Jen says.

Short Fiction Inspired by & A Review of Demeter Fragrance Library Dregs

Jen is standing on the trunk of Cal’s car, and he is really pissed about it. Jen doesn’t care. Three sheets to the wind on some of the foulest red wine I have ever had the misfortune to taste, Jen needs a platform for her latest magnum opus, a free form poem entitled, “Why Rivers Cuomo is a Total Douche.”

Jen says Rivers is a sexist pig, and if you don’t believe her you can read that Sady Doyle piece that proves it. Jen says she already knew everything Sady said, like way before Sady did, but that’s okay, Jen still loves her anyway.

Jen says she can see the skepticism on my face, and I try hard not to roll my eyes at her as she stumbled over to point to the exact location of said skepticism. Jen says it’s somewhere around my eyebrows. Cal tries to persuade Jen to come down, but she isn’t fooled by his faux concern that she might fall and knock her teeth out.

“Stop crying about your car,” Jen says, and Cal winces as the broad trunk of his ’69 Pontiac GTO, which he spent most of the summer and every penny he made mowing lawns painstakingly restoring, flexes under her weight as she stomps around. “You’re such a materialistic bastard,” Jen says, cackling. “This is no longer a symbolic representation of your masculinity! I appropriate this giant phallic instrument in the name of the oppressed! This is the Peoples’ car!”

Cal stares at the ground, really regretting that he agreed to buy us booze with his fake ID. I can’t say I blame him.

Jen shakes the bottle in my direction, offering me more of the foul wine. I can see crap floating around in the bottom of the bottle, and I shake my head at her with a grimace. Shrugging, Jen throws her head back and drinks deeply from the bottle. When she pulls it from her lips, her mouth is red ringed, like a kid with a grape popsicle.

All the sudden, I see a flashlight moving fast in our direction. Cal panics, and tells Jen he knew he shouldn’t have listened to her when she suggested we drink in the high school parking lot because it’s the last place anyone would think to look.

Jen says Cal shouldn’t be so uptight as she launches herself at him, half-jumping and half-falling off the trunk. Cal catches her right before she hits the ground to prevent her from landing, as expected, face first. Cal pulls her upright and suddenly they are almost kissing. I blush and turn away, wishing I wasn’t there.

A voice calls out “Hey you!" and we all recognize it as the old school security guard, Stan. "Stan the Man," Jen says giggling, and pulls away from Cal, who stands frozen in place, arms still wrapped around the space Jen occupied. The fog is so thick it creates a barrier between Cal’s car and Stan, but as soon as he sees the distinctive Pontiac, we’re all doomed and we know it.

Jen says, “Come on, Cal,” throwing open the passenger side door and flinging herself into the back seat. Cal and I spring into action on her command, running for the open door. He jumps in and slides across the seat and I follow, barely pulling the door shut when he guns the engine, tires squealing against the asphalt as we pull away.

“Do you think he saw us?” Cal asks, and I shrug. If so, I know we’re screwed. Cal is a nice guy, but he’ll fold like a house of cards if they ask him who was with him tonight. It’s too bad, too. If he was the type to lie, Jen probably would have kissed him.

Jen says nice guys finish last, and with her, she means it.

Jen wraps her arms around my neck from the backseat, and I pat at them as she sticks her head over the seat between us. An old Jane’s Addiction song comes on the radio, and Jen mumbles along, making up her own lyrics to make the song about her. I laugh as she sings loudly in my ear, ignoring the off-key parts and the nonsensical words she adds because she’s too drunk to think of real rhymes.

“You’re the best, you know that?” Jen says, planting a wet kiss on my cheek. Cal can barely keep his eyes on the road. Waves of jealousy reverberate off him and into me and I feel angry at Jen because she always says that, and I know she doesn’t really mean it. Not with Cal; not with me.

“I love you,” Jen whispers, resting her head sleepily on my shoulder and closing her eyes. I can feel her breath against my cheek, and the foul wine smell on her breath should repulse me, but it doesn’t. Like everything else about Jen, I think it’s weirdly beautiful.

“I love you, too,” I mutter, resting my cheek against her forehead.

Jen doesn’t say anything.

I wish she would.

People Who Don’t Know Nothin’ ‘bout Hurricanes Call Us Crazy

Short Fiction Inspired by & A Review of Demeter Fragrance Library Salt Air 

I knew I should have left. Most people left the peninsula days earlier, when the first warnings came out. The big one was coming. It was a topic often belabored during hurricane season in these parts: a hundred year storm. Over due by almost a decade, the weather men, the politicians, the local LEOs were all clear on one point: if you’d never evacuated before, now was the time to start.

A Galveston, Texas cemetery
flooded after Hurricame Ike.

