Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Well, it's light. She only woke up twice, pretty briefly both times. I waited until she fell back asleep and then... oh, man. I'll just say it's Henna. The crazy thing is, they're not random. They're definitely not random. They're not even natural patterns like crystals or fractals -- it's script, I swear to god. My previous theory isn't covering as much as I hoped it would. I always wondered what I'd do if I ever encountered something I knew there was no ready explanation for, and had to pull on what I'd learned from stories. Well, ancient scripts -- you go to musty old libraries, right? Or short of that, Google. Nothing so far. I wish I didn't keep wanting to bolt back in there. It's subcutaneous, it's absolutely subcutaneous, but it's not an itch. Just... localized pleasure, suddenly yoinked. One of those hardwired organic shocks, like when you take a pacifier out of a baby's mouth, or when you... well. Heh. The question is, what scent goes with my grand new design? The answer is: Antony. And just let them stare. I dare them. Blessed among women maybe I ain't, but this is something else again, and I'm not going to be cowed by it.
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07:16:07 AM,Thursday 27 January 2005
I, uh... I don't think this is coming off.
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06:08:52 AM,Thursday 27 January 2005
Weird night. When I got here, everything was fine; my employer was using her new speech synthesizer to write an email, and the other employee was puttering about happily enough. But after about an hour, I started hearing this scritching and scratching from the radiator in her bedroom. No one else seemed to notice anything, and, I mean, what was I supposed to say? "Hey, I think your 10-room 8th floor 6-doorman swank-as-murder Central Park apartment is paying squat to a nest of social-climbing rats"? And maybe it wasn't; maybe it was just cutlery noises from a midnight snacker downstairs. Or maybe rich people's radiators scritch instead of CLANG-CLANG-CLANG. What do I know? So I sat there and administered the nightly footrub and kept mum. But after she had fallen asleep to Charlie Rose, I snuck over there with a flashlight I'd taken from the utility drawer.
I guess I expected a weird smell and maybe a pair of eyes beating a retreat from the light, and I was just gonna verify my suspicions and relate them in the morning. I'm a friend to rats, by and large; still, I've got a responsibility to oversee the sanitation of the sickroom. But... heh... um. How do I put this? The radiator had, like, desiccated, almost. But that doesn't make any sense. Only moist things desiccate, living things with hard parts. Paint flakes and metal rusts, but this thing was as ultramodern as the rest of this place, until tonight. It's like it turned... chitinous. You know what I mean? Like if you flatten out the nibs of fifty quill pens, and put them in the place of the metal gridwork. It still kept the same structure; pot of orchids on top, knobs under the flip-panel, wall-to-wall carpet flush with the bottom. It was still beige. But it wasn't painted metal, nohow, and it scritched. Not rhythmically, but with purpose, almost. Like an old dog scritching himself in his sleep, or a mad monk with writer's block. Further inside, I could see mats of stuff like cilia -- short little frondy bits, still beige, but rounder and more flexible.
This is the part where I get massively stupid. You know in Amelie where it says she cultivated the small pleasures in life and she sticks her arm up to the elbow in a barrel of raw lentils? I'm such a sucker for that feeling. I can't help it. It's why I like snails and chain mail and sandpaper. So I, uh, flipped up the bit you flip to get to the knobs and stuck my arm in and bent my elbow and put my forearm between two mats of cilia. And GOD it felt good. Not wet at all; each little cilium was dry and raspy, but the cumulative effect was soft as buttermilk. And it was still a radiator, y'know; nice hot heat blasting out of it all the while. And Charlie Rose was finishing up, and my employer was making her regular night-time snorey noises, and part of me wanted to retreat off to the kitchen to get on the internet and blog this, but another part of me wanted to break apart all the delicate little flat quill-nibs of the radiator grille and climb inside this thing. Maybe I wasn't hugged enough as a child. I... um. Actually, I probably shouldn't blog what happened next. It's a little incriminating, and I want the chance to tell my story to the concerned parties in person. Let it be said that I'm fine, that I'm starting to think I know what caused all this, and that I'm going to be wearing long sleeves for a while.
