Just before dawn this morning we were pulled out of a deep sleep by a faint beeping noise. Not the alarm clock. Not the coffee maker. Not the carbon monoxide detector or the smoke alarm. Not the low battery indicator on the Orgone Box. No—it was much more distant, almost subterranean.
Leaving our sleeping rack in the northeastern belfry, we descended floor by floor until we were in the sub-basement, below the Data Processing Chamber. And there it was: the distinctive incoming-data bleat of the FirstNerve BurrOmeter, coming from deep within the packing crate.
We never sold it, you see. The Museum of Arts and Design didn’t cough up shipping costs, much less the scrap metal value, so it’s been gathering dust for months.
We grabbed a crowbar, pried open the crate, and were greeted by the auto-detect light on the data transmission panel, blinking like a French perfumer after a face full of Someday by Justin Bieber. We eagerly activated the metaphor diodes, reconnected the name drop dosimeter, and wiped the packing peanuts off the sensor surfaces.
The incoming signal was strong but slightly scrambled. The knob on the Omnidirectional Media Selector was frozen on nytimes.com, but a quick spritz of WD-40 loosened it right up. A few degrees down spectrum we got a fix on the new coordinates: the data were coming from deep inside the Grooming subsector of the Style zone in the GQ quadrant. It was the unmistakable rhetorical signature of the “fragrance expert.”
An entire opus on vetiver featuring nine fragrance reviews. Bonanza!
Name Drops: 12
Jean-Paul GuerlainBonus Points:
Annick Goutal
Henri Sorsana
François Demachy
Jo Malone
Karine Dubreuil
Alberto Morillas
Tom Ford
Harry Frémont
Antoine Maisondieu
Olivier Pescheux
Etienne de Swardt
Perfumers: 9Mix ‘N Match Olfactory Metaphors: 6
French: 8
Designers: 2
the humidity of a blue Haitian morningEuropean Airlines: 1
a market next to mango sellers in the shadow of palm trees
a seamless, darkish scent inflected with smooth wood that is elegant as a spider’s thread
liquid sunlight with a bite of fresh ginger
the scent comes out of a bottle with a hairy chest and a wood baseball bat
fireflies hovering in the evening air, luminous as embers, and cool as night
SwissairExotic Locations: 5
Haiti“Regular Guy” Locations: -2
Java
Paris
Bangkok
Zurich
DallasJock Sniffing Bonus Points: 5
New Jersey
raw, earthy, masculineTotal BurrOmeter reading for Making Scents of It: A Guide to Vetiver: 46 milliburrs.
sharp masculinity
undeniably masculine
no nonsense and masculine
raw masculinity
Outlook: It’s hurricane season. Gale-force winds spinning out of control. Board up the windows.
5 comments:
"the scent comes out of a bottle with a hairy chest and a wood baseball bat" - if we change baseball bat for a caipirinha shaker stick I would say that was a real event in Copacabana or Ipanema beach that he would rather forget...
"the humidity of a blue Haitian morning" - LOLOLOLOLOL! No comments or I will be too mean to be truth...
GQ is a magazine for Gays Quacking????
"blinking like a French perfumer after a face full of Someday by Justin Bieber"
That was well worth the wait.
+Q Perfume Blog:
Hey, what are you saying? My first paid writing gig was for GQ! (Serious.)
And thanks a lot for clarifying the Freudian imagery. It will be a while before I order a caipirinha . . .
Nathan Branch:
On the NJ Transit train the other day, the wheels were rumbling "Antoine Maisondieu, Antoine Maisondieu, Antoine Maisondieu, Antoine Maisondieu" and then the conductor's announcement woke me up.
I know. Freaky, right?
if the face is full of Bieber... I wonder where the head was...
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