Pumps and a Bump (ROUND 2)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Kambodi Gris (attar), by Ensar
Only my second wear. Very milky vegetal coolness with dry spice. None of the menthol I expected—Tigerwood is menthol, not this. This is a creamed-pepper vetiver-lavender scent—like an Ensar take on Vetiver Insolent, and by “Ensar take” I mean of course the aquatic ambergris and the musk. This is more herbal than Vetiver Insolent and even comes with a piney-clean incense that Vetiver Insolence lacks (the Miller Harris is much more citrusy incense). This is very western comparatively but I enjoy the great mustiness that restrains it from being full-blown mass-appealing cedarwood frag. Indeed, the mustiness makes this something more like a vintage designer that would definitely read as Grandpa today.
*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 M. C. Hammer of Dinosaur Dental, a dental practice for young kids.
*Still working on this one. It will get better
Pumps and a Bump
The Sisyphus of sedation dentistry suctioned the patient’s throat, rendered once again mere object in his deep-dipping frenzy to scavenge what had led to pneumonia in others before her. Thoroughness was less his retributive care for a moral agent he had wronged than his way to express that he was done for good now with such wronging (“No more. This’s the last damn time.”)—a promise he had broken too many times.
Not one gelatinous clot less than all he could give, built up over nearly two bowlegged weeks of anticipation for the pulpotomy circled on his calendar in the telling blue of a telling crayon, had filled the consolation cavity—the other two, more delectable but too damning for anything beyond a pinkie, imprinted from the previous procedure of moaning midazolam on a huff glove ziplocked in vain to preserve the indolic musk and civet tang indicative of age-appropriate self-play that part of every trophy hunter like him translates, OshKosh B’gosh and butterfly barrettes be damned, as begging for it. The mouth butcher even made sure, against the clock, to milk himself clean like one of the yogurt tubes waiting for when she came to (“For any residual bad taste”)—as if what he stroked, that one way only, was his own leg of faulty-valved veins pooled with an international flight’s worth of back-flowed blood, only the directionality of extrusion was not his brain and heart but hers.
It would take brain-bending empathy to understand the shift—fuck the clock right to slavery to the clock; evidence plastering right to evidence cleaning—as anything more than nature-doc absurdity of the highest order. For there the man was in a frantic rush to suction clean what just milliseconds before he would have obliterated his family and reputation, his license and freedom, to finish soiling with all the bone-cracking theatrics damning even in the blurriest CCTV: right leg hitched high like M.C. Hammer’s dog, knee for someone his age higher than a Pentecostal miracle; hands overlapped, bottom lip bitten in menace, as if he were humping to the New Jack of a 90s nightclub, only here they clamped and wrenched something more tangible than air; otherwise-arthritic hips, too high octane to be called anything but “violent” (even if abstracted like the Cheshire grin and set in a cylorama 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 until that final plunge at a depth of greed too reckless even for the anti-gag licocaine; white ass grooving and grinding at the Slow Jamz tempo of blacker-the-berry love, the radical decoupling of pelvic bowl and lumbar spine (and just all that ligamentous laxity around the SI joints) uniting him to prehistory tribes and to TikTok twerkers alike; 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 as he does; jiggly ass circling, clockwise then counterclockwise like a bushman, with that batty-boy gayness of any good lover who savors instead of gobbles—all this body work complete with romance whispers (“Lil fuckin Sleeping Beauty, huh?”).
Was something in him looking to get caught precisely because he had broken the promise 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 in his rage against having been born, the breathy sighs of his halitosis swirling in the air with the chlorinated gaminess of his climax—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 for gauze in the supply closet (“Just check the overstock. Top left, I think. Thanks Debbie.”).
“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)