First impressions: Jailbait (bubble gum) and Follow Me Boy (trenchmouth) were vile, so we quarantined them. We sniffed through all the rest, and everything got (fairly surprisingly) provisional approval. I'm pretty sure we're going to like a higher percentage of this order's scents than we did of the first. I swiped Yggdrasil on my left wrist, Scarecrow on my right, and De Sade on the back of my neck. K. put Neo-Tokyo on her left and Intrigue on her right. Then we sniffed again.
Yggdrasil started out floral, dried down to a haunting but all-too-brief trudging-through-wet-woods scent, and then flattened out into a boring, grinding, one-note-samba cinnamon. Feh. I know I sound bitter, but it's just that I had such high hopes for it.
Scarecrow smelled faintly narsty in the vial but turned into a fantastic traditional men's cologne on my wrist within seconds, which faded without noticeably distorting over the next three or four hours. A few weeks back, I wandered into a huge swanky perfume shop in the Village and spent a good half hour spritzing $50 men's colognes onto paper testers without finding but a single one I actually wanted to smell like. Scarecrow reminds me strongly of that one, but improves on it by cutting out the slightly sickly notes and replacing them with the smell of sun-warmed hay. I really freakin' like it. K. was less thrilled, but maybe it'll grow on her.
De Sade also made K. recoil in the vial, though I thought it friendly enough. She convinced me to wash it off the back of my neck so that I wouldn't offend my employer with its sharpness, and I did, but it still stuck around, and... I'm sorry, babe. I love it. It makes me strut like t3h s3x in army boots. I've never smelled saddlesoap, but that's the word it makes me think of. Some sneering finely-muscled groom with a scar on his nose rubbing saddlesoap into his Lady's pommel in a way that makes her wonder whether to fire him or raise his salary. It makes me want to go around seating and hitting things. Rrrrrmph!
Tzadikim Nistarim is incredibly beautiful in the vial, though K. thought she detected a rancid note. I don't know what spikenard is supposed to smell like, but there's a sharp tangy fruitiness that agrees with me very well. I can't give an objective verdict on what it'll do to skin, though, because my wrists are too scent-sodden to be good substrates at the moment. I reapplied Yggdrasil in the vain hope that it'd improve itself on the second go-round and then tried to get everything off with dish soap. But when I tried swiping Tzadikim Nistarim it just wound up sweetening the Yggdrasil's cinnamon residue, and that wasn't at all the idea.
Neo-Tokyo is phenomenal. In the vial, it's just a very light aquatic aroma, but on her -- I have never smelled a manmade scent that did such a thing. Ozone, metal, rain, bamboo, cherry blossoms, city air... all of them unfurling and milling around inside your nose without ever muddling together or sounding a harsh note. She says it makes her feel like a Gibson girl. My favorite one so far from both orders, though I wouldn't wear it.
Intrigue is lovely in the vial. Unsweetened cocoa, ripe fig, maybe something like sod or potting soil. On her, it quickly retreats into her natural scent until it's hard to detect on its own. It gives her skin a rich, buttery sort of quality you want to roll around in your mouth for a while. I want to become better acquainted.
More as they strike me. I can't believe how much I dig this stuff. It's partly the names, it's partly the variety, but it's mostly the magnificent skill that goes into 'em. I've never been a perfume-wearer, 'cause I've never found anything complex and subtle enough to suit me. What's more, I like the natural human scent, and have never thought it necessary to mask it, if you're going to be in close enough quarters to smell it at all -- but these scents work along with it, and make you perceive it in a different way. I think I'm going to go looking for unscented shampoos and bath gels to mix the imps into, 'cause it's not often I decide to smell myself up deliberately; these are so superior to the commercial products I'm forced to clean myself with, though, and that sort of subconscious "mmmm..." left behind after a shower is exactly the level of impact I'm looking for.