The stories of the last one were famous. The dead floating up out of their deluged graves, the wooden caskets suddenly buoyed by the onslaught of water, six feet of  storm soaked earth nothing in the face of the swirling currents washing through the city. Those left on the island who survived never got over the terrifying sight of their dearly departed coming up out of the ground and parading through the streets, a sure sign that if you’d made the choice to stay, you were already dead.

Issac’s storm wiped out the island, turning a bustling gem of a city into a waterlogged ghost town that had to be rebuilt from the ground up, literally. After the storm, the city brought in tons of earth to shore up the water fronted edge of town, covered the area in six foot tall slabs of concrete to create a wall between the residents and the sea. The dead were no longer buried in wooden crates; they were stacked in mausoleums or cemented into the ground, a pledge to returning residents that such horror would never befall the city again.

Except now it was.

The new storm was set to wipe out the town again, perhaps forever if it was as bad as anticipated. The news people said anyone who hadn’t left either had a head full of delusion, a love so strong for the city they’d rather die there than contemplate living anywhere else, or was certifiably insane. There was no two ways about it, said the radio and tv folks. Staying in the city was a resignation of your life to the Fates and the Furies.

Knowing all that, I still stayed, and I wasn’t even in the city. Given how dire things were on the main island, staying on the long narrow spit of land that made up the peninsula I lived on was more than pushing your luck; it was a death wish written on paper, stuck in a bottle, and cast into the sea begging it to claim you. Some people went for death by cop; this, quite simply, was death by hurricane.

So what was I doing here? Watching the hundred year old pear tree in the yard next to the rickety house twist and sway in the increasing winds, even I couldn’t say. If I had to put my finger on it, though, I’d have said because it was the only place I’d ever known peace and happiness and love, and if it was going, then maybe I didn’t want to remain in the wake. Looking at the peeling wall paper and fading paint, I knew the little two bedroom house wasn’t anything much to look at. Built on stilts with a room downstairs that various male relatives had talked about finishing but never got around to, it was a crazy place to ride out waves estimated to top well over the second story.

The kids had said as much when they’d called, pleading with me to head to Houston. They’d begged, but I knew they were all too far away to get here fast enough to force me out and I wasn’t having any of it anyhow. First of all, I didn’t have a car to get there, because I couldn’t drive after my cataracts developed, and I wasn’t about to go begging strangers for a ride. I had more pride than that. Second, I told them what I told them every single time a storm came. I’d made it through the ones that had come before; I’d survive this one. I wasn’t about to leave my home and all my worldly possessions abandoned for looters to get at if it took me too long to get back to the peninsula.

But it was more than that. I’d buried my first dog in that yard, and squinting into the wind, I could just make out the little row of stones shaped in a cross where his bones laid. I’d had my first love in that rickety house, I’d unexpectedly given birth to my first baby in the old claw foot bathtub, and after the kids had grown up and moved away and the old neighbors had sold their houses to summer people and my husband of thirty years had up and died on me too old to remarry and too young not to be lonely, this house was all I had.

Standing on the porch, I curled my gnarled fingers around the banister that encircled the balcony, and let the wind slap me in the face as it pulled my wispy white hair out of its bun. Looking down at my hands, I could still see the ghost of younger ones in their place, and I wondered when so much of my life had passed me by, like sand washed out to sea. Everyone I loved had left or died. I was eighty-one years old. I loved my house. It was all I had left.

Inhaling deeply, I caught a whiff of the storm wind pulling the ocean closer and closer to the bay side of the peninsula, where the house sat waiting to make a last stand, and me with it. The air was so salty it stung my nose and eyes, and the brackish edge told of all the driftwood and kelp and sea creatures being dragged in along with those thousands of gallons of water, pushed harder and closer every passing minute.

Looking up at the sky, I said a prayer to God. If this is it, Lord, then you can take me. I’m ready. I just want to know that the last thing I’ll remember is this place – the way it felt, the way it looked, the way it smelled. If you gotta take me now, then I’m leaving this world knowing the last thing I’ll ever see will be my home.

Nodding as if in agreement, I wandered back inside. I couldn’t hide in the tub because I’d filled it with water in preparation for the storm, so I curled up on the floor next to it with a blanket and a book and waited for the beginning of the end.

A single surviving house in Gilchrist,
Texas after Hurricane Ike.

Three days later, the house and I were still standing. Rumor was only about ten houses in our little town had survived more or less intact. Mine was one of them. 

 When the search and rescue people brought me a little prepaid cell phone with some groceries almost a week later and I called my daughter, she burst into tears and yelled for a half hour that the next time she was coming down to drag me out if she had to, but she wouldn't let me take that kind of chance again. She’d been sure I was dead. I told her to hush, that I knew enough about living and dying to know that if it was my time, no amount of her caterwauling was gonna change things. The good Lord would take me when he was ready, I told her. And apparently he wasn’t ready yet.

He took the pear tree, though, and I was awful sorry to see it go.

