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This week I went with two old friends to a buddy's jazz club in Brooklyn, Puppet's (Puppet's). Had a blast and heard the Alex Blake Quartet. Alex Blake is a stellar double-bass player, and our friend Jaime played a mean trap set. Alto-sax player really shined. An excellent evening out.

*Lord's-Jester*

Last week a lady came to my house who has some renown as a perfume writer. She loved my perfumes, in particular the one I call Demeter (used to be called Blondie), based on tobacco, hay, and 14 other notes. [We are in discussions now as to the proper name for it.] She said, with a very large readership, that as soon as I get ecommerce going on my web site, she will write about my stuff. She said Demeter is one of the best tobacco scents she's ever smelled. !!! Also, I sent some samples to a friend in Australia (Selene and Phoebe); her business partner said my perfume is in the same class as Mandy Aftel. !!!!!

In natural perfume, there could not be a better compliment. Ms Aftel is without a doubt the best in the business, and founder of the Natural Perfumers Guild.

This week my assistant and I remade Demeter, and also Heracles. With Demeter, my goal was to brighten it up a bit, to give it some lift. To accomplish this, I added sandalwood in the base, and neroli, juniper, and templin in the top (templin is distilled from fir cones). We'll see; I may go back to the first or second recipe. With Heracles, my goal was to tone down both the black-currant bud and the boronia, which were way too strong in the first iteration (which I called Down Under). Again, here, I took the total weight of the aromatics and calculated how much alcohol to add to make a light parfum. First whiff makes me think the black currant is still too strong. Time will tell.

I am simply overjoyed that I now have an ounce of orris-root/violet-leaf co-distillation; the only company I know who sells it has been out of stock for months. I can work magic with orris-violet, especially when combined with the orris dilution I now also have. A Facebook update: 'I am beyond excited that a rare co-distillation is back in stock at Floracopeia. It's like my life was on hold while they were out of stock. Magic has returned!' And also: 'I've discovered I have a sense of a certain completeness, knowing I have all the aromatics I need to make great natural perfume. I want for nothing if I can rest assured that task is feasible.' I might even be able to get some more boronia soon.

Also this week I did more work on Lord's Jester Inc. I got a corporate bank account, enlisted the services of an accounting firm, finalized packaging, etc. I will offer liquid perfumes in two sizes, .17oz (almost .2oz) and .4oz, and solid perfumes in three sizes, .25oz tins (cool retro tins that snap shut and are highly portable), .68oz and 1oz jars (great aluminum jars lined with retro white glass). The small perfume bottles have very small openings, small enough that you can turn the bottle over to put some on you finger, or put some drop by drop onto a handkerchief. [By the way, samples of handkerchiefs embroidered with the company name are on their way to me from India.] For the larger bottles, I've now got screw caps, spray tops, and roll-on tops; combined with a handkerchief, this will offer the user multiple options for application.

*Chi*

I want to understand more fully what Tolle is talking about in the following passage. I get it in theory, but how about practical terms? From Eckhart Tolle:

"The Unmanifested is the source of chi. Chi is the inner energy field of your body. It is the bridge between the outer you and the Source. It lies halfway between the manifested, the world of form, and the Unmanifested. Chi can be likened to a river or an energy stream. If you take the focus of your consciousness deeply into the inner body, you are tracing the course of this river back to its Source. Chi is movement; the Unmanifested is stillness. When you reach a point of absolute stillness, which is nevertheless vibrant with life, you have gone beyond the inner body and beyond chi to the source itself: the Unmanifested. Chi is the link between the Unmanifested and the physical universe."

*Morals*

I am what some call a "moral atheist." It perturbs me that the word 'atheist' must be qualified. Do people really imagine there are amoral atheists? In my experience, there are some apathetic atheists; they aren't amoral so much as they just don't give a crap, about moral questions, about the existence of god, about developing a code of conduct. Most of us are deeply moral, more so than your average theist, I must assert, because we had to develop our sets of ethics on our own. Instead of having it handed to us in a book, we've struggled over many years to make our own standards of conduct. I myself have no trouble with folks who do get their ethics from a book, whether it's the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, or the writings of Buddhist monks. What I do have trouble with is folks assuming I have no morals simply because I'm not a theist.

