I smell LIKE dead people! Argh!

I gave myself a little treat and got three of the solid perfumes from Crazylibellule and the Poppies: two (Ginger & Coconut and Encens Mystic) from the Shanghaijava Collection, and one (Aux Anges) from les Divines Alcoves Collection.

They're cheap and had hugely successful reviews so I got a couple to play with. Also, you can take 'em on a plane, which is nice.

I very much like Ginger & Coconut... it's subtle, milky rich, and surprising all at the same time. I have never tried a perfume with cumin in the top notes and it's shocking-- I imagine you'd either love it or hate it. I do love it. On me it's spicy, natural smelling, and with the also shocking curry note, it provides a little grounding for the otherwise positively etherially sexy brew of kaffir lime, ginger, coconut, precious woods, amber, etc. Yum.

I also like Aux Anges, which I wore to bed last night. It is jasmine, ylang, a little citrus and bergamot, and white flowers. It smells like summertime when I was a kid. I can't put my finger on it, but I think it is a memory of eating honeysuckle blossoms with Jeffy when we were little, surrounded by white flower aromas from nearby jasmine and magnolia blooms. It's very girly, but still a pleasure.

Encens Mystic is the best reviewed of the bunch. It's incense with clove and vanilla... which SOUNDS a lot nicer than it IS, on me. It smells like a funeral home. Old lady perfume and a tang of urine, musty furniture, church incense, and candles. And not in a good way.

I sniffed it, in the package, where it smells a lot nicer, and thought "hmm, I'll give it a try for the afternoon."

Oh.

My.

God.

IhateitIhateitIhateit!

Now I have to smell like this til I go home. >.<

Update: I scrubbed the berjeebers out of it with a damp paper towel, and now the faint reminder of what was on me is actually quite pretty. Not at all me, but I don't loathe the (scrubbed) dry down the way I loathe the top notes. I do not foresee putting it on again, but I might make it through the day without gnawing off my arms at the shoulders so I can get away from my wrists, now.

For Pathy and April

This link about freelancing.

I smell dead people.

Two posts back to back, I know. I'll go back to sporadic updates after this.







Thanks to Engrish.com for this prize.










For five days (ever since the 4th of July party), I had a phantom smell in my nose. Burning and cigarette smoke, so strong it was like being in the Lima bus station, only without the watering eyes. Absolutely unmistakable. Nothing it could have been but cigarette smoke.

The only problem? Nobody else had it.

Yesterday, finally sick with the virus I'd been nurturing since the party, I gave up and Googled "phantom smell." I was going out of my mind, crazycrazycrazy. It's amazing how much torture one little sensation can be when it just... won't... fuck... off.

If you Google phantom odors, you find a lot of forum posts telling you to seek the help of a neurologist, ASAP! Because you have a brain tumor, or epilepsy at best. Maybe brain damage. The people who have this strange symptom for those reasons are understandably urgent in their exhortations that you get to the doctor RIGHT NOW and it's a little overwhelming.

Scary? Sure. Coupled with the dizzy spells that plagued me for almost 2 weeks LAST time I caught a bug (I wonder if I ever even got over that?) and the vision problems that worsened suddenly and radically when I had an oxygen crisis a year ago (I had pneumonia, maybe-- blood work say yes, X-ray say no). Could I have brain damage? Could I have a tumor?

I did what I always do when a bunch of unqualified, anonymous people tell me something. I looked for a qualified one. A paper on phantom aromas by a doctor.

Ohhhh, and it also occurs from viral infections or migraines. Thanks, doctor.

The same article told me that people sometimes kill themselves because of phantom smells. The smells can be anything-- smoke, often, but also flowers, or vile things like rotting garbage, or shit. Okay, I hate smoke, but I got lucky.

Why do they kill themselves? Because eating becomes torture.

You do not taste all the things you perceive as taste. What you REALLY taste is salty, sweet, sour, bitter, pungent (maybe--might be sensation + scent), and umami (maybe--might be snobbish perception of saltyness). EVERYTHING else is smell.

So if everything "tastes" like shit... yeah, that'd do it.

They cure it by cutting the nerves. Sometimes it works.

I made a weak brine of salt water and snorted it. Stunned out the chemical perception and proved to me that it was in the nose/sinus, NOT the brain.

Thank you, doctor.

Now it's coming and going, but it's not as death-grip as it was, and I know it could be worse. Anyway, fascinating thing, the body... and that's even without my usual prurient spin on that.