A week of Demeter Fragrance Library Reviews, with a Twist

Reviewing perfumes that veer toward ultra-realism is tough because if it’s done right, it smells like the platonic ideal of the thing it’s supposed to smell like. If it’s done badly, well, it smells nothing like the thing you think it should. So it’s tricky, reviewing ultra-realist perfumes. I think Christopher Brosius takes a good tack on the expectation game by telling the consumer the story of what he thinks the scent smells like. It creates a scent from his memory, which means it isn’t necessarily going to be yours.

Demeter Fragrance Library goes the other direction by asserting the thing is what it says it is (for the most part). Salt air is supposed to be salt air; vinyl exactly what the name says in the title. This is a risky maneuver on Demeter’s part, because if the first scent of theirs you try smells like you think it should, then you’re sold on the line, and much more forgiving of the miss here and there based on that first bull’s eye. If that first try is a miss, though, you may dismiss the line completely.

Luckily for Demeter, I never give up on the first try.

This isn’t say that that Grass, which I reviewed here, is a bad scent. It’s not even to suggest it doesn’t smell like cut grass. It mostly does. However, there’s another aspect floating around in there that makes it not quite grass. I liked the experience, but Grass, well it wasn’t the droid I was looking for.

Because these scents are, for the most part, what they purport to be, I'm taking a different tact this week.  I'll tell you what the scent is like when worn, though that part will be mostly self-explanatory.  I'll also tell you a story.  Sniffing some of these scents evokes the idea of a place or circumstance  so strongly, you just find you want to write about it. Thus I decided I would.  This week you get a handful of short fiction/perfume reviews, courtesy of Demeter and my crazy brain.

I hope you find it entertaining.

~ People Who Don’t Know Nothin’ ‘bout Hurricanes Call Us Crazy - A story inspired by Demeter Fragrance Library Salt Air.
~ Jen Says. - A story inspired by Demeter Fragrance Library Dregs.
~ Lucky. - A story inspired by Demeter Fragrance Library Fresh Hay.
~ Mrs. LaClette's Roses - A story inspired by Demeter Fragrance Library Pruning Shears.
~ The First Ozarkiana State Fair and Barbed Beecue Competition - A story inspired by Demeter Fragrance Library Mesquite.

Congrats to Starling, winner of the Demeter draw!

List Randomizer

There were 7 items in your list. Here they are in random order:

1. Starling
2. beanphed
3. cKate
4. ccdouglass
5. Carrie Meredith
6. frill
7. Alnysie

Timestamp: 2011-08-22 03:08:25 UTC

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Congrats! Please email me an updated address so I can get your package in the mail!

Lately I’ve been living for the weekend...

Perfume Challenge Week 30: Monday, 8/8/11, to Friday, 8/12/11

Thanks to Undina, I now have wonderful ammo cases to store my samples in. I initial bought *muffled sounds* hundred sample slots worth, and I managed to get my estimate pretty close. I also managed to get some of them organized by house immediately, which was great for being able to, you know, find things. Now I need about twice as many boxes so I can take all the scents I don't have enough of to merit a house section and break them up by notes. Because I'm completely neurotic, and as Rob Gordon so succinctly put it in High Fidelity, "Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I'd feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn't… well… kinda one of them."

I'll try to post some photos next week, but if you look at Undina's post you get the basic idea. I need more of those grey ones though...

Perfume has taught me so many things. One of them is that the word 'need' is entirely relative.

Monday: L'Artisan Navegar - Notes: Lime, Red pepper, Ginger, Rhum, Star anise, Black pepper, Cedarwood, Guaiac wood, Incense. 

Lime and pepper are all over this opening, and the woody base is very strong on me. It's like a super classy version pencil shavings (always my thought when it comes to cedar) but then it turns into a pretty lime flower.  I find this less about the fruit and more about the plant when it comes to the lime aspect which I don't often encounter. (It's usually all about the fruit flesh or the fruit peel, or even the fruit leaf...but never the flower.) This is exactly what I wanted Jo Malone Lime Basil & Mandarin to be. Refined and elegant, yet youthful. Pret-tay nice. 4 of 5 nods.

Tuesday: Atelier Cologne Grand Neroli - A romantic ingenue; wraps elegant orange blossom flower around layers of clean herbal notes, warm musks and addictive brushstrokes of vanilla.” Additional notes include neroli, lemon, bergamot, petitgrain galbanum, moss, birch leaves and white amber.

WOOHOO! An extremely light dry citrus aspect makes Grand Neroli even more orange than your usual neroli. It is so pretty, and the first almost edible orange flower scent I've encountered. The vanilla aspects are much like those of Atelier Cologne Vanilla Incenseé as Grand Neroli has a similar dryness to it that gives the scent an open air quality I find unique and enjoyable about several of the Ateliers. It's a very crisp scent and not at all weighed down by the vanilla sweetness.  At a mere $55 for 30ml, a great bargain for neroli lovers everywhere; I'd chose it over a lot of other comparable scents. I like wearing my Jo Malone Orange Blossom in the warm weather, but this would make a great Fall neroli/orange blossom thanks to the dryness of the vanilla. 4.5 of 5 nods.

