Upon my dressing table are many mysterious wee onion-shaped bottles containing a scent for each of my moods because the telly told me that there is a scent for every mood and it often has something to do with Venice or Paris. I believed the telly but didn’t want to smell like an ancient canal or an enormous outdoor pissoire-au-lait so I set about creating my own perfumes to embody, or ennose at least, the 873 scientifically described emotions of a manic-depressive housewife (only 8 of which are classified as “Any Fun At All”).

I’ve only managed to make 7 at the moment but have recruited the girls to help me in the collection of ingredients. They wear their faerie costumes and I mostly wear a black pointy hat and a false green nose although the Problem Husband has pointed out I might want to wear some other clothes too. He is a very clever man and quite right. What a stinging nettle can do to an unprotected bum isn’t funny at all. In fact Mr. Bush is said to be looking into it as a means of the detainee “coercion” he has just allowed into law in what has to be the greatest moral bound backwards of his most un-American administration. But this is not a political blog so I’ll leave that to others. On with the sniffs then.

Eau # 1 intended for the periods of elevated libido that often plague/please the bipolar person’s manic or hypomanic episode. I described it over at foot Eater’s before but here it is for those who may have missed the recipe:

It is made out of the mashed-up heads of the rare blue dusk-moth which can only be found upon Michaelmas Eve in a particular wild cabbage copse on the Isle of Lewis, when they come out to mate. They are leapt upon immediately by maidens, pure-of-heart (they have to sit a tricky multiple-choice test first to ensure purity) in the manner of people clutching at fivers in that wind-cubicle on a whacky Noel Edmonds variety show).

The heads and antennae are boiled for several hours with the tears of lovers, stinging-nettle syrup and the juice of one lime, and the resultant liquor is pumped by dialysis through Mr. Alan Rickman. Liquid is collected 2 hours later from Mr. Rickman dressed as the Sheriff of Nottingham who’s been reading saucy magazines throughout. The perfume is complete now, with the precious filtrate of Rickman blood, and will vary from batch to batch according to how many oysters he’s been eating. It’s heady stuff indeed. I call it “Eau My!”

Eau # 2 is meant to be worn on those dysphoric days/weeks where agitation and irritability has you unable to sit still and the nocturnal bipolar perfume-wearer might find his or herself climbing the stairs or cleaning cupboards or pacing the house all night long to keep the feeling of physically needing to crawl out of his/her skin.

Step 1: Take some more stinging nettles and the liquefied sound of nails on a blackboard (available at all good Walmarts). Simmer slowly for a week with a Britney Spears’ “Oops I did it Again!” CD and a 5-molar solution of hydrochloric acid (aq).

Step 2: Rub this solution under your eyelids, all over your skin and swallow the remainder with 17 whole butterflies. Collect the tears, skin seepage and vomited bile from this process.

Step 3: Arrange to sit a driving test and your university finals on the same day as having a root canal. Collect resultant sweat.

Step 4. Mix the products of steps 2 and 3 with Venetian canal water and voila! The perfect scent to reflect your current reality! It is called “Eauuuuaaaaagggghhh!” and it stinks.

Eau # 3. Or “Eau de Catatonia”: Don’t shower for 2 weeks and collect the odor in sheeps stomachs which have been marinating in hospital grade disinfectant for untold years. You need no other scent. Well, you do (you really do) but this product will indeed reflect your mood. There are many variations possible with this “base” falling loosely under the product-line “L’eau”.

Eau # 4 or “Eau to Joy!” Take the leap of a gambolling lamb, the luck of a gambling Irishman and the love of a lassie for her laddie. Capture the scent of these somehow (technique not yet perfected despite many field-trips to Las Vegas and A Farm) and mix with fresh, green grass, the comforting dust of ancient books and the bonhomie of a night out with your best friends (this bonhomie might well have some beer in it; it might not; it might be gin).

Eau # 5 or “Eau d’ear”: Take the tears your husband/wife will shed after he sees the credit-card bill for your multiple corner-shelving and 1950’s nylon petticoat purchases from ebay. Take your own eventual incredulity and dismay at the arrival of many packages of what seemed like great ideas/bargains at the time.

Mix.

Add the metallic flavour you get in your mouth when you narrowly avoid a road accident and ferment in sherry casks for several years, to deepen. Just before the final distillation, add the sweet and salt flavour of ice-cream licked from your arm on a hot day and Essence of Bafflement (Jean-Claude Gaultier has bulk-buying rates on cases of this).

