fragrance reviews: __ pierre guillaume néroli ad astra __ i smoked cigarettes when i was a graduate student and quit intermittently afterwards. a few years out, i went a long time without cigarettes but would occasionally have one with friends, which would turn into me smoking a couple times per day for a few weeks or months. i liked smoking after drinking wine. i thought it felt amazing at the time. i donno, i was in my twenties. this fragrance brings me back to grad school but it also diverges from that time a bit. the neroli notes aren't as obvious as in other fragrances that i've tried (e.g. les exclusifs de chanel eau de cologne and another that i'm forgetting); they meld with loud pear notes that make the fragrance's bright & bitter tones a little friendlier, child-like and perhaps insincere. it's as if the fragrance is trying to convince me that they are a good person when there is more to them than that. (and also, what's a good person? who wrote the criteria, and who actually satisfies it?) over time, the annoying pear notes dissipate but the sparks remain. this almost turns into a mossy scent but not really. a blend of air and something sparky -- fresh air and clutter that smells like a gentle tickle. a ticklish dream, perhaps. i like that it takes time for me to like the scent. it feels deliberate. i haven't had a cigarette in about three years, i don't want another cigarette, and my reasons for not wanting one aren't necessarily obvious. i am worried about the health consequences, of course, but i also recall smoking with people who were kind of shitty and/or uninteresting and just standing there . . . waiting for life to happen. not everyone was like this -- some were great people, some are still good friends of mine, but a lot were randoms who i would otherwise never interact with. imagine a world in which we can light up a cigarette without the chore of forced, lame conversations and nicotene addiction. i'm into it. next up: theodoros kalotinis jasmine of athens, tag cosmetics after 8, diptyque do son, issey miyake (i have two of these). . . . not by un-doing anything that was done but by allowing all things to be undone and embraced accordingly, not by correcting the mistakes we each made but by acknowledging that they were made together and for a reason maybe, not by reinforcing guilt but by reminding you of our support: no longer compulsory but almost as intoxicating as a shot of everclear. astaghafirullah; (here & now -- left hand held open with my heart crawling around it) . . . bitmapping life: no nuance, just lots of little dots that assemble to create an illusion of gray -- an illusion of infinity because the sky’s the limit, right? -- an illusion of depth -- an illusion of an illuminated ditch that’s really only black and white.