I always report on the osmanthus. Whether it is one or two days early or late (by and large, it usually comes out predictably on October the 1st): this year it is in full flower three weeks early. A strange but gorgeous sensation: fuming the air with its persistent floral apricot like a tangential dream from another universe, the scent as dense as a petit fromage à l’abricot, creamy and benign; clear; yet almost eerie in its insistence. It floats on the air, and fuses with your thoughts, a floral accompaniment to each inhalation of mid-September air.
We decided to keep it local again this Sunday, going no further than down the hill, finding another undiscovered coffee shop with delectable cakes, before deciding, then, to go and have a look around Tokei-ji, a temple we haven’t been in for a while. Founded in 1285 (and it really feels it; I sensed something viscerally ancient while slowly making my way through the grounds in the mosquito-heavy humidity, osmanthus in every breath;) a wetness that could prove oppressive if it didn’t so perfectly go with the surroundings. Mossed trees and thatched rooves; wooden houses; this sanctuary was once the only temple where battered and abused women of the period could seek refuge from their tormentors; after three years on site, they were granted divorce.
D was wearing Nº12, the new perfume by Puredistance. And it smelled heavenly. Also containing osmanthus absolute, along with orange blossom and a touch of vanilla, the powdery, chypric sillage of the base note trailed him in a way that, given the visual and spiritual beauty of the Buddhist precinct, alongside the deep wet green of the lush, almost hopelessly serene gardens, added a dry, melancholic pathway back to him as he took these photographs; the osmanthus trees leaking their perfume silently into the air as the complex patchouli and oakmoss floral chypre androgynously insinuated itself into the droplets of air and my brain. I was completely entranced, and haven’t had an olfactory experience of this blissful intensity for quite a while.
Granted, there is a lot going on. After all, this scent is intended to be the jewel in the crown of the set of twelve perfumes that will now form the permanent collection by Puredistance: thus perfumer Natalie Feisthauer was commissioned with the responsibility of creating a perfume that would leave an absolute and unmistakeable impression. And it does. On my skin, there is, admittedly, a slight, almost saline rinseishness that comes from the initial tang of oudh-like ambroxan flashed with bright mandarin, bergamot, coriander and cardamom – a fresh opening that is rather dazzling (‘quite grapefruity!’ D exclaimed) with a Montale-like gleam and immediacy, with probable nods to the Middle Eastern markets. Soon veering off course from typical expectations, though, this attention-grabbing opening accord cedes to a rather intriguing contrast between a Faberge-fougère-like accord of powdery heliotrope, orris, geranium, hedione, tonka, oakmoss and ambrette, set against a more classical, Aromatics Elixirish rose, ylang ylang, vetiver, sandalwood, and crucially, patchouli – the key ingredient in the perfume, beautifully used – to form a characterful, long-lasting modern chypre; it is an emotively rich cushioning that is distinctive and frankly gorgeous – particularly when smelled from afar. The Amsterdam niche house, now this fragrance is complete, will be henceforth referring to its full collection as ‘The Magnificent 12’, and in this instance, I certainly cannot say that I disagree. On Sunday, in all the perfumed air, I was in heaven.
I was reading an article this morning by a journalist rhapsodizing about the summer, all the things he had done; all the places he had been, cross-country; feeling so liberated; how people he knew everywhere went crazy for travel, to catch up on everything they had been missing, to go places, see friends, socialize, hang out in bars, restaurants, attend concerts and the theatre pre-Delta and then during, despite the headlines about fatalities and hospitals filling up in the UK and in America and elsewhere: an explosion of need after being curtailed and unable to live as we do usually.
