Squatter (ROUND 3)
scent of the day: Portrait of a Lady, by Malle
Rose pedestaled by spicy fruity ambery patchouli / considered one of the greatest rose perfumes of all time, similar to the night without the shitty oud / opens very close to another Turkish rose and patchlous scent: ELDO’s Eau de Protection (portrait of a lady is very close to memory to eau de protection, might be that the later is better considering price) / They are so similar at first that it seems a rip off to go with the Malle, that money wise the ELDO is insanely more value for money / However, the Malle shows itself to be much richer (more incensy and resinous and middle-eastern) and realistic after 15 minutes, where for the next two hours the rose seems realer-than-real and with facets of wild rose honey / more serious and grave and operatic than eau de protection / becomes much more realistic than ELDO and has vibe of artisinal wild rose honey whereas Eau de Protection goes more bath bomb soap. / it is darker that the ELDO, magically dark / less tealike and more realistic than lyric man (and yet with less of a dark base than lyric) / like a real flower in 8k, stem and leaf included / fruity rose with dry earthy background, almost like cypriol is in with patchouli / better balanced than the ELDO: dark gothic and bright upbeat notes / dusty woody rose with bee pollen vibes / berry and black currant fruitiness / you get leaves and stems too—and spices, especially medicinal-cooling clove/ lemony frankincense embodies both the resinous and bright tension we see here / powdery musk from cashmeran silk / tuscan leather raspberry / potpouri feel from rose plus spices in drydown as naturalism unfortunately fades / rose is bright, and get more bath bomby, but not as much as eldo/ rapid transition to becoming skin scent / ambroxan carrying agent is clear here—but it is not overwhelming or one of the bad amber woods: gives an oceanic musk side / slight sour clovey element of Dev 2 and Serge Noire, which is superior scent both in terms of my taste and I would say perhaps objectively too / Dev 2 has rose and this all makes me think Serge Noire has some rose / I think Imitation Man is better on rose front and I might even prefer Lyric Man too overall (although not in terms of how specifically the rose is done) / Makes me really want to try La Douleur Exquise, which many say is a more masculine version of portrait—more sultry and earthy / La Douleur Exquise has an Anteaus castoreum that this lacks/ Portrait is not as loud or masculine as Promise, and definitelyu not as crudely synthetic /amouage roses are better
*Overhauled but piece is still sloppy. Might just abandon.
Squatter
You do not own your home, whatever the deed might claim. How could you? No one owns this land, except perhaps the First Nations. And even that warrants examination. Did not the land exist long before them, occupied by flora and fauna with whom they did not negotiate—and who certainly gifted them no title?
Many of you will protest. “But a contract was drawn, a purchase made.” Look beyond your own interest for one second. Judge with impersonal eyes. That contract was executed by parties who, when one traces the chain of title back far enough, possessed no legitimate ownership to convey. It does not matter what they believed or what they convinced themselves to believe. Their signatures were performative—ink pretending to constitute authority.
Consider the parallel. If you purchase a vehicle that was ultimately stolen, do you own it? Obviously not. The same principle applies here.
You possess no legitimate right to exclude anyone from your home. Who are you—no, really think. Who are you to determine who belongs and who does not? The same principle that renders borders illegitimate because “we’re on stolen land” dissolves your property line as well. If no one legitimately owns the entirety, no one legitimately owns the subdivision. What, then, distinguishes your property threshold from a national boundary? Nothing.
But even many of you who admit that “No one is illegal on stolen land”—a wise maxim if there ever was one—fail to recognize the full implication. Because you cannot insist “No human is illegal” when the migrants cross the Rio Grande, yet insist on exclusion when they cross your threshold.
Many of you keep the porch light on, positioning it as a beacon not merely for invited guests but for those experiencing need. You congratulate yourself for this hospitality. Fine—you prioritize those fleeing hardship. You surrender spaces. You allow the tired and poor a pathway to permanent belonging.
But pause on that verb: “you allow.”
Who are you to grant allowance? Even if you do not maintain a fence, even if you do not live in neighborhoods where housing costs alone enforce borders more effectively than any wall or patrol—you have no right to allow.
The problem goes beyond words. Most of you impose criteria for migrants to meet before you “allow” their entry. They must knock at the front door. They must endure probationary periods. You even subject them to evaluations. Who are you to impose tests, though? And who are you to judge the answers? On property as stolen as the larger land of which it is no more than a parcel, you get to exclude people from entry on the basis of tests?