What is theism? The belief that there is a deity of some kind who gives rise to the universe. I do not believe that; my beliefs are most closely reflected in Taoism. In this statement I mean to bring up what is, for me, the best ontological argument for the existence of god, St Anselm's, which says simply that god is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. For me that greatness is the sum total of all the events happening across the universe in a split second, from the formation of new stars, to the many life cycles of the earth, to the blood coursing through all our veins, to our intimations of divinity, to our deathless dreams; all of it at once is the cosmos, which is that than which I can conceive of nothing greater. The cosmos is my god.

*Asian-Ladies*

In my life, I've gone out with two Asian women. The first was a Chinese-Japanese lady in Taiwan; the second was a Cambodian woman in Seattle. I mention them just because my relationships with them were very different from all the others. With the lady in Taiwan, who called herself Ms Liang, our time together was riddled with dishonesty and subterfuge on her part. Every word the woman ever told me was a lie. I've no idea what her real name was, how old she was, what she did (other than burn through her parents' money), whether or not her father was in the Taiwanese military as she claimed, or if in fact she was married, an idea she denied completely.

Eventually it came down to this: a man claiming to be her husband confronted me violently in public and told me to leave Taipei if I valued my life (in Chinese, which I was only just beginning to speak). One of the first things other foreigners had told me after I arrived on the island was that a foreigner's hand must never touch a Chinese person in anger, in public anyway; to engage in such behavior would be to run amok--every man in Taiwan was required to do two years military service, so the streets are basically lined with trained assassins. When confronted on the crowded street, I had no choice but to run for my life.

With the Cambodian lady in Seattle, things were much tamer but still a little odd. I had thought of her as the most beautiful girl at Seattle Central Community College for a year and a half; one day in my new anatomy class I found her giving me clear signals that romantic overtures would be welcome. I asked her out that day, but it took a couple of weeks of convincing before she agreed. It turned out she was very traditional and couldn't easily accept premarital sex; it didn't take long for her to give in, but I did have to say I was open to the idea of marrying her, which at the time I was. We tried to make it work after I moved to Bellingham to finish college but we failed.

While I was still in Seattle, I did have ample opportunity to witness Cambodian-American culture. What I can say is that if you want to get an idea what it's like, see Eastwood's recent classic Gran Torino; the nature of the cultures of immigrants from south Asia is captured with such aplomb, it's a miracle. In my Seattle girlfriend's case, her parents both refused to speak English, her brother was a gang banger (South Seattle is one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the country), and the whole family was addicted to gambling. All Nikki ever wanted to do was hit the casino, which eventually was our undoing. Gambling addicts but ultra conservative; go figure.

*Quotations*

We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.

--Alan Chadwick

[Mr Chadwick's work on intensive gardening led directly to the development of Biointensive methods, as practiced by John Jeavons and Ecology Action.]

If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music. I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it. And I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit.

--Tori Amos

[It's all about giggling a bit.]

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.

--Martha Graham

[Eloquent proof.]

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

--Yoda

[My favorite wise man.]

Duct tape is like the Force: it has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

--Carl Zwanzig

[I am never without a roll.]

One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself: I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.

--Georgia O'Keefe

[Insert "perfume" and "write" instead of "paint" for me.]

Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. Not that I disapprove of all hearty enjoyment of life. A flushed sense of happiness can overtake a person anywhere, and one is no more to blame for it than the Asiatic flu or a sudden benevolent change in the weather (which is often joy's immediate cause). No, what rankles me is the stylization of this private condition into a bullying social ritual.

--Philip Lopate

[One should read my piece Some People Always Smile]

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

--Rumi

[I'm slowly learning the importance of this wisdom.]

I don't have a career; I have a typewriter.

--Don Delillo

[I live more fully than I would otherwise because of my keyboard.]

A writer is committed to trying to make sense of life. It's a search. So there is that commitment first of all: the commitment to the honesty and determination to go as deeply into things as possible, and to dredge up what little bit of truth you with your talent can then express.

--Nadine Gordimer

[With natural perfume, I give myself over to beauty; with words, over to truth.]

Peace love and ATOM jazz