Keeping golden honor with our Oud theme of autumn, these hand and body washes by Molton Brown add an extra ‘H’ to the proceedings, and give our guests something to add to their aura. With golden particles suspended in its richness, and the essence of Oud surprisingly on point, this decadent soap lingers on the skin, transporting visitors to another world and another time.
Yes, there is always drama in the fall. It’s there in the way the nights begin to cool, the way the forest leaves start to flicker before beginning their full-fledged burn. It’s there in the crisp snap of morning, when the dew has turned to frost and fog cloaks the early morning traveler with a vague sense of worry.
It’s also there in the pungent zap of Oudh, drifting on the air like a memory, carried on the breeze like some impossible flying carpet. Fall is transport and change and the burning of a phoenix. After a handwashing of Oudh soap, fall is an unseen talisman tickling the nose.
Waking unnaturally early on this past Sunday, I walked into the living room and found the sun just starting to slant in through the window. A single column of light fell across the floor right near the space where I usually meditate, and it felt like the universe was inviting me to do my daily practice right then and there. There were still shadows from the night, and the edges of objects were laced with darkness, but we were on the other side now, and it was only going to get lighter. I lit the end of a dwindling stick of Palo Santo, gently rang the singing bowl so as not to wake Andy, and settled in for the early morning meditation.
This was the date that a lunar eclipse was happening in Virgo, though I’ve forgotten all the things that it’s supposed to mean for my sign. It was also the last day of summer, so the morning felt both celebratory and a little sad. A friend had recently echoed my disappointment of this summer, and I understood that I wasn’t alone.
Sending the summer off with a sunny Sunday morning meditation felt good. When you can end something with calm and stillness, when you can honor and bow to what has been without feeling too terribly bitter or ill over it – these are good things.
It’s been no secret that the majority of recent Tom Ford fragrance releases have not thrilled my nose. The potent and sometimes-polarizing boldness of the original Private Blend collection had given way to more commercial and mainstream offerings – nothing terribly offensive, but nothing terribly brave. That changes with the arrival of the latest in the Oud line – ‘Oud Voyager’ – which is a stunning addition to the collection (and a 50th birthday gift to myself the last time I was in Boston).
It’s a banger from the beginning, even if the oud isn’t the extreme pungent blast that some fragrance fanciers favor – it’s more of a softer, benign take on it, which is perfect for the fall season. We want to ease into this, yes, with some fanfare and excitement, but elegant restraint as well. The push and pull of life – the extremes of fall – the enchantment of oud…
Yesterday morning marked the first day of fall and this blog was occupied with that shift and a new look for the autumn season. That meant the weekly blog recap has been moved to this morning, so if you didn’t get a chance to catch up on Monday per the typical schedule, here is your chance. It’s a recap filled with a few recaps – the past circling in on itself – and there are lots of linky labyrinths for those looking to dive down different rabbit holes, so have at it – we’re all mad bunnies here.
We close out this first day of autumn with a moody song embodying the arrival of the season. Ella Fitzgerald sings of beautiful heartbreak, and a longing to not have an early autumn ~ and we are powerless to stopping it as it’s already here. Hearing the muse while a sliver of oud emanates from my wrist, I indulge in the beauty of the night.
When an early autumn walks the land and chills the breeze And touches with her hand the summer trees Perhaps you’ll understand what memories I own There’s a dance pavilion in the rain all shuttered down A winding country lane all russet brown A frosty window pane shows me a town grown lonely…
Accustomed to the dark falls and the treacherous emotional terrain that often accompanies the seasons of lesser light, I feel that this is familiar territory. Whether it’s the unrequited infatuations of my youth or more adult-like failed relationships in my 20’s, fall has traditionally been a time of emotional turmoil. In some ways, the spell of such a time is a reminder that we are all still human, still prone to making messy mistakes in service to our wayward hearts.
That spring of ours that started so April-hearted Seemed made for just a boy and girl I never dreamed, did you, any fall could come in view So early, early…
A candle glows gently before a mound of sumptuous sequin brocade. The light is serene, the colors are soft. Would that such pretty things be a balm on thy heart.
Darling, if you care, please, let me know I’ll meet you anywhere, I miss you so Let’s never have to share another early autumn
Instead, it rages quietly. It ravages in silence. It tears down the semblance of an ordered life and wreaks its havoc with nary a ripple of the surface. There, all is pristine and placid. No one wants to know what lurks below.