D and I were, though oppressed as everyone has been, quite the opposite. We didn’t want to go anywhere. Not realistically being able to go back to England: Japan is a ‘red country’, meaning hotel quarantines (at your own expense) in London; returning here would be the same, all under strict guard and control – it all feel at the instinctive level like some nightamareish ‘tourist’ equivalent of Guantanamo Bay. All travel thus held zero appeal: even the idea of physically getting on a plane, of sitting in an airport, seems inconceivable. Likewise long train journeys. We simply had no desire to go anywhere except in the near vicinity, and this despite double vaccination. Is this to be expected? Is it abnormal? Have you felt similarly? Is this reticence and caution a form of cowardice, collective PTSD, or is it just a normal reaction after a year and a half of having to travel on cramped trains and buses and in confined classrooms constantly under threat of potentially catching the virus? Have we been overreacting? Are we turning into hermits?
The first ten days at home after the end of term, I do think I went into some kind of summer hibernation or withdrawal, as I described previously in another post. I think I really needed it. After that, though, we started to venture out on walks nearby, discovering temples we had never known existed before, places I had seen on the bus route and always had some curiosity about but never actually made the effort to go and look; backlots and side streets; deserted spaces.
We even had a sleepover at our own house. Moved one futon into the small guest room with its narrow bed; one on the floor, like kids, and stayed there for about ten days watching films or reading books with the cat (who seemed to enjoy the ‘new stimulations’ as well). It was funny how it was actually like having a holiday within your own house: waking up each day not in your usual environment – a ‘home away from home’. Like staying at your friend’s; waking up to the unfamiliar. After coffee and breakfast we would then just play it by ear; either just wander down another unexplored path, or stay in.
One evening we were invited to go to the house of some old friends’ for dinner. What would be a usual turn of events – socializing, drinking, talking and eating together – seemed initially strangely daunting. D didn’t even want to go at first – I had to persuade him. Having been in his own funk for a month or longer from July, during which time he turned off all notifications and closed down his emotions, I didn’t know how it was going to turn out. Was it going to be awkward? And when we arrived at their house in south Yokohama, overlooking the sea, at first things, just momentarily, did feel a little stilted, as though none of us quite knew what to do. I even felt that our hosts were a little neurologically odd in their movements, initially; a bit jerky, dusty, as if they had been taken out of storage: our eye contact was off at first: I felt a bit heartbeaty.
After some wine, and just the pleasure in each other’s company though, (plus an absurdly delicious homemade chicken pie), and the fact that we had after all just recently had our second vaccinations, we all calmed down a lot and the time went very quickly and enjoyably. The conversation was great. I felt less contained. It was like being unsutured. We just caught the last train, hugging Justin goodbye – having said goodbye to Setsuko back at their apartment with her new rescue cat; D had a very big spontaneous constant grin on the way home, physically looser – I felt the same. It was lovely. For a long time, aside a couple of times going out with some of my Japanese colleagues after work for cans on the park bench, and one or two quick lunches with people, again outside, this was, I think, the first proper socializing we had done in a year and a half, and it felt oddly momentous. You do forget that you are a social creature, that humans are social beings; I suppose when the possibilities of interaction are reduced, as they of course have been, you just adapt. But sometimes you don’t even realize yourself what is happening to you; there can be a normalization within yourself of new states of being that are ultimately perhaps not in your best psychological interest.
Sometimes you also realize that you have been living in a place for many years and not noticed things you should have. You have just walked past them. Like this exquisite cafe, for example. A former villa turned restaurant (it was apparently very famous for its beef stew of forty years until last year), the current corona restricted cafe was still a place of utter serenity and calm; the lemon cheese cake and crème caramel we had completely out of this world.
How could we have missed this place? It has been waiting for us, all this time. Just off the main road to the temple of Kenchoji. Next time someone comes to visit, or I need a private, quiet tete a tete with a friend, this retreat is where we will be headed. We both felt deeply tranquil there – it was a a beautiful oasis of peace.
Another discovery we made by chance just from walking around was a 1930’s cafe, hidden behind a building in Ofuna – next to Kamakura – famous for its pickled mackerel bento boxes and boiled ham. Although it was a bit odd having sushi for breakfast with coffee – D was more adventurous, going for the full chirashizushi; I could only (barely) bear the much easier to eat roll version- with the out of place Hawaiian music going on in the background, and the giggling not-used-to-foreigners adult waitresses, it was quite a novel, and amusing, experience.