Eulogy for a sunflower

It survived my brown thumb. It survived opportunistic ducks. It survived the half-barrel of doom. It survived my desire to cut it down before I knew what it was.

And yet it is no more, my yellow friend.

I planted a lot of sunflower seeds in peat pellets and let them sprout. They grew strong and swiftly, delighting me. When they were big enough, I transplanted them to out of doors.

The ducks ate their tender shoots within the hour.

One sunflower was slow to rise. When I transplanted it, later than the others, to the half oak barrel that had been there since before we moved in, which was volunteering some hideous profusion of wildflowers that choked out my lemon cucumber plants (drying up now with fruited vines for reasons I cannot diagnose, although everything around them thrives), slaughtered one of my two hot pepper plants, and stunted my eggplant.

I forgot about it because it seemed to die. Possibly it did die, and the one that grew was a seed that hadn't sprouted at all when I transplanted the peat pellet.

A horrible yellow flowering weed shot up on one side of the pot. We cut it down because it went mad and started killing the other flowers. It is growing back.

At about the same time, a fleshy, hairy, big-leaved thing arose in the middle of the barrel.

"It's a thistle" we told each other as it sent up a fist-shaped green, scaly pod. We considered cutting it down along with Old Yeller, but left it. "I want to see it bloom," I said. "The little birds might want the thistle seeds," Pat said.

It turned that pod inside out and became a sunflower. The bees loved it. It smelled gorgeous. Every day it changed.

The little birds-- fledgling goldfinches, and their parents, song sparrow fledglings and adults-- loved to land upon it. There is nothing more adorable than a baby bird devouring the leaves of your favorite surprise blossom, inches from your kitchen window... unless it is two, or three.

We could not look at it without thinking of the goldfinch babies.













Yesterday, when I came home for lunch, our yard was swarming with baby song sparrows, house finches, house sparrows, and goldfinches. The scrub jays were active and noisy. "The sunflower is drooping more than usual," Pat said. "I think it must be getting too heavy for itself."

"Nah, it's the little birds landing on it," I said. "We ought to splint it."

"Probably," Pat said. We'd had exactly this conversation before. It was a very droopy sunflower.

We watched wildlife. There were two ground squirrels in our little fenced back porch.

"I hate the squirrels," I said, as I always say. (Like many mammals, squirrels are dicks... they ruin it for everyone. They will ... well... squirrel away any food you put out for the birds. They don't eat it. They just steal it and hide it so that nobody else can eat it. And tree squirrels don't even remember where they bury their snacks! They have a host of other evil behavior, like faking the act of burying something, so that other squirrels starving for a nut and trying to dig up something someone else buried won't get anything at all. They're jerks.) Then I softened. "Ohh, he has speckles. Look at his white eye-ring! Look, that one's a baby-- he's got such a ratty little tail!"

Papa Bastard Squirrel had brought his more-than-two-but-who-knows-how-many offspring to our yard. What we did not know was that they were planning a route to the suet feeder that Pat had hung from the eaves in an attempt to allow the birds to get a little bit of it, before the Bastard Squirrel got it all.

That route led through my cucumber plants (okay, they're deceased but they are a labor of love), up the sunflower, and, as any mammal that could use its brain for anything but evil could tell you, right back down the sunflower as they bent over the stalk.

They did nibble it where it broke. They also ate some of the disk-like center of the flower and its ripening seeds, on the outside where they ripen first. They dug out petals and scattered them around the porch, like long yellow fairy canoes.

We splinted it, too late.

Now it's got a tangle tamer cast with plant stake splint, taped with red botanists' tie-tape and bright scarlet Duck Tape. We don't think it'll make it.

I hope the little birds won't stop landing on it just because of the splint. It will probably die and dry there, but maybe they can eat the seeds.

We loved our sunflower. Next year we must plant more and put the suet farther away. Nothing can take away the magical memory of baby goldfinches regarding us from the top of a flower inches from our window, but those durn squirrels sure tried.

What am I going to do with them?















* None of these pictures are mine... I'm lazy and bad and they're pretty, so there.

One of these things is not like the other...

I don't think I'm still hung over but I feel that way, and increasingly filled with impotent rage about the blowful morality of the Decider.

I'm in a very kindergarten mood right now. Let's watch Sesame Street together and sleep off our Independence Day.



Manah Manah






















Do doooo de do dooo.



Manah Manah.



















Do dooo de doooo.


Manah Manah.




Do doooo de doo dooo, de doo dooo,
de doo doooo,
de dooo doo,
doo
doo
doo
doo
doo
doo
doo.



