Darling, if you care, please, let me know I’ll meet you anywhere, I miss you so Let’s never have to share another early autumn Autumn, autumn
These are troubling times. Whispers of abductions are no longer the stuff of fantasy, disappearances and likely snuffings are now commonplace, and the darkness hinted at in years prior has come to full, devastating fruition as some of us foretold. It feels like Voldemorte has ascended, Hitler is in power, and Satan has achieved the long-sought revenge of a fallen angel, turning our world into a little bit of Hell. It’s hard to make sense of how dark some of our souls were ~ and apparently are ~ and I struggle with recognizing the basic humanity we once foolishly assumed was present in all of our brethren. For those who are surprised by how awful can be, it must feel like an affront and an attack; for those of us who are used to be treated as second-class citizens ~ the marginalized, the different, the ‘other’ ~ it is simple confirmation. Some of us are unsurprised by any of this; we have already crafted ways and means of survival, as well as avenues of beauty and enchantment to carry us through the darkest moments.
And so we open this fall season of the blog, christening it the Autumn of Oud ~ as much for its mystery and beauty as for its metaphorical correlations. Oud is a precious raw ingredient in the most decadent fragrances ~ rich, incense-like, and pungent, with a woody warmth centered around a musky heart. The creation of oud occurs in the heartwood of the agarwood tree when it is threatened with a particular fungus. It is a resin that is produced as a defense against an attack that might endanger its existence. As this only happens in the few trees that are afflicted with this fungus, oud is rare in its natural state, and widely variable. It is said to be valued sometimes at a higher rate than gold due to its rarity, and perfumes using natural oud are prohibitively expensive. For that reason, many of the ouds we encounter are synthetic, cheaper versions that approximate the richness of the real thing. (I don’t mind that, and I’m not such a fragrance snob that I’m bothered by a synthetic oud. If it smells nice, why not embrace it? And if a human-made oud is more sustainable, so much the better.)
The idea of oud as a defense mechanism only adds to its allure. Something beautiful and rich is produced when erecting its fortress, in the same way that something rare and powerful happens when we come together against a threat to our basic existence. It feels like a fungus is invading our country right now, and I want to have the hope that we will collectively be able to produce our own protective device, as exquisite and glorious as oud.
The Autumn of Oud aims to capture a sense of mystery, as well as the escapist beauty that comes with such a rich and sometimes polarizing scent. There are infinite varieties of oud ~ my cologne cabinet alone has merely scratched the surface, and hardly any of them carry the weight and magnificence of the real authentic thing (true, natural oud is far too expensive to find its way into my poor hands) and all of that plays a part in these times as well: the search for authenticity in a world of malignant misinformation. Our country reclines on a bed of lies, and our people seem content to indulge in the laziness. Perhaps we have all been carried away by the sweet promise of the impossible.
For our own purposes here, and what you might see in fall blog entries, the essence of oud meanders through like curls of smoke unfurling around the corners of an uncertain future. It gives danger, it gives risk, it gives decadence, it gives defiance. Ideally it gives a seductive and beautiful invitation to portals that take us to other lands, other worlds, other places where candles and incense light the darkest night, smoldering in the burning season.
Fall is a still a mystery to me in many ways ~ mostly in the haunting memories this season holds. Right when I think I have it solved, new layers reveal themselves, and old haunts switch the meanings I once held as true. Fall was when I fell, and I always feel a little lost and a little haunted when the nights turn colder. Let us see what this season brings… if you dare.
A midnight post to ring in the autumn, an amuse-bouche to whet the appetite, and a tantalizing tango to set the scene to all that follows, this is how fall begins on our little blog. Slipping in during the night, autumn is ephemeral as fragrance. Unseen and untouchable, it can only be sensed by the nose – scent its own powerful purveyor of its presence, maker of memories, and lover of lore.
‘La Cumparsita’ translates as ‘little street procession’ and the song is one of the most recognized tangos in the world. It plays a magical part in the queasy New Year’s Eve scene from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ in which Norma Desmond makes her ill-fated romantic play for a much-younger Joe Gillis, only to be met with his cold dismissal. What happens to all the love that goes unreturned? That’s a question this blog has never been able to truly answer.