It was nice not having an agenda this summer; no fixed itinerary, as you sometimes ironically do when you are on vacation : stumbling upon these new old places. Probably if we had gone away somewhere, to another country, they would have remained undiscovered. It is good to go deeper into the local topography – climb some stairs, here, go down this lane : I felt we had penetrated further into our own living space.
The weeks went past. Then, having spent most of the summer holiday close to home, just in Kamakura, one day we woke up and decided on having a proper day out.
Going north up to the centre of Yokohama has little appeal right now – it is one of the current delta epicentres – and we have both agreed that for the time being, Tokyo is completely out of the question : it is simply impossible to avoid being in close contact with large numbers of people there and the medical situation is getting out of control. Instead, and I don’t for the life of me know why we haven’t done this more often, seeing that they are pretty much equidistant, we decided to take a train just 20 minutes south, to the curiously old fashioned but less densely crowded US naval base city of Yokosuka.
I must say, that having been spending so much time in the zen capital we call home, Yokosuka truly did feel like going on an exotic vacation. We went there once, many years ago, and I remember being in some trap club thinking where am I? The streets were full of Americans in uniform and the dressed up locals sometimes giving them the eye; every other premises a burger place or tacos bar or pool club – it is so different in terms of energy I don’t know how it had possibly faded from our minds.
Yokosuka is a very intriguing place. Run down, as you can see; old fashioned in a way, but very vibrant. Ethnically diverse – you see soldiers in full uniform about three times as big as the regular population walking around, kids on skateboards, old Japanese grannies – fascinating eateries – we had an excellent Peruvian lunch and want to go back for the Colombian and Vietnamese, difficult to get in Kamakura or Yokohama. Not to mention the burgers. I need to try one.
It was fascinating. A very hot day, I almost felt eventually overwhelmed by it and all the sensory stimulation, so we sat in the seaside park,looking out at the shipyard, at sunset, the sound of the military trumpet calls as evening fell; navy personel out for their evening jogs; old men sat looking out over the water: Japanese sailors doing manoueuvres aboard a submarine that was docked in the bay. Though only a short distance away, it felt as if we had entered another world. I had assumed it was miles and miles away down the coast, an hour or so- but no; just an easy twenty minute train ride. We loved it. So we have decided we are going to go back there again, the weekend after next, to celebrate Duncan’s 50th birthday. There are hundreds of restaurants to choose from; the alcohol laws (which currently can’t be served in public spaces as a precaution against the spread of Covid because customers let down their guard too much) are being repealed this week as no one can stand it any longer and all the bar owners and restauranteurs are going crazy; there are so many beckoning alleyways to look down – so many compelling neon corners: coffee houses, import shops; it is a a whole new playground. I can’t wait. Let’s just hope that in the process of having fun, we don’t overdo things and wake up with tattoos.
It has probably long been obvious to everyone else, but it only struck me for the first time the other day placing them side by side, that there is a perfect design cohesion and style continuity between the first and the most recent Serge Lutens. My bottle of the ultra rare and ultra coveted Nombre Noir, the legend that the maestro of maquillage created for Shiseido in 1982, is probably my most ridiculous bargain of all time (as in ridiculous: please read the story here). There isn’t much left now, as I used it all in one Christmas frenzy, but still enough for me to enjoy, once in a while, the plummy, damascene apricot glamour of its churlish, preening osmanthus.
