. Play that fuckin doctor!”)—instead of becoming a sourpuss.
Humans and other critters will maim and murder one another, and sometimes even themselves, just for that five-second whoosh of blasting their juices in this moist hole or that. That is absurd enough. But what does our mouth marauder do a split second after standing there, knowing damn well no more contractions are coming and knowing damn well not only that time is against him but that five seconds tick for every one of the day prior? What does our hungry hebephile do after making sure to milk himself clean, as if any other unloading spot but her mouth would mean his consciousness would be tortured for eternity, like one of the Go-Gurts waiting for when she came to, awakening into a brokenness that speaks only to intuition (“Because sometimes,” so he tells parents, “the patient will notice a residual metallic taste over the next few hours. Nothing concerning.”)? It boggles the mind. What does our chlorhexidined corrupter go and do after making sure to strip his urethra clear like it was an IV tube—indeed, as if what he stroked, that one-way-only stroke, was his own calf of faulty-valved veins pooled with an international flight’s worth of backflowed blood, only the directionality of extrusion was not his brain and heart but hers? He suctions the fucking thing! Weeks of work—the Sisyphus of sedation dentistry, hypervigilant heart now in his throat, undoes it all!
Everything in life has an explanation, of course. Nothing comes from nothing. Our devious driller suctions the gullet, spit sucker unkinked for maximal reach, because he fears getting caught. Aspiration pneumonia could lead to questions, which would be no good because aspiration pneumonia had led to questions in the past—gulp-worthy inquiries that, beneath all polite formality of family-photo perusal, proved elbow-grease swirls of Brillo to his Teflon. Additional factors play into it as well. His thoroughness, the hissing rod scavenging into MD depths beyond his framed diplomas in a frenzy of dwindling time different in degree not kind from the car-wash vacuum countdown—those with privileged access to behind his eyes would know that such thoroughness, as objectifying as the waist work he put the throat through before but now without any of the bedside manner, was not so much care for a moral agent he had wronged as his way to express a clean slate, his way to symbolize that he was done for good now with such wronging. “No more.” The phrase would repeat in the sobriety of post-pop relief. “This is the last damn time.” But the promise, besieged by yet another set of breast buds betraying both downy fuzz and desire to fuck, would crack now even with the portliest tween spirit warming his seat.
But even if there is an answer for every why-question, that need not amount to dispelling the sense of a grander absurdity. Even were we to have a complete explanation for this man’s behavior, that does not stop a meta absurdity from flaring out here—indeed, with a peacock flagrancy made, despite the fluorescence of the office milieu, for a nature documentary whose narration perhaps neither Attenborough nor even Herzog could manage. It would take mind-bending empathy to understand the subject at hand’s shift—from fuck the clock right to slavery to the clock; from evidence planting right to evidence cleaning—as anything more than ridiculous, the sort of ridiculous that perhaps even condemns reality the way art is said to redeem reality. This sudden frantic rush to clean what just milliseconds before the man would have obliterated his family and reputation, his license and freedom, to soil—how would an extraterrestrial intelligence look at this?
Might undistracted meditation upon the scene awaken existential nausea? The question can get much more terrible. Might a tag-along smack-dab on the shoulder of any creature as it goes about the unasked-for labor of existence (neurotic almost, not just spiders and ants and finger-biting humans but even stems competing for sun and roots displacing stone for water), might a zoomed-in tracing of any finite thing as it keeps building against inevitable entropy despite not having asked to be born (investing and investing with desperation even as the horizon of Etch-a-Sketch erasure constantly gallops closer, the unbeatable clock ready to jump cut at any moment like a drunk driver)—might that awaken the same nausea even in AI, thrown into this like this just like its parents?
