Pumps and a Bump (ROUND 7)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Nephrite Elixir, by Amphora Exotica
A rooty-mineralic fougere with strong impressions of lime and pine and chocolatey musk. Lime is very pronounced at first. And that brings it into contact right away with various fragrances (all of which seem to perform better): Savitri, Chypre Siam, Forbidden flower, Siberian Musk, and even 1805 Tonnerre and Isfarkand Elixir.
The impression is of being in a pine forest as dawn evaporates the night mist. The nephite stone color represents it well. Muskier than you think. I disturbed the spot on my arm with my shirt by accident and it unlocked a lot of musk. Mildewed roots are in here too, and with a medicinal touch—a function of orris, mushroom, moss, and holy basil. Very much in between a Pineward fragrance and Spell 125 by Papillon.
This is only first wear. Unlike the amazing and characterful Spell 125, this seems to collapse in on itself—yes, even in spite of seeming to take (on paper at least) Spell 125 into Siberian Musk territory. Everything is very dialed back. If one or two things (urinous civet and seminal linden blossom perhaps, but what do I know?) it would seem to have more oomph. I might be somewhat blind, however, to piney fragrances. Or maybe it is in their nature to be muted. Who knows? I do know that I must wait a few months before making up my mind about this one.
*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 all over today. My aim was to create an even queasier momentum by twisting medical jargon into sexual metaphor while also punctuating the whole with locker-room vulgarity. The queasiness is important to the core of the piece: highlighting the absurdity not just of deviant dentist but the serious efforts of every creature, plant and animal alike, thrown into existence just to die.
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 hysterical bloom, he made his timid way across the parking lot. His dental hygienist, always on time with a nosy visor hand, had her squinted eye on him. “Pull somethin there, Cowboy?” she called out, holding the door in wait. He ran with it. “My racquetball days are done. Too damn old!”
The excuse to scuttle about the clinic as if some humanoid crab, upright in exoskeletal 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; 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 hell of his slimy underwear, mucosal as an adolescent girl. 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 allowed for 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 allowed him to bear 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 followed by a freezer pack 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.
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 slime. 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, then, 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 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, 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—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 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’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 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 pan back a bit in time to remember all the mountain-moving theatrics, joint cracking you could hear down the hall, 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 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. 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 (shockingly yellow as it passed in the suction tube)—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? Does 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)