The latest by Lutens, La Proie Pour L’Ombre, is of course from the Gratte Ciel, or skyscraper, collection, and the bottles look perfect together, though almost forty years apart. A vanilla amber, with incense/licorice and a hint of leather (this is not a leather, ultimately, no matter what you read, but an immortelle-laced, ambery, warm and sweet, luscious scent that brings to mind so many of the old Lutens like Ambre Sultan, the incense of Serge Noire, a hint of Arabie (the celery note is problematic here; D doesn’t like the beginning but likes how it evolves on my skin), the warmth of Cèdre; it went perfectly this weekend with a dot or two of the new Christian Dior Vanilla Diorama – another glinty vanilla amber that begins with a fresh spritzy opening that reminds me of a delicious dessert I once had at a French restaurant in Nagasaki that was infused with citruses and star anise, leading to a cacao-touched, sugar-crusted texture of marrons glacés and a light woody amber basis that prevents the scent from becoming too sweet or flayed open. I haven’t worn vanilla in a while; it has become a note I save for special occasions in case I feel it is eating me alive; but this one is not a vanilla bean monster: I would say it is more along the sleeker, less ice creamy lines of vertically structured cents such as Pure Distance Gold or Guerlain Tonka Impériale. While the name of the scent may raise a few eyebrows among perfume purists (what next? Chocolate Dioressence? – actually, that’s not a bad idea) – playing with classics from the Dior Heritage Archives and giving them a contemporary remix, the perfume itself is is a warm, lingering, and at first, slightly unassuming perfume that gets better as the day goes on, eventually lasting for a good twenty four hours on the skin. It was very enjoyable with the Lutens on Sunday, which I wore on my clothes and on my beard – some Dior on my wrists; the cooler weather a perfect backdrop for being wrapped up in rich, but strangely subtle, dreamy, autumnal amber.
I have often admired and envied the ginger lilies that grown in the garden of our neighbour from Paraguay. Cycling past her expertly tended gardens, when her tall, hedychium coranarium plants flower at the end of August and the beginning of September, I always greedily inhale the scent of the flowers and wish I could pick them. I probably sometimes have.
This year, just beyond the kitchen window, a big ginger lily – which D says came from a cutting from a friend of ours who moved back to Scotland nine years ago, and which has always been there, getting bigger each year, but has definitely never blossomed before (because you can be sure I would have noticed )- opened up out of the blue in the garden one day, just as we were about to go out. By the time we had returned home, it was open more fully, intensely fragrant – like a delicate gardenia infused with freshly cut ginger stems – and proceeded to keep flowering, and wilting, flowering and wilting as new buds kept opening up.
We were both really excited. I have never had a plant fragrant enough to disturb the senses from outside the window before – (if you discount our big osmanthus tree, which makes you almost too delirious come October)- but never a white flower, with that erotically petalled, lunescent trail of perfume trailing up at the moments when you least expect it. My mother has an incredible trellised jasmine back home that smells breathtaking in early summer; there were lilies here everywhere in July, wisteria in June; but this is the first time that I have ever had such a seductively scented flower of my own.
Once I had semi-extracted myself from my morass, one of the goals of this holiday was to go to Kurukuru. This antique/ ‘recycle’ shop is a (for us, but probably not for most people) beautiful, chaotic garbage heap next to a supposedly haunted tunnel / busy thoroughfare at the intersection of Kamakura and Zushi full of treasure that I am always more than delighted to cycle along the coast to, when in the mood – D’s bike is broken, so I walk and do figure eights and go down alleys and circle and come back- he has always been a brisk mover ; this time we walked in : : and I immediately saw, among the junk – the Jane Austen-esque familiarity – I have always loved the original presentation – of an entire unused Madame Rochas collection.
Look at this shit. Admittedly, I love Mystère more. But there is something, something sweaty and powdery and Mysore-ish and talcum rose about the Madame Rochas that really suits me. It is, in some ways, my ultimate sandalwood. And although the parfum, as I expected, was defunct and turned: mon dieu – seriously, the parfum de toilette is I think by far the best iteration of this perfume I have ever experienced. Firstly, the label on the box is to be fetishized. Like the most delicous, cold, creamy walnut cake from the 1960’s. Secondly, the perfume within – the flacon, as you can see, is full and in absolute, optimum, pristine condition. Oh mama, you better believe.
