It happened. I finally got arrested for driving drunk, a favored activity of virtually every Texan I know. I'm now a criminal and will be paying every cent I make to the state of Texas for the foreseeable future because of my bad luck. I'd been up to no good at a strip club called Palazio- my first visit to such an establishment- and I came upon a police barricade about two miles from my house. A cop (with no flashlight in darkest night, I might add) had attempted to wave me down and I had been looking in the wrong direction. I was cooperative and polite to a fault as I slurred and slogged through my sobriety test, they cuffed me, and I was booked for the night.
With the impending suspension of my driver's license and my uncertain future in all other areas of life, I must be productive in some small way and convince myself that I am still capable of forming coherent sentences and making the occasional astute observation. In the year since the death of my previous blog, my life has been overrun by soul-sucking modern conveniences: Facebook and iPhone. The cruelest part of Facebook: after staring at it for long enough, I become convinced that I deserve "notifications" even when I post nothing. The fleeting glue-high gratification of seeing "1 new notification" pop up on the telephone becomes a constant worry. The universal accessibility afforded by smart phones and the internet brings with it an infantile need for constant attention and personal affirmation which, in its most reductive form, amounts to the brief"so-and-so LIKES your status" notification, "So-and-so" invariably being someone you never talk to, hardly know, and don't care about. I went from writing daily to virtual illiteracy, endlessly refreshing my email while talking to people in the vague hope that a distant acquaintance would "like" my four word status update fragment about what perfume I was wearing that day. Don't you shake your head, you judgmental asshole, because we're all in the same boat. I see you on Facebook, with your "so-and-so just got tacos. Yummy!" cry-for-help status updates, attempting to fill the void and connect with some other sad sack who, if you're lucky, will both LIKE and LEAVE A COMMENT along the lines of "I like tacos too!" on your wall. You might as well have "HELP ME" blistered across your abdomen, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.
It's summer, and you know what that means? I'll be wearing gigantic orientals, their sillage amplified by a quarter-inch of sweat. It's considered gauche to wear loud fragrances in summer, but I completely disagree; all the big orientals- Youth-Dew, Opium, Angel- seem positively designed for this kind of sweltering provocation. A good layer of sweat really brings out their "COME HITHER, YOU BIG MAN" qualities. Speaking of Angel, I think it might have surpassed Youth-Dew as my all-time favorite perfume. I got my star refilled at Nordstrom last week for the nice price of $45 and I've been wearing it continuously for the past week. It's just such an endlessly fascinating and disturbing fragrance, and it's impossible to categorize or understand. It was released in '92, well into the onset of what Chandler Burr calls the "anorexic oceanics of the 1990s", yet it is a throbbing, room-filling fuck-off power-woman scent in the 80's OpiumPoisonGiorgio style. It straddles the line between male and female despite being intended for and worn mainly by women; an ultra-femme pink cotton candy note is strangled to death before your eyes by a virile, throaty patchouli. It is one of the most successful perfumes in history and is available at Wal-Mart but it does not in any way comply with the American imperative to smell "clean"- in fact, it smells positively raunchy, as though body odor and sweet musky shit-stained panties were layered with rotting fruit and topped off with a post-apocalyptic stripper pole. Its advertising is counter-intuitive and designed to distract potential customers from what it ACTUALLY smells like; the packaging is light blue when the juice smells a sinister glittery brown. Sales-associates will inform dimwitted women that it smells of chocolates and sweets, when it smells of death and the infinite beyond. Ad copy refers to the "tender notes of Angel" and "memories of Thierry Mugler's childhood"; Angel wearers clearly lost their innocence LONG ago and now confront everyone they meet with the olfactory tenderness of snorting jagged shards of blue sugar glass. Angel is worn equally by conservative women (allegedly it is the signature scent of both Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton) and women of the night (numerous sources have told me of its popularity among erotic dancers). AND IT WAS A HUGE HIT! More disturbing is the nicotine-like addiction that Angel induces in the wearer, necessitating the purchase of (literally) hundreds of bizarrely named ancillary products ("Celestial Showers Gel"? "Perfuming Hair Mist"?) in an effort to preserve the scent on skin for the rest of your lifetime. The addictive part of Angel, the really good part, is that first blast of body odor and rotten fruit that fades within a few minutes, so the wearer is forced to continually reapply to get that kick. The more you wear it, the more you become anosmic to it, so you keep putting on layer upon layer upon layer, achieving a Baby Jane-like flaking pancake makeup effect and making you smell TRULY filthy, TRULY like you have been living on the streets and selling your unclean body for weeks. As Anais Reboux says to Roxane Mesquida at the beginning of Breillat's "Fat Girl", "You reek of loose morals." They have soda fountain-style REFILL STATIONS at all major department stores, for Christ's sake! I indulge in dreams of taking foot-tall Slurpee cups to Nordstrom and demanding that an effete, tittering male sales associate fill them to the brim, at gunpoint. How on earth did you get away with it, Mugler? Around the time of its release, sales associates were instructed to forcefully spray it on the arms of confused women, look directly in their trembling eyes, and tell them, mantra-like, "THIS IS A FRAGRANCE FOR A UNIQUE WOMAN. NO ONE ELSE WILL SMELL LIKE THIS. A UNIQUE, UNCOMPROMISING WOMAN WOULD WEAR THIS. IT IS UNLIKE ANYTHING ELSE". I'm not kidding, this is how it became a success. They still talk like that at the department stores, too, when they find out you're an Angel fan, in the thick, lascivious tone of a depraved Madame speaking to a whorehouse patron with particularly exotic, violent, and possibly illegal sexual tastes. They'll spray you with the latest seasonal version ("Angel Soleil au Fraiche Summer Fraicheur Energizing Oil Cream" or some such nonsense, available for a limited time only) and hold your arm with their lacquered dragon talons, hissing that there are LOTS of people out there who like Angel and you needn't feel guilty or immoral for it. AND IT WAS A HUGE HIT!
One of my best friends who happens to be a mortician told me an amazing and frightening story. While preparing a corpse for its funeral, she was handed a bottle of Angel and instructed to spray it all in and around the coffin because it was the deceased's favorite scent. Angel, which already smells of death, follows its wearers TO THE GRAVE.
