Pumps and a Bump (ROUND 5)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Fiona (batch 6), by TSVGA
Batch 6 is more oudy and the animalics are louder—usually a good think in my book but the stunning sandalwood champaca due of batch 5, which I also had the misfortune of smelling first, is unbeatable./ I only ever had a decant of 5, and it is now gone. I own, though, a big bottle of 6—same spirit but much less foreplay and right to the floor of the fragrance. As such it comes off less with the lumbersexual vibe—something again one would think I like given my disdain for hipsters. But there was something remarkable about the floraly version 5. In both version there is this lovely jasmine that, with the oud, gives you a very similar powerbait fishing lure aroma that I get in Miyaz’s Fleur Tabac—an aroma that I thought made the Miyaz utterly unique in my collection until I noticed this.
Another lumbersexual fragrance—I get that from many of the TSVGA: makes me think of Brooklyn hipster gentrifiers poured in from Portland or something / Aside from those negative connotations (sort of what Dr Squatch wanted to be), this is a top level perfume (among the best I have put my nose on) / You may hate the hipsters—and I do for irrational reasons that I am working on—but you cannot deny their artisanal cheeses and coffees / Even if the friend in the fragrance community who sent me a sample of this is right and the creator only got into the game to make a quick buck (instead of for the love), I still would have to give him respect for Fiona (as well as Pipe series, despite it dipping into gourmand sweeteness I typical steer clear of, and Vicki-Lin, which dips into liquid mesquite smoke territories) / FIONA is the best of the three that I have tried and it has a common buttery antique feel—not the antique wood I love so much in Bortnikoff, especially when its musty and/or tannic, but something older something before human history / I think the choya or the seashell elements used in various of the TSVGA but comes out loud and proud in all its umami glory (real umami, not the Megamare ambroxan-calone suggestion of it), which gives me a nostalgia for not my own life but for the sea from which all of us came. / It is not a sea fragrance, but it brings me to the sludge of first life on Earth / I have Areejs that bring me to ceremonial tribalism and even prehuman history and I have bortnikoffs that bring me to musty attics, but TSVGA—as I now see through wearing FIONA—brings me to the primordial (maybe not Pipe as much, but definitely FIONA and Vicky-Lynn). /
there’s that umami aroma which is in a lot of the tsvga: onycha, choya luban, choya nakh—notes that give briney animalic sea shell vibes, even some caviar (a signature as stunning as Tauerade and Bianchi’s orris butter)/ garage band masterpiece / has a bortnikoff heyday oud, like in Lao Oud / onycha, an ancient aromatic ingredient that shows up in old texts (one of four elements to the Bible’s description of sacred incense: Exodus 30:34), is the seal of a snail’s shell (the operculum) that gives of musky smell (sweet, animalic, mushroomy) when burned /so smooth and buttery like a rich well blended piece abd yet unlike a well blended piece, and this is garage band element, you can pick out each note pretty much, which appeals to note nerds.
Bortnikoff ambergris and tropicals and even oud, but the animalics (the amount and type) makes this one of one. grounding but in a primeval prehuman way. so many of the TSVGA frags have a cozy quality, texture—perhaps because of the womblike oceanic primordiality, not oceanic in smell but in sea-shell-animalic primitiveness / buttery and comforting naturalism in many of these TSVGAs, many go rustic like Pipe, but in Vicki-Lin and Fiona it is a rusticness that precedes mammals—when mammals were relegated only to the sea /rustic and old world like Pipe / Even here in Fiona we get tobacco rusticness / castoreum is tarry
*Earlier versions had relentless focused intensity, diving straight into the countdown and never letting up—the effect being claustrophobic constriction from the beginning. This new version is more expansive and philosophical and literary. For that reason, though, it is potentially more diffuse. I hope I didn’t “mess it up.” But I do want the piece to work as psychological/philosophical examination of absurdity (Herzog documentary tone) instead of just visceral horror. So I think I stand by my change.
*At at a solid draft. Help me improve this!
Pumps and a Bump
White honey had been building over nearly two bowlegged weeks. “Pull somethin there, Cowboy?” the dental hygienist said, holding the door for him as he made his timid way across the parking lot and through the sweet rot and bleach musk of the Bradford pear tree in full bloom. He ran with it. “Never again with the damn racquetball.”
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 chunks of baking soda; a world where a broody hen will sit on a golf ball until a real egg comes along and 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—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 hell of his slimy underwear. Not only did the bodily discomfort—the pressure of clogged-up duct work, the sharp pains shooting into the lower back and abdomen—swell out of his own design, the very reason he put himself through the ordeal—the why that allowed him to bear almost any interim how—disallowed 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 breath work or a cold shower at night followed by a cold compress and ass elevation on the arm of his sofa.
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.
Four days out—coccyx the only contact he would allow with the stool he otherwise liked to roll around in to suck the fear and pull the giggles from his 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 with manga hemorrhoids—his sockets throbbed and his back teeth felt afloat in a gamey goo, a musky nectar of linden 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, a steady spill of backlog slime. Even in sleep, more the twilight shuteye of a nerve-wracked boxer on the eve of a title event, he held a kegel—pelvic floor white as his toe knuckles—to keep the structure from unzipping too soon.
Come the keeling point of achy-breaky reckoning, then, it made sense that—even with a ballistic bluster furious enough to displace a ceiling tile, and then splat the wall across the room—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 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, a civet tang that 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 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 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 (“Because sometimes,” so he tells parents, “the patient will notice a residual metallic taste”)? 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 back-flowed blood, only the directionality of extrusion was not his brain and heart but hers? He suctions the fucking thing! Weeks of work—and the Sisyphus of sedation dentistry 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 than 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’s 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 florescence 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 even in AI, thrown into this like this just like its parents?
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 higher—given 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 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 gasses. 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 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) 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 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.”
Was something in him 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 with the chlorinated gaminess of his spunk—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, even if the ultimate arche 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)