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05:58:02 AM,Tuesday 25 January 2005
Ah, my blog's back up. Man, what a weekend. Friday, K. and I went to the Met. I hadn't been there since the first time I visited New York, when I was a teenager. We couldn't take in everything, of course, but she introduced me to several of her oldfriends, and I dragged her upstairs to goggle at Dürer. Along the way, we decided what sort of samurai armor we'd pick if we had the chance, saw some truly bizarre allegorical figurines, and gaped in wonder at the ugliest object ever fashioned by the hand of man. Eeeeh! I have to go back, soon and often.
Then we went back to her place for pizza and Moby Dick and SLEPT IN THE SAME BED (this doesn't really stop being the best part, even after quite a few successive weekends now) 'til morning, when we went to Avenue Q, which was brilliant. We came back and her mom made pea soup according to my mom's recipe, which was so utterly perfect it left me unsure whether to dance or bawl after a single spoonful. It snowed all day, and we had to shut the window against the streetlight glare that night, but by afternoon the sun was beating down so manfully that K. dragged me out of bed to make sure we could play in it before it melted. We stomped snowblind through Riverside park and sat by the Soldiers and Sailors monument to watch the kids crash into the hay bales at the bottom of the hill. Then we crawled through a hedge and ran back inside for more pea soup. That night, we watched a show about the real whale attack that inspired Moby Dick, full of cannibalism, madness, and floppy hats. Afterwards we read novels in the bathtub, with epsom salts and grape-flavored aloe bites. Then I put on clothes, kissed her grinning steamed-up face, and went off to work.
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(2)
05:04:28 AM,Tuesday 25 January 2005
"What do I do? Well, I just got promoted to Animal Hoarding Project Coordinator..."
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(3)
04:24:12 AM,Friday 21 January 2005
Your Conscience in your Hand like a Crow.
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09:01:57 AM,Thursday 20 January 2005
ohmygodpeterpearsiloveyou.
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(2)
07:49:23 AM,Thursday 20 January 2005
If Odious can cop my links, why then, I don't feel the slightest guilt copping his.
Just as well, really. Still. Sounds fun, don't it?
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(2)
02:44:39 AM,Thursday 20 January 2005
In the past day or so, I:
* Registered and paid (well, charged -- but, if I'm careful, I can pay it off in about two months) for my class at Hunter and got a shiny new CUNY card into the bargain. Free swimming! w00t!
* Sent off a check to my mom, paying her back for the money she lent me in August and September.
* Emailed eleven people (friends and strangers) about stuff to do in the city, and have one thing definitely lined up already.
* Applied to a part-time job that would be perfect if it weren't a bit too far away.
* Completed a survey for the research study I'm in.
* Went back to Shakespeare & Co. for my tax form (which they couldn't find, fnurr) and snuffed the books and straightened the displays and hugged the former coworkers and got independent Dublin-native confirmation that my "but he soon beat the master entirely at drinkin'" is very Irish indeed, thank you very much.
* Finally read "To Esme with Love and Squalor".
* Ate a singed marshmallow off a toothpick.
* Saw two old ladies with inscrutable permagrins.
* Sunk my funk.
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(6)
03:41:21 PM,Wednesday 19 January 2005
Squelch.
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03:37:45 PM,Wednesday 19 January 2005
It's too darn hot...
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(1)
09:33:37 AM,Wednesday 19 January 2005
{headclunk}
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07:21:45 AM,Wednesday 19 January 2005
I finally realized what they were getting at with the whole invasion-of-Iraq thing. It follows the principle of:
"If Seymour misbehaves, don't slap him. Slap the boy next to him -- Seymour will get the idea."
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06:06:07 AM,Wednesday 19 January 2005
Mediocrity? Fine, if that's your fate; no shame in it. Humanity's weathered worse. But don't shrink from it. Don't buckle under the clammy awfulness of it. Don't resign yourself before it claims you. Flout it to your last gurgle! Heroic mediocrity -- there's something to aim at.
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08:20:58 AM,Tuesday 18 January 2005
Aw, shucks. Ludwig, you old flatterer. {bats eyelashes}
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(3)
07:00:01 AM,Tuesday 18 January 2005