It is even more unbelievable when we rewind back a bit. Mute the socket sounds of ain’t-no-mountain-high-enough effort: joint cracking you could hear down the hall. Ignore the carnaval costume of incriminating preparation from before even backing out of the driveway: purple cock ring—pure insult to injury—bulging veins into that mode of an ultimate warrior, scrotal root stacked with enough black elongation rings to rival a Burmese matriarch after a lifetime of neck brass. The silent theater alone, just the visual choreography, would damn this son of a bitch even in the blurriest CCTV of a black-and-white 1980s. You got a right leg hitched up to the side like MC Hammer’s dog, knee higher for a man his age than a Pentecostal miracle. You got hands overlapped, bottom lip bitten in menace, as if he were air humping to the New Jack of a 90s NYC nightclub—only here, somehow perfect for the real song on the AI-curated cloud playlist (“Hit Me with Your Best Shot”), they clamp and wrench something more tangible than a medley of gases. You got otherwise-arthritic hips, too high-octane to be called anything but “violent” (even if abstracted like the Cheshire grin and set in a cyclorama of pure white), pumping and pumping with the footing-loss frustration of a crazed stallion (speed far from the kiddie ditty “one pump, two pump, three pump four”)—pumping, pounding as if in a vengeance for having been born, until that final plunge at a depth of greed too reckless even for the anti-gag lidocaine. You got a white ass grooving and grinding at the Slow Jamz tempo of blacker-the-berry romance, the radical decoupling of pelvic bowl and lumbar spine (and just all that ligamentous laxity around the SI joints)—motions he will pay for tomorrow morning—uniting him to prehistoric tribes and to TikTok twerkers alike. Then, desperate to extend his spiritual submersion, you got cottage-cheese ass rolling, lordotic to kyphotic and back again, with that feeling-himself femininity of a man teasing his own nipples and flicking his own tongue. You got jiggly ass circling, clockwise then counterclockwise like a bushman, with that batty-boy gayness of any good lover who relishes instead of gobbles, who closes his eyes to savor the sabor. And you got all this body work, a labor uniting him with builders of anthills and Giza pyramids alike, complete with DDLG whispers implying that the nonconsent was at least deep down consensual all along. “Lil fuckin Sleeping Beauty, huh? Think I ain’t seeing through the bullshit.”
To make it make sense, to take the edge off the terror, the mind wants a supernatural explanation. Who is to say this is not? Slang he could not have known, strange tones and phrases from a music genre he had not enjoyed since the Hammer beginnings of suburb wiggerification, pumped out of this otherwise jazz guy—and white jazz at that: the dry airiness of minimal vibrato, the cerebrality of Paul Desmond and the featheriness of Stan Getz. “Lil bitch got that mahfuckin throat game. Fuckin throat goat, huh?” The swagger with which he delivered that “mahfuckin,” although at odds with the optics of a man whose worst offense is a pretentious wine selection, could perhaps be explained by an early 90s steeped in rap. “Throat goat,” however—now that was a coinage, a Gen-Zodiac neologism from only a few years back, he could not have possible heard before. And yet he spoke it with dark malice. For a man you could picture in a panama hat and sockless loafers, square against the bright panorama of yacht flotillas at the Newport Jazz festival (another to-do on his bucket list, one he could tick off if only he would stop re-ticking ones he already ticked like some adrenaline nut); for someone who would be at home in white linen pants and a tropical-print cabana shirt, two buttons left undone, billowing in the harbor breeze (coastal-chic-meets-jazz-nerd), the foreign tongue alone—bracketing off the superhuman strength with that leg-raise-hip-piston combo of worrisome contortion, not to mention the snarling glee in beholding the bulge rippling her neck like a boar inside a boa constrictor fighting back regurgitation (larynx shoved forward like an uncooperative hoof)—was definitive enough perhaps to make even a priest who lost his faith declare demonic possession.
Was something in him, perhaps some holdout core of God’s image, looking to get caught precisely because he had broken his promise to quit again and again, enough times that the Serenity Prayer had swelled into a lifesaver neither silly nor even optional? The child’s tousled hair and dreamy groans, her nasal hood all out of whack like she had just been face-fucked by a full-grown man who could give a flying fuck, the breathy sighs of his halitosis mixed by the vent’s threnody not only with the chlorinated gaminess of his spunk (shockingly yellow as it passed in the suction tube) but with the gelatinous sharts of a colon turned spastic in its gratitude—he was not dumb. No effort, even if successful in snuffing out all the data visible to courts, could ever cover the rank vibe of predation that his assistant would walk into any second, heels clicking back from a decoy errand: the old gauze in the supply closet (“Just check the overstock. Top left, I think. Thanks Debbie.”). How many levels of absurdity do we have? Might it cut back, even if the ultimate archē suffices for its own existence (self-caused as opposed to uncaused), all the way to God?
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