Suzie and I were browsing at Muji on our recent weekend in Boston (I needed an essential oil for the bedroom diffuser, and they had a lovely rose scent that worked out well) and this song came on ~ one of those moments when it takes a while to place the music and the memory. At first it was disconcerting to hear, as I couldn’t quite figure it out; the memory at fifty is not the same memory and instant-recall of thirty.
As I paused to listen it slowly came back to me, and the vision of Norma Desmond sweeping about the tiled dance-floor as her little band played in the corner materialized in my head. She wanted only to be loved, and it didn’t matter who ~ a paramour, an audience, a pet monkey ~ she wanted only to be loved.
And so we dance, carried on the wings of a swoony fragrance tinged with oud ~ some echo from the past, some ping from the future ~ and a little hint at our fall theme, coming up in the next post…
Twenty years ago, our poolside was newly planted with a perennial bed (you can see a couple of purple irises in the background of the pic below), its wooden fence also relatively new, and my abs somewhat still intact. It seems a good place to end this summer’s posts, as we have just celebrated the 2005 project release of The Divine Diva Tour: A Fairy’s Tale. It also puts me in a nostalgic frame of mind, so let’s revisit some other summers now behind us…
Our Summer Island 2025 never quite achieved the expectations that I had in my mind, and there was really no way it could, as much as I tried to tamp them down. It was the summer that I turned fifty, the summer that I celebrated twenty-five years with Andy, and the summer that was filled with other various anniversaries and dramas (the most major of which I had little to do with). After twenty years, The Divine Diva Tour: A Fairy’s Tale finally got posted for all the world to ignore, and formed the bulk of our weekend posts.
Originally, I’d thought that the twins and family would be over visiting the pool and treating our home like a summer island oasis, but after the initial Island Party, they didn’t respond or have time to visit, so Andy and I hosted friends and enjoyed the outside by ourselves. They were also dealing with other issues, but that’s a darker story more fitted for fall and further rumination before I decide to tell it.
Happily, there were other summer diversions to be had, and an opportunity for shifting how family occupies my mind and existence, as well as how our good friends become our family over the years. It’s a common occurrence for many LGBT+ people, this way we forge our own family units out of necessity, and it’s both heartbreaking and beautiful how it has to happen. This summer we celebrate the friends who got us through it, the sunny days that went on and on after a slow beginning, and the little island we created, even if it wasn’t how we originally envisioned it.
JUNE 2025: The month it always begins – summer laid out in its entirety before us – all promise and hope and happiness – and all impossible to live up to after a winter of wishing and envisioning.
SEPTEMBER 2025: We never give September the summer glory it’s due. The majority of this month is still summer, but we forget that when school begins and Labor Day ends. This one began in mindful territory.
The Divine Diva Tour: A Fairy’s Tale comes to its inevitable close here, with the full repository of entries that comprise this project from 2005. Two decades is a very long time to stay silent and unseen, and releasing this diva back into the world after her time in the bottle is the sort of dream, and nightmare, known only to genies.
Closing out its online premiere at the very end of this summer of 2025 feels fitting, as themes of fantasy and escapism are vital at this dim moment in history. Looking back is also sometimes a comfort; you already know you’ve gotten through it, so the seeds of any real danger never germinated – and if they did, you handled them.
For now, this time-capsule of divinity frozen is our modern-day archive of 2005. How strange and awful and wonderful that not all that much has changed.
“It isn’t possible to kill part of your “self” unless you kill yourself first. If you ruin your conscious personality, the so-called ego-personality, you deprive the self of its real goal, namely to become real itself. The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you abolish that will of the self to become real, but it may arrest your personal development inasmuch it is not explained. You ought to realise that suicide is murder, since after suicide there remains a corpse exactly as with any ordinary murder. Only it is yourself that has been killed.” ~ Carl Jung
The last page of The Divine Diva Tour Book is a jumble of words and statements that I no longer recognize, that no longer hold much meaning, and that no longer resonate in any way with me. They are the words of a petulant, spoiled twenty-something who didn’t quite feel his place in the world properly. They do not ring true to who I am or where I am today, and for that reason I wasn’t going to include them here. As much as this is a historical look back at a place twenty years ago, much of it remains relevant today – except that last page. But if I’m going to be honest and authentic, if I’m going to acknowledge my foibles and failings, it’s important to put it out there, as it was, without editing or amendment. Clearly I had some issues, and at a time when I didn’t have, or want to access, the necessary tools for dealing with them, it came out in this messy format. A diva is messy – sometimes we are the messiest creatures of them all – and this is part of that ride.