Squeedly bop do do be bah... bah do bee doodly bah dee pah... bedah la la... bedah la la...

Manah Manah...

Do doo de do doo.














Sorry, toots. I guess money won't buy you everything...

But corruption will.

Here's something that makes more sense. Piero Umiliani, you were a genius.

For more combat scat, I highly recommend the Home Movies episode "Hiatus." In the opening scene, conversation breaks down into something Kafkaesque, and then into a kind of scat freestyling dozens match... something so wrong it makes the brain bleed. Brendan Small, you are a freakin' genius.

Oh, and never, EVER Google "Home Movies" and "scat" together.

The old spirituals work best

There is no finer way to spend the 4th of July than surrounded by friends, drinking beer or soda, and stuffed with fine food, and playing Guitar Hero. It's better yet if you are all bellowing "Sweet Child O' Mine" at the tops of your lungs, so that neighbors cannot help but join in in their own yards, as they barbecue and light fireworks.

"Sweet Child O' Mine" has a special place in my heart. I hated it when it was out because ... well, c'mon, it was Guns N Roses. It was on approximately every 2 minutes and you never got it out of your head and it suuuucked.

That, my friends, is the stuff of memory. The stuff of legend.

David Wong at Pointless Waste of Time has forever corrupted my brain with a gleeful and perverse love of this song by naming it (and by extension, all those horrifyingly saccharine hair ballads) "one of the old spirituals" in his brilliant (GO READ IT) John Dies at the End.

I said, "so, what do you suggest?"

"We screw them as much as possible. I am a retired priest. Did you know
that?"

John asked, "are you one of those priests who can shoot lasers out of their
eyes? Because that would be really helpful right now."

"No," he said. "But I can bless water to make it holy." He held up his
flask and shook it, letting the liquid splash around inside. "The ice statue, I
mean."

John's face brightened, and he said, "that's perfect!" He thrust his index
finger into the air. "Then we just have to somehow get all hundred or so of
those monsters to go lick the statue!"

I stared hard into the face of the older man, said, "okay, there is no
possible combination of English words that would form a dumber plan than that."

"We'll need to buy time, of course," he said, undeterred. "But if I'm
right, if they're doing what I think they're doing, it's most likely the only
hope we've got. The travelers out there... they do have a weakness."

John said, "we know. Chairs."

"Uh, not exactly. They're natural dischordians. It's a product of where
they're from, you see.

When you live in a world of black noise, melody is like a blade to the
ears. Angels and their harps and all that."

I said, "what does that have to do with-"

A hole exploded from the center of the door with a spray of wood splinters.
A little pink fist and a segmented leg curled through, reaching around between
John and Big Jim. John grabbed it by the wrist, pulled it straight, Jen stepped
forward with Fred's switchblade. She severed the arm to the sound of a
feline-shriek from the other side. John held the detached arm in his hand for a
moment, then turned and shoved it back out through the ragged hole.

Marconi said, "I see you have your instruments. Can any of you sing? The
old spirituals work best."

John said, "I can sing."

I said, "no, you can't, John."

"Well, I play the guitar."

"So can I," said Big Jim. "We have two guitars."

I said, "this could not be any stupider."

John said, "Dave here can sing like Axl Rose."

"Ah, once again, you prove me wrong, John."

Marconi looked down at the two carts stacked with amps and cables and said,
"I need several minutes, so play something long. Like Sweet Child O' Mine."

I smell good. Today I have barbecue smoke in my hair, all charred oak -- and am wearing Comme des Garcons' Leaves series: Lily. It smells like a lily of the valley plant, green and ozonic with sweet lily freshness brightening it. It's too sparkly and teenaged without a tiny touch of the star jasmine, magnolia, and vanilla from Monyette, so I've got on a dab of that, too.

I feel like a slightly scorched dryad in this combination of aromas, which is something, when I'm sitting at my desk trying to sort out billing snafus and talk people into maintaining their insurance policies. Unsinkable! Which is not a bad thing, when you're mildly hung over and would rather be singing Axl Rose.

Please make a few phone calls... urgently

There's not much time left, at this writing.

The new regulation that has dramatically hiked music use fees for this form of broadcast only (not, say, radio) is an absurdity and an anachronism that will kill one of the most functional, egalitarian, small-scale, legitimate uses of the Internet without beginning to address the very real piracy issues that it distracts from.

Neither does it do anything about large-scale corporate music use/resale/broadcasting. It actually harms the artists, in many ways, including -- at the most basic level -- removing a powerful vector of advertising their product.

If you haven't already, go call.

And thank you.