Pumps and a Bump (ROUND 3)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Kasturi Cola (Dense), by Elkhaldi
First wear. From the jump I am hit with volatile roasted-coffee aromatics (pyrazines, bitter oils) and a caramelized edge that seems slightly burnt. Here we have dark-roasted realism with a Kahlua nuance. There is cream in here too, the sort cream you would get in an ice-cream float. The cream is not sweet, however—and it is more about the texture: a milky warm texture. Indeed, the ice-cream seems infused with a dry leaf tobacco (very desiccated in texture and smoky)
This is not your fruity or high sugar colas. This is one with the creamy depth of vanillin and the spicy warmth of cinnamon and the depth of benzoin-like resins ramped up. The soda seems vintage in the manner of those chalky bottle cap candies.
The chalkiness actually builds and comes with a coumarin warmth. That powdery plume, buzzing, is from the musk and tonka. Yes, it could seem as you mix the float that there is a musk pod inside. As the fragrance progresses, it seems as if we are evolving from a literal ice cream soda float into the bottle cap candies. The float like the candy is very adult though. Children would want something way sweeter.
This is a sugar-minimal homespun tobacco-infused coffee ice-cream (very adult indeed) placed inside an artisanal cola (one from a mom-and-pop corner rather than some big factory, and again low in sugar) with a musk pod inside.
The chocolate is big too here. I gather it is based around the Sylheti oud. Sylheti oud is from Bangledesh.
Given that Sylhet and Assam were historically part of the same ecological and political region before modern partitions, and given that the oud oils comes from the same species of aquilaria (malacennsis) growing in the same climate belt, and given the shared earthy-dark aroma, I tend to lump Sylheti in with Hindi oud in general. If there is a differentiating factor it is more dark chocolate earthiness with a green edge than fecal hide with a desiccated straw edge.
Vietnamese oud is inside too. It amplifies the green aspects of the Sylheti but carries an incense vibe too—maybe slight red-fruit hints.
Now that I have tried the bright version to (of which I have a sample), I know how to tease apart the difference. The dense is more like a coffee with a hit of cola syrup and with tobacco infused ice-cream on top. It might be better to describe, in effect, the bright version as more the cola (think: old-fashioned soda-fountain soda) and this dense version as more the creamier coffee version.
Either way, both are musky gourmands right in the dark-cafe gourmand territory. Because of this things strong resemblance to Kerosene’s Follow, it can be easy to write off. But time must be spent with this one. Still, I would have liked this to have been framed more as a musk fragrance, such that the soda and coffee and chocolate elements actually served to bring out such elements of a musk—presumably a Mongolian musk would be best for that task.
*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.
*One more round and I should be at a solid draft.
Pumps and a Bump
White honey had been building over nearly two bowlegged weeks. Slashing an “x” through another numbered box on his calendar, edging closer to the pulpotomy date circled in the telling blue of a telling crayon—that had been his only relief. 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.
Four days out—coccyx the only contact he would allow with the stool he otherwise liked to spin around in to pull giggles from his Dino Dental patients—the clock in his office seemed to tick louder, a dilation between seconds splayed so open that rodeo greenhorns unlike him would have suspected an office prank. Three days out—stride wide-set like a Hollywood cowboy with hemorrhoids—his back teeth felt afloat in their throbbing sockets, a gamey goo of summer linden no swallow could clear. Two days out—dam well beyond dignity and just shy of failure—he had begun to brim over, a steady spill of backlog slime. Even in sleep, more the twilight shuteye of a nerve-wracked boxer on the eve of the title event, he held a kegel—pelvic floor white as his toe knuckles—to keep the structure from unzipping too soon.
Come the fateful moment of blustery ballistics, then, it made sense that he let not one gelatinous clot less than all he had to give fill the patient. That the mouth was a consolation cavity did not undermine the resolve. The other two cavities—too damning for anything beyond a stinky pinkie—were more delectable, of course. That is why, in fact, he had been damned sure on the previous date, during another unnecessary procedure of moaning midazolam, to have imprinted them on a huff glove ziplocked 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 “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 a hand to work with, a mid-shelf hand he had to tighten and work for the tranquilized girl, 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?”)—instead of becoming a sourpuss.
Humans and other critters will literally kill one another, and sometimes themselves, for a five-second experience of dumping their loads in this hole or that. That is absurd enough. But what does our mouth butcher 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 Sisyphus of sedation dentistry do after making sure to milk himself clean, as if any other place but her mouth would kill him, like one of the yogurt tubes waiting for when she came to (“For any residual bad taste”)? It boggles the mind. What does he go and do after making sure to strip his urethra clear of juices like it was an IV tube—indeed, 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? He suctions the fucking thing! Weeks of work—he undoes it all.
Everything in life has an explanation, of course. Our dentist suctions the throat, anyone would agree, because he does not want to get caught. Pneumonia could lead to questions, which would be no good because pneumonia had led to questions before. Additional factors play into it as well. Those with privileged access to behind his eyes would know that his thoroughness, deep-dipping in that car-wash vacuum frenzy to scavenge everything he can in the dwindling quarter time he has, is not so much care for a moral agent he had wronged than his way to express, to symbolize, that he is done for good now with such wronging (“No more. This’s the last damn time.”)—a promise he had broken too many times.
Fine. There are explanations for everything. 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 whose narration perhaps not even Herzog could handle. 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 plastering right to evidence cleaning—as anything more than ridiculous. This sudden frantic rush to suction clean what just milliseconds before the man would have obliterated his family and reputation, his license and freedom, to finish soiling—how would an extraterrestrial intelligence look at this? It is even more unbelievable when we pan back a bit in time to remember all the bone-cracking theatrics that would damn this son of a bitch even in the blurriest CCTV of a black-and-white 1980s.
You got right leg hitched high like MC Hammer’s dog, knee—for someone his age—higher than a Pentecostal miracle. You got 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. 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 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, pounding, 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 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. 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 as he does. You got jiggly ass circling, clockwise then counterclockwise like a bushman, with that batty-boy gayness of any good lover who savors instead of gobbles. And you even got 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.”). How many levels of absurdity do we have? Does it cut back 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)