The eau de cologne will certainly be used. I am actually quite transfixed by it. More masculine. More Kamakura taxi driver. But it was so pleasurable, having bought all of this for less than ten dollars; along with various, aesthetically delightful household contraptions, to then cycle along the coastline and dreamily watch the sun go down with Mt Fuji at Kotsubo; carefully (well not really), taking out the treasure from the bag to try the varying Rochas configurations on my skin and enjoy its timeless confabulations. Who left this collection? Who was it that owned all the bottles in these different strengths, and incomparisons of beauty?
In the middle of August I crashed. I am coming back to myself now, and will get back to all that perhaps later. Throughout, though, I have certainly been very heavily perfumed. There is too much to handle: I need to intoxicate.
One of things I very much love about wearing scent is the sense of demarcation: of separating and deliberately contrasting different pointers in time into retrievable, memorable chunks of consciousness. On the last day of term, jubilant I had got through the year and that the last month or two – post second vaccination and all the relief that had ensued = had gone well I finally put away my Penhaligons Gardenia, which in very hot weather I had been wearing for three or more weeks continuously, along with Floris Gardenia talc (after taking a bath each day before heading out in Floris Gardenia foaming shower gel……….as though an English Cleopatra ( ‘do I smell like an Edwardian Lady?’ I asked Duncan with semi-concern, in my white shirt and suit trousers, feeling instinctively that I did in fact smell beautifully fragrant and floral in a way that was perhaps unusual but still seemly (“No: you smell clean and sherbety: I like it” ); feeling already as I put all of these white flowers back into their boxes for another year how potent the temporal stamp is in the mind with smell – they were already past tense; already filed away; already reminding me, almost nostalgically, of this July and August, even though time was still progressing. But of a particular time, gone forever. But now stored. Ready for recapture.
It had been gloriously sunny. Then, as my holiday began, bad and disturbing news from home and an approaching typhoon suddenly made the temperatures plunge and all the light go into total retreat. it was a week of literal, and figurative ,darkness in which I found myself regressing back decades into depressing remembrances to the soundtrack of Tori Amos; inescapably. Drinking wine, zombie-like, I hardly even remember what I did for about eight days, except slowly rearrange my perfume cabinets; bottle by bottle; therapeutic in a way, and meaning that when the sun did come back again – with glorious revenge – I was fully ready to drench myself thoroughly to societally objectionable levels of intensity. Frankincense oil. Patchouli oil on the body. An unquenchable thirst for the leather chypre or aromatic combined with marine: Kenzo Pour Homme under the arms, and then lashings of the rose-mimosa leather patchouli masterpiece that is Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum eau de parfum (completely essential in my life – I need some more ); the original Sisley Eau Du Soir, which in vintage (the black bottle), a perfume I adore at the right moment and which I only have a few drops left of now but which I have found a suitable substitute for in Montale’s Aromatic Lime – also indispensable when I get into this mood; the final accord lingering on everything you touch broodingly, dramatically.
One morning, cloudy but not dark grey and pouring as it had been for days on end, it could only be Courrèges Empreinte: a curious hybrid of light floral-fruit facets (jasmine; melon, peach, a bitter twist of artemisia and coriander over what smells like a chic white leather French trench coat) that on me settles into the most elegant and enigmatic final accord, something like the younger sister of Miss Balmain parfum, but paler, and distinctive in its own right. Robert Gonnon, the perfumer behind this creation, has quite a slim resumé, but if I tell you that he created Paco Rabanne Métal; Cacharel Anais Anais, Grès Quiproquo, and Ô De Lancôme (all of which I own and wear), this should give you some idea of Empreinte’s sleek and ambiguous credentials. It is a very interesting scent indeed that gradually unfolds over time, unlike the great majority of contemporary perfumery, (the perfume’s original ad tag line reads: “Many women leave an impression. But few leave an actual imprint.…”)
If Empreinte is the swish of that white coat, as it is removed and hung up in a Parisian bistro, Falcon Leather, by Matiere Premiere, is a much darker, directer leather made liquid: centered on birch tar and oud, labdanum and benzoin and a touch of saffron – smelled from the bottle this is heady, aggressively masculine stuff with a strong-beating heart. It smelled good on Duncan, but would smell even better on some of the leather-jacketed body guards and for-hire high end killers in some of the adrenalizing Netflix action films I have found myself absorbed in these last few days (anything but the real world outside, please – the news everyday has just been too overwhelming. I read it but have to hold back) Black bomber jackets are de rigeur for these professionals, no matter the location – and a spray or two of Falcon Leather on their ubiquitous garments could only increase the sense of grounded, guarded propulsion.