No one is illegal on stolen land.
The situation only gets worse. You would call upon authorities, or even feel righteous enough to try yourselves, to remove those who entered without authorization. Do you not see what has gone wrong? You act as if the method of entry had any relevance. It does not. What authority do you possess to count entry through the front door as legal and entry through the window as illegal?
If removing these migrants right away were not cold enough, many of you will wait. You will wait until they have established themselves, until they have gotten used to the comforts of the space. Then you would summon armed agents to extract them. How much more sinister can you get?
We have heard the rationalizations before. “We aren’t kicking out just anyone who entered uninvited. We are prioritizing the removal of those who violated house rules.” This rationalization fails. It is irrelevant whether these individuals contribute to household maintenance or whether they violated your space in ways you find deeply disturbing. No one is illegal.
You might turn your head in incredulity. “So I have no right to remove even someone who has broken in and now continually damages my home?” The answer is already clear. Even if they deserve penalties for such actions—a big “if” since what right does anyone have to penalize anyone for doing what they wish with what no one owns—those penalties cannot include removal from the home.
Why? Allow these words to sink in. No one is illegal on stolen land.
Yet still you deploy diversionary tactics. You believe you acquire moral authority—some legitimate right to determine residency—through your catalog of accommodations. Look at you. You provide warnings, you allow “time to arrange affairs,” you even offer financial assistance for relocation. You exercise extended tolerance toward “trespassers” who contribute to household operations and show a track record of good behavior.
Step back for a second, though, and you will see the glaring truth. These gestures of consideration merely reinforce the problematic framework that categorizes certain people as “illegal.” They perpetuate the harmful notion that exclusion is just.
You may attempt to deploy logic. We have heard the retorts before.
“If no one is trespassing because no one legitimately owns property to trespass upon, does that not permit me to claim their possessions—their clothing, their food, their vehicle?”
“If it is stolen land, then no one has to pay taxes or any other price to live here and banks cannot foreclose because they never had legitimate claims to begin with.”
“Tribes were displacing and absorbing other tribes, taking territories, since before there was any such thing as Europeans—the Europeans were simply better at conquering.”
“Even acknowledging theft in certain documented cases, some statute of limitations must eventually establish legitimacy for subsequent generations.”
“Pretty much all territories have histories of conquest impossible to trace, but now—having found ourselves thrown into a situation we did not ask to be in—we operate within civilized frameworks of purchase rather than violent seizure.”
“In order to keep this land healthy we must secure borders to make sure that everyone contributes—the same applying to keeping our home healthy.”
“If no one is illegal, then we can refuse to leave Mexico even after entering without documentation.”
“If it is wrong to exclude and enforce territorial borders, those native tribes who tried to keep Europeans out must have been wrong for doing that too.”
In all these attempts at resistance, you overlook one critical factor: you are white. That factor establishes an exception to the principle that exclusion constitutes injustice. That factor resolves all the contradictions you are trying to expose.
The issue is race. When you recognize that race—your race—is the issue, no longer will you struggle with the fact that white Americans remain invaders five centuries after settlement while nonwhite immigrants who arrived yesterday do not. No duration of residency will render this land a white person’s. It is irrelevant that you reside in California or Utah or other territories bought from Mexico. These are distractions.
What ultimately matters is racial identity. No nonwhite person is “illegal.” That is the actual principle operating beneath the surface. The subtext had always shone brightly enough to make it seem almost wrong to call it subtext. Let us be explicit, then. White people—they are the ones who are illegal.
The issue is equity. As a mechanism of atonement, as redress for historical and ongoing harm perpetrated by your demographic category, you—especially those of you who are cisgender white neurotypical males—have neither the same moral nor legal rights as anyone else. You have less. No white person has any more right to stop a migrant from coming into his home than he has a right to stop one from coming into this country. A white “No” does not constitute valid “No.” No white person can claim the distinction between invited guest and intruder, between resident and trespasser. Can you go into the home of a nonwhite migrant, even if undocumented? No. Why? Because you are you—simple as that.
How about instead of speaking all the time, instead of being defensive, you observe silence and humility. Stand down. It is time for BIPOC voices to lead the way. Understand that there is more to it than simply not coming to opening weekend of Mexican Panther. You know what you must do. It goes well beyond just opening your doors.
Welcome home, stranger.
“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)