*

I do have a few other completed eaus (eaux?) but I feel this has gone on long past the point at which people will have stopped reading. I will add this to my growing list of uncompleted blog stories which will be completed at some point but not today. Today I have to gather a pigeon sneeze, a Hells Angel’s whisker and the somnolent wheeze of an asthmatic transvestite professor of marmalade. I will use these in the creation of my newest eaupus (hahahahahahahahem): “S’Eau Surreal.” In the television advert for this perfume, its name will be whispered by Marge Simpson in a fading echoey way as if she were in a deep blue cave whispering out to a swirly, yellow world.

My question: What perfume or smell do you like the bestest?

(Addendum: It’s night-time now and I’ve just re-read what I posted today. It all sounds a bit self-indulgent and woe-is-me-ey. I’m sorry folks! I just bashed it out because I thought it tied in neatly with the recent Stephen Fry bipolar stuff over at Pat’s (Past Imperfect) and the perfume stuff over at Foot Eaters. I didn’t realise it was coming out quite like that. I thought I’d made the tone lighter than the result. Don’t let me scare you away! Really, I’m really the most naturally optimistic and cheery bipolar person you may ever meet! When I started this blog, a small part of the idea was to bash out into the void some of the bipolar stuff if I felt like it. In the event I haven’t really felt like it. It bores me, quite frankly. I’ll shut up now in case it starts boring you lot. I guess I meant to say sorry if the change in tone bit seems too abrupt. Normal service will be resumed in the comment box (Don’t comment on this last bit in itallics. Just tell me how you all smell and what smells you like – See! I aren’t in the least bit scary or wierd am I?)

I tried but failed to upload a photo to Wordpress. I suspect it doesn’t like the look of my face. For my part I’m not looking kindly at Wordpress’s infuriating, insolent bum-slap of a logo either. In the meantime, I have opened a Flickr account and will add more photos as I get them transferred to Wocky (my laptop, my friend). For the moment here is the test shot of Problem Child the 1st and me that I used to get my Flickr up and running.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38108740@N00/

Today I have been learning how to take photos from my husband’s ‘puter and transfer them to mine. That was easy. Flickr is easy. Wordpress is a git.

Also, you might be interested to know that the hills around our town are ablaze. We have ash falling all around like snow and the sky is peculiar.

I am in a bad mood.

Off to play with Flickr for a bit.

Update: Flickr is the anti-Wordpress. So easy, so free (!) so very, very linkable! I am abandoning, for the moment, the putting of pictures onto Wordpress, and am laying my cap before Flickr. I’ve added the link to my sidebar in a zippy now-I’m-a-big-picture-now-I’m-a-wee-picture-again button that they have made. I’ll add more photos as and when my competence allows.

There follows a brief, shouty prologue:

It’s a bit of a crappy day all round for everybody. I thought I’d try and distract myself from inaccurate ABC “docudramas” by posting something. Do we really need a docudrama when a third of the country still doesn’t have the facts sorted out in all these five years and still thinks Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11? When Mr. Bush said today that he “will never forget the lessons of 9/11″, does anyone know, did anyone ask him if he knows what these lessons are?

Anyway.

Today I have no use for punctuation although it may use me like a, poor; ragged! wre(:)tche’d, th”ing? what with it being a definite set of accepted rules and me being just a housewife. Life is hardly fair though.

I’ve cannibalized today’s post from a comment I left over at my friend Latigo Flint’s (see sidebar for a link to his excellent site) place. It’s a bit lazy, I’ll admit but today’s allotted blog time was spent mostly in catching up with my ever-growing number of blog reads (most, but not all of whom are also on the sidebar – will fix that soon) and trying to locate an old Hilda Boswell book for the girls on Alibris. That, and I’m a distracted, lazy moo at a low ebb.

If I could link to the post that begat this without Wordpress underlining my whole site, I would, but apparantly I’m too stupid. As ever though, see my sidebar for the link there. Latigo told a tale of a lonesome Starbucks patron who was “simulating the entire upcoming professional football season with these team pencils and a quarter.”

