saltwater creature

Harrow looks so cool on the cover of her book while in the book half of the time she looks like 

I died but I came back exactly the same. You though, I came back and you were wrong. Did the fact of my dying really damage you that much? Was bringing me back worth what it cost you? Would it have been better to just leave me?

The straight woman is unsatisfied with straight studio porn. She wants to get off to something in which the actors actually emote and show passion beyond canned moans from the women and, at best, vacant grunts from the men. She turns to gay porn. She knows it's not "for her," but neither was the straight porn, and at least the actors look like they're enjoying themselves. And for a short while she is satiated by Sean Cody et al, but she runs into the same problems she had to begin with. She was not looking at sex but a simulacrum of sex, trapped in Plato's cave. Unsatisfied, she turned to vintage gay porn, harkening to a time when most gay bars still had darkrooms and reliably smelled of piss and Amyl Nitrate. Here was the real thing, in all its animalistic passion. But she still couldn't immerse herself in the fantasy. She wanted the media to engage with her own imagination and meet her half-way, rather than having it spoonfed to her onscreen. She turned to yaoi, with its elongated figures reminiscent of mannerist portraiture, then bara, including hardcore BDSM scenes. But the tactile sensations depicted in the pages didn't do justice to their real life counterparts. She turned deeper into her own imagination, this time reading erotica. No, not the poolside paperbacks sold at Barnes and Noble. The good shit. Why then, was she still not satisfied? She dug deeper, searching for the true meaning of eroticism. She studied the psychoanalysis of Freud, the cultural criticism of Susan Sontag the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde. She took vacation time and flew to Europe, starting at the caves of Lascaux to explore the human urge to create, then traversed the Camino de Santiago on foot, along the way meeting a 56 year old carpenter from Burgos named Andrés, with whom she had an explosive affair. They both knew it couldn't last, which made them cherish each other's touch all the more. Upon flying home, she gave up. If her search for true eroticism never bore fruit this whole time, why would it now? It would take years before she stumbled upon the answer by pure happenstance: dubstep.

:)

A part of being an adult is living with regret and not allowing it to consume you. The older you get, the more mistakes you’ve made, opportunities you’ve missed, people you’ve disappointed. And every day you have to remind yourself to be kind and forgiving of yourself. You accept and love the you from the past and understand that it’s all a part of the process. Then you move on and live your best life, knowing now as old as you feel today, you’ll never be this young again.

An angel. Alchemy treaty Aurora Consurgens, 1420-1450

i hope we both die

all the 9 to 5ers scrolling through tumblr at 7am like we're reading the morning paper. raising our coffee cups in greeting by reblogging each others posts.

I have this thing for perfume. I’m a collector and I love to think about it and I take a lot of pleasure imagining what my favorite character’s might wear. Sometimes the exercise is restricted by a character (Dean Winchester might wear Drakkar Noir, if anything, but he probably just wears a scented deodorant stick, most likely something conservative like the original Old Spice). But then sometimes fucking Hannibal Lecter comes along and canonically recognizes a rare, niche women’s perfume with one sniff and blows everyone else out of the water and omg I want to put perfume on him. 

So what would Hannibal Lecter wear?

(note: part of me thinks Hannibal wouldn’t usually wear anything because he’s a goddamn perfect predator and he wouldn’t want you to smell him coming up behind you in his stocking feet.)

All my usual favorite men’s houses strangely don’t work for Hannibal: Tom Ford’s private collection is too obvious, Serge Lutens is an eehhh, maybe?, but most likely creates the same problem as Tom Ford. Amouage is a little too much, too rich. Maybe he’d wear Memoir Man, but most likely he’d find it loud (I can’t believe I’m saying this about an Amouage scent). And Creed is just no. No Creed. He’d find Creed’s false elitism coarse and vulgar.

You know what I think he would wear? I think Hannibal Lecter would wear a lot of rare, vintage women’s scents. 

THIS SOUNDS CRAZY, but vintage women’s scents aren’t the flighty, strawberry candy scents women wear now, they’re often bodily, contralto, plush, smoky-dark, dry, astringent, sultry, leathery, mossy, sexy…and many male collectors wear classic vintage women’s scents because our modern tastes have refashioned them as unisexual. Hannibal Lecter could wear vintage Chanel Cuir de Russie, which smells like fine glove leather with this tiny, furry sort of dirty furstink note underneath. It’s civilized and polite with this undertone of filthy sex. 

Or he would wear Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris, which is one of the loveliest, warmest Iris perfumes of all time. Iris can be cold, metallic, camphorous, but Iris Gris gave us a warm, peachy Iris and on a man it would smell plush and dandified and golden and delicious. 

And my last vintage perfume is a longshot (and other perfume fanatics will laugh!), but oh my good god if Hannibal smelled like Vintage Bal a Versailles by Jean Desprez, I’d probably climb him like a tree. Bal a Versailles is this peppery, spicy, musky women’s scent that basically smells like the abstract version of woman’s arousal. It’s intensely, wonderfully filthy and sexy and I want to lick it off him OK MOVING ON…

If Hannibal Lecter was to wear modern scents, I’d imagine him in something like Parfumerie Generale’s Querelle, which is a unisex scent that smells like moss, sweat (cumin), sex (myrrh and cinnamon) and incense. It’s fucking gorgeous dressed up and equally gorgeous fucked into a mattress. Or he would maybe wear Malle’s (and Roucel’s) Musc Ravageur, which is an animalic-musky perfume that has this medicinal spicy topnote that keeps it all buttoned up and polite for day wear. 

Or for something that is manly and simple but gorgeous, Knize Ten, which is an incense-y, birch tar leather warmed with an unsweetened strawberry note. It’s actually pretty masculine and passes as a conservative daywear scent, but straddles the fence a little into DANDY territory. It just smells good. I could see him wearing this.

Anyway, all of this just kills me. and tl;dr, Hannibal Lecter probably smells really good.

(Also note: from the hints we got, Will Graham probably receives drugstore holiday collections of Dana’s Canoe or Nautica Classic. Both of which are a damn shame, boy should smell like L'Artisan’s Timbuktu. Boy would get SO MUCH PLAY if he smelled like L'Artisan’s Timbuktu. Or Gucci Pour Homme in the old brown/ivory checkered box. WILLIAM, you could smell so good. UNNNF.)