Wednesday: Comme des Garcons Series 2 Red: Carnation - Notes: red carnation, essence of red pepper, red rose, cloves, absolute Egyptian jasmine, absolute red pepper.

My first carnation. One critical review I saw called it "big red [chewing gum] in a bottle" but I think that really undersells this  Comme des Garcons. It is decidedly traditionally 'feminine,' which naturally makes me want to spray on the most dudely dude I can find just to see how I like it. Carnation is not overly peppery and the clove is smooth like the finest grained powder instead of sharp the way I find in so many clove heavy scents.
It does smell like carnations, which I would have thought I'd hate; my only instructions to my wedding florist was that I wanted funky arraignments and NO CARNATIONS. FN1. So when I tell you I find this carefully balanced scent that is equal parts rose and carnation frosted with clove delightful and compelling, no one is more surprised than me. I do question if I'd like it as much if they had used something other than rose, since roses are one of my addictions. That I suppose is a question for another day, a different carnation. Today, this carnation, for me? Wonderful. 4 of 5 nods.

Thursday: Penhaligon's English Fern - Notes: Geranium, Lavender, Clover, Patchouli, Sandalwood and Oakmoss.

My first Penhaligon's and it turns out to be one of the nicest fougeres I've ever encountered. The geranium is very strong in the opening, and the lavender makes a nice accent without being overwhelming. Apparently considered more of a masculine (I'm sure the complimentary scented shaving soap helps), I actually think this is lovely for a woman, particularly when the opening moves off and the sweetness of the clover and sandalwood come in. It's like a woman wearing an expensive men's dress shirt as a nightshirt. Sexy as hell due to, rather than in spite of, the 'traditional' gendered item juxtaposition. Some find it a difficult scent to tame, but I find it classic, sophisticated, and a wonderful scent for summer. Be careful, though. It's got strong legs, lasts forever, and has generous sillage. At $125 for 100ml, this bottle would last you approximately forever given the strength of the scent, so it's probably best for a bottle split. 4 of 5 nods.

Friday: Parfums de Nicolai Week-end à Deauville - Notes: basil, peppermint, tarragon, calone, helional, jasmine, lily of the valley, cardamom, galbanum, apple, cedarwood, leather and white musk.
Week-end à Deauville is a lot of white flowers with healthy accents of peppermint and basil. I like the basil here, because it isn't overwhelming and fuses together with the peppermint for a fresh bright opening best fitting for Spring. Unfortunately, that part burns off too quickly on my skin, so all I get is white flowers and light musk. I do get some apple sweetening the middle of the drydown, but not enough to suit me.

Bois de Jasmin describes it as "salty-sweet", and I can see that. Week-end is pretty and floral, so if you like those things, try this. It's supposed to be a beach scent of sorts, but this isn't any beach I've ever known. For me, this scent suffers from the same problem I have with L'Artisan Mure et Musc. It's just so...nice. That doesn't make it boring, it just feels so young and...naive to me. It doesn't feel innocent necessarily, just the opposite of worldly.

When I young I had this old anthology of poetry that divided love into two categories: "Young Love," and "Love, Older Grown." This is decidedly the former. There is no passion here or bitterness, just sweetness and romanticism. It's about as scandalous and sultry as Rebecca Black's idea of fun on a "Friday" night. Like if an extra wore it to the filming of Weezer's "Buddy Holly" video, they wouldn't be in on the irony. All that said, it is very pretty, so pretty that I can imagine it scenting the air during the filming of the scene from West Side Story when Maria tells us how pretty she feels because she's in love with a "pretty wonderful boy." So if that's your wheel house, get yourself a sample.  Also, only lasts four hours on me, which I don't generally think of as long enough. 3 of 5 nods.


Winner of the Week: Atelier Cologne Grand Neroli edges out Penhaligon English Fern, but barely. Oh Wait! Comme des Garcons Series 2 Red: Carnation! Sigh. Okay, once again, I cannot choose.

Also, I want to give a special shout to my friend LillieMae, who is moving to Chicago this weekend for graduate school. Study hard, be all smart, and then come home.  I miss you already.

"Every Friday, just about midnight,
all my problems seem to disappear.
Everyone that I miss when I’m distant.
Everybody’s here.
Yeah, my friends cause they’re so beautiful
Yeah, my friends they are so beautiful
Yeah, my friends... ~ "Friends," Band of Skulls

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FN1. Arrangements; not arraignments. Sometimes lawyer life is bleeds over into my blogging...