In great contrast, Serge Lutens’ latest addition to the Gratte Ciel collection, another Christopher Sheldrake collaboration, La Proie Pour L’Ombre, is warm and nuzzly; a familiarly Lutensian, strangely gorgeous and mysterious scent ostensibly centred around leather (and licorice and vanilla), a powerfully immortelle, almost celery-like note cedared with spice in the top that at first is disconcerting but then begins to pull you into its own unusual sense of unique gravity. D thinks it smells like butterscotch: the ambered texture is certainly odd; almost chocolatey; with tones redolent also of coffee absolute; but also medicinally enveloping and pungent like some of the more extreme and esoteric Japanese incense towards which I quite often find myself gravitating. Unlike the flamboyance of the two other perfumes I have been describing to you today, I feel that La Proie Pour L’Ombre is more private; a dark, shadowy-like-its-name fragrance that suits these particular times: less a leather for a publicly viewed sillage than a quiet, personal cove of introspective luxuriance.
I gain comfort from violet. And the best violet I have ever owned is undoubtedly L’Occitane’s Patchouli, a disappeared extrait from the 1990’s (also gorgeous in the more radiant edp which I would kill to have a bottle of again), that is now virtually impossible to find anywhere.
An immediately poignant blend, one that somehow imbued whatever you were feeling at the time with sad longing, this was a violet/rose/clove/patchouli heartrending syrup that I saw a miniature bottle of on ebay the other day for ¥33,000 – eleven others were watching closely.
Friday night, after the conversation on here with Gabrielle and Catherine about how much we missed the old, pre-everywhere mainstream iteration of L’Occitane (when there were little bottles of extrait like Mûre
-which I picked out from the collection to try again the other night, marvelling at how alive it is; ‘just’ a blackberry little number, but something lovely about it; as though it were telling a story. Simple. A very short formula. But scintillating), I found myself wanting to attempt to recreate Patchouli. Impossible. Because I am not a perfumer, and don’t know all of the notes. But I began with a rich patchouli essential oil, blended in some rose, and some Klito by Marko Buffini, a very violety scent; added some of my strange clove/rose/hinoki/patchouli desolate Autumn perfume, which I made many years ago while watching John Cassavetes’ Opening Night in my old house’s tatami room, and still keep in the original L’Occitane Patchouli bottle, in the top picture; now so intense; based on the dregs of what was left of the patchouli; some Ungaro Diva extrait, and then years of added essential oils; I am not even entirely sure which other ones I have added over the decades; I sometimes wear a little on cold winter days, as it lingers. The addition of this private perfume started to veer the blend away from what I was looking for – a little too smoky – but then I remembered a dessicated bottle of L’Erbario Toscano’s Violetta Nobile that was somewhere in the kitchen; mainly dried up for some unknown reason but now very concentrated in the nozzle and spray tube. Pouring my blend into this bottle, the initial exhalations from the re-awoken bottle were very nice; super violetty, as the scent from beneath joined the powdered upper notes and created an enjoyable, rich, even potentially noble patchouli violet. Nice. But not Patchouli L’Occitane.