I considered this irresponsible for the following reason:

- So read now then gentles, the most poorly punctuated and magnificently indifferent run-on sentence you are likely to read today unless you go to CNN.com -

One man flipping a pencil in an LA Starbucks might well effectuate a series of tiny air gusts that could eventually tip the balance of probabilities and provide just enough puff to cause a ball to sail over a bar somewhere in Denver field while the crowd goes wild and a daddy, let’s call him Olaf, forgets to pick up the children in his glee and the victorious camaraderie all around him, and the two children instead are picked up by a pervert, lets call him Edward and one child being so sensitive to the horrors of this world will lose his mind in the car on their way to the pervert’s house because of two or three strong black hairs he can see curling from the pervert’s nose which repels him such that he cannot breathe and so doesn’t and dies, and his sister in her rage and grief stabs the pervert with a unicorn from Target and goes on to lead a succesful yet haunted life in, spookily, the pencil business; the pervert with the sticky, drippy unicorn in his neck turning out to be the children’s real father after all, sent by their mother to collect them so they could escape the arsehole tyrant Olaf and go to live in Vermont where the schools are better and the light has a strange quality; the same man and Edward who, in a sickeningly ironic twist, was the top man in unicorns at Mattel and a person of gentleness and pleasant manners and not a pervert at all, apart from the unicorn thing.

Who can say?

It’s called the Pencil Effect* and little understood, save for the tragedy it almost always causes. It’s why I use pens.

(*This is an utterly real, actual Effect, mind you, similar to it’s more famous Butterfly cousin but no less portentious and awesome. And awful. It’s in books and everything.)

I was out for a walk in Ojai the other day when I began to wonder what the collective noun for a group of housewives would be? Bearing in mind this is Southern California, the possibilities are many. While we are all individuals in our housewiffery I think it’s fair to say we do break down along certain lines. For example, the polish of housewives parking their shiny SUVs outside the manicure salon didn’t seem to have an awful lot in common with the hairiness of housewives by the organic kumquat and patchouli stall at the farmer’s market.

I continued my walk.

Passing a cleavage of builder’s bums (each one peeking cheekily out into the SoCal sunshine as their oblivious owners bent to their tasks), I considered the fact that we all belong, in our various ways, to someone else’s collective noun “cloud” and have very little say in what their chosen collective noun says about us. This can be a discomfiting thought in the wrong mood leading to dark self-doubt, especially should you find yourself unhappily placed in someone else’s idea of, say, a bleating of bloggers or an abomination of Scottish people or a bevy of barflies (formally of course a beverage of imbibers but if you’re going to damn someone for membership in a group you disapprove of, for a caprice of gods’ sakes do it with feeling in the vernacular).

Of course, should one find oneself numbering in something flattering and lovely like a ballet of barflies or a sigh of lovers or a whisking of wordsmiths or a gentleness of dentists it could well lead to a twinkling/smugness of feelings of well-being and self-worth.

Continuing down the road to the letterbox, I passed a campaign of pigeons marching solemnly (although not very uniformly or straightly, it has to be said) to show their support or abhorence of whatever it was that was on their minds; I couldn’t read the writing on their tiny placards. For some, I don’t think their hearts were truly in calling for justice/more millet/death to seagulls, and the throatier members of the horniness of he-pigeons were clearly not there to uphold (or smash) any real ideals. Rather, they seemed to be just looking to get lucky with the earnest, young female pigeons peck, peck, pecking for The Cause, their minds on a higher purpose leaving them therefore unguarded against the amorous advances and beguiling words of a randy he-pigeon.

My winging of letters posted, (allright, fine, my bendover of bills posted; never actually write letters these days, its all email, innit?) I turned and made my way back to the car waving to a song of children and their hover of mothers in the park. How neat and tidy it is to collect one’s nouns, I thought to myself, and not have them lying around all willy-nilly in the manner of some slattern who doesn’t care who stubs their toe on her sentences. Then I thought, what a municipal-water-cleaning-facility of shit you think about sometimes, Sam, – determining right then and there to add it to my a-a-atishoo of posts. (I do beg your pardon.)

My question is what would be the collective noun for people who do what you do all day?

Footles, an inkling of private detectives, a hunger of podophages?

An orange cone of safety inspectors, SafeT?

A bewilderment of bewilderbeast, Nanas?

fmc – tell Memnoch he’s spawned an arse-kicking of fmc readers ready to hide his gym shoes and spike his spirulena shakes with rum.