Le Joker, by French outfit Art De Parfum, won the gold medal at the London Beauty Awards, 2020. I can see why. A saline, fresh nutmeg aromatic, with facets of star anise, Timur pepper, ambergris and elemi, this is one of those perfumes I would put in in the same category as Eau D’Italie: scents that are magnetizing in their chalky sea air simplicity, yet that wisely eschew the dirty über-niche plugholes of algae and seaweed. Described by the company as a ‘fascinating woody fragrance (cypriol, patchouli, Atlas cedarwood), intertwining fruity spicy notes with powdery notes of makeup and smoky cigarette facets……Le Joker aims to awaken different emotions in different people’. I personally certainly don’t smell the (clown) makeup, but can imagine that on the right rogueish individual, an aspect of spent tobacco and winking mischievousness might become more apparent on a particular skin. D is going for quite thirst-slaking, homoerotically salted fragrances at the moment, such as Fo’ah 11, Nebbia Spessa and Salarium, which cut through, but blend and meld with the hot summer air. The fresh, toned, and rather addictive smell of Le Joker would certainly nicely fit into this piquantly seductive family.
The fact that this perfume cannot but be irrevocably linked in our minds to Todd Phillip’s The Joker – winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 2019 as well as garnering a Best Actor Oscar, for Joaquin Phoenix at the 2020 Academy Awards, can’t have hurt this scent’s popularity. It’s quite a canny tie-in. So perfect for these crazy times. I actually thought I would hate that film, because since early childhood I have never had any interest in Good Guys vs Bad Guys plots: hence no war movies, superheroes, and a million other Disney entertainments where there is a fixed ‘good’ and a fixed ‘evil’ entity and where the protagonists battle until the foregone, very obvious conclusion (such stories are just inherently uninteresting for me; life itself is never that simplistic, it is so much more complex and fascinating). I had imagined that Joaquin’s tic-tic tic overacting would get on my wick – and it did, a little, at times – a little too desperate for that trophy; and yet he was brilliant, and the film as a whole was undoubtedly something of a dark and highly atmospheric masterpiece of dystopian nihilism: making a sardonic mockery of the happy happy ending and the constantly dangled possibility of redemption. For some, there is none. And though, overall, I reject nihilism as a philosophy, feeling too much natural joy in living to ever surrender myself to theories of ‘pointlessness’ or the sheer miserable emptiness of existentialism, at the same time, I can’t deny that right now I do see the world as something of a joke. I sometimes laugh out loud, wickedly, just for the sake of it. I read the newspaper and shout in fury. Or else I just scoff, and get back to the much more important business of just lying down, still, on my futon and just tuning in to the fecund, insectoid world outside my window, as my cherished plants slowly, but visibly, grow each day and I sink fully into my own essence, often unspeaking; D equally absorbed, immersed in his world; equally contented.
Because if I were to properly let myself imbibe and take in all the sheer nonsense all around me, across the waves; everywhere; I would either implode, or, like The Joker, go fully postal. Masked idiots walking like zombies on the streets in temperatures of 36 degrees, only to immediately take them off and sit down in Starbucks or other, never-closed coffee chain stores and luncheries, right next to each other talking and drinking and eating with pointless plexiglass ‘separating’ them, even though they must, if they have any remaining sentience, be aware that the hospitals here are filling up, ICU units are running out with the relentless spread of Delta and Japan is facing really quite a daunting situation; the government merely making restaurants close earlier than usual as part of their hilarious ‘state of emergency’ – ha ha FUCKING HA; all beyond useless and incompetent; the truly laughable sadness of teachers I work with refusing the vaccine even though, in the school I worked in two days ago, in which students, now it is the summer holidays, study from morning to night in a study room with no windows, the day schools they go to now having outbreaks, students coming down with fevers (“…..but we have air circulators”) – – – what, a fan that just spreads the virus around the room; now you are making me go beyond mere chuckling into side-splitting guffaws; WAH-HA-HAAAAHHH’ ! !!!!! : a twenty something in Louisana about to die from Covid 19; unvaccinated, her last words to her exasperated nurse being ‘……….but we thought it was a hoax!’