Looking at it now, the passage reeks of insolent, charmless self-pity, laced with narcissism and hypocritical vanity. In many respects, these are very tenets of what makes a proper diva. While the tone was intended to be despondent and unforgiving, today it verges on the hilarious, and reminds me of one of those stand-up sessions where people read earnest quotes from their childhood diaries and the dramatics turn comically ridiculous. I don’t think I intended for this to be quite so funny, but it really is, so I hope you read it with the over-the-top earnestness with which it was written – and crack up at how foolish it is. I wasn’t ready to laugh so heartily at myself back then – today I am, because the truth is I’m closer to court jester and fool than I will ever be to any diva. There’s a little more happiness to being in that space – but just a little.
And so I give you the final act of the Divine Diva – it’s messy and mortifying and more than a little mad, which is sort of the soul of this project. It was also twenty years ago, and I forgive myself for how bad it was. I hope you’ll forgive me too – we all have past transgressions we’d like to remain buried. Exhuming something like this is an act of bravery and stupidity. See for yourself…
The Final Page of The Divine Diva Tour Book: A Fairy’s Tale ~ from July 2005:
I have offered myself as sacrifice. I have subjugated my life for your viewing pleasure. I have lived to entertain you – all of you – and at such a terrible cost. What price have I paid? What toll has it taken? The world will never know. But this was a peek into the glamorous existence of a Diva – perhaps the Greatest Diva of Them All – and a little secret I’d like to share now that we’re almost done. This hasn’t been done solely for you. Ahh, no, my friends. For try as you might to make it about you, it’s always been about me. I can’t help it – it’s the way the world happens to be. I will not apologize if my star shines brighter than yours, or if I’ve been more fortunate than you, or if you don’t think I work as hard as you do. How do you know? How do you fucking know – what I’ve been through, what I’ve done, what I’ve seen, how I’ve lived?
And yet I’ve shown you much, allowed you to live vicariously through these odd scenarios I’ve concocted, these strange flights of delusional grandeur. Give the entertainment its proper due. Applause here as I bow down, Mister. You have me to thank for passing your hours with such charm and wit and humor – I ask for nothing else. It was done for the thrill of it all. For the vanity. For the escape. For the Diva that I am and I’ll be always. And for you – all you wonderful people out there… in the dark… I have done al of this thinking it’s what you wanted from me, what you expected, what you anticipated and desired – and you couldn’t even care less. You say you love me, you tell me I’m handsome, talented, beautiful and lucky – and still you couldn’t care. Now here I am – left alone, left to be looked at – a pool of tears, a messy ruin, a genius in the throes of self-destructive abandon – and you just cannot care. So fuck you, fuck all of you, and fuck me too. Fuck me for caring so Goddamn much, fuck me for trying to be Someone, and fuck me for half-succeeding. You can’t forgive such foolishness, and neither can I. We are too selfish to enjoy someone’s else’s happiness for long. Let this misery be my gift to you. Farewell wicked world.
Back to the present day 2025 moment at hand… That was a lot – and a little extra on top of it. It’s ok to laugh at it. Or roll your eyes. Or turn away in disgust. I think I did all three while re-reading it. It was also a singular moment of metaphorical self-destruction, a suicidal gesture to dramatically illustrate the ways we do, at certain points, have to destroy those parts of us that are problematic, both in an intrinsically personal way, as well as on a universal level. No one exists entirely in a bubble, as much as we may sometimes wish we did. It was an end and an exorcism – for all that narcissism, all that vanity, all those false constructs that held me up when I didn’t really have a genuine belief in myself. It was helpful to me then, it got me through the darkest days, and for that I do not apologize or feel shame. We do what we have to do to survive.
Arriving at this place and space, twenty years later, is a relief and a wonder. Looking back, I can smile and laugh and shake my head at some of the images and antics. I can acknowledge and appreciate some of the nonsense and foolishness. I can also take certain elements of truth and beauty, celebrate them for what they were, and let them go.
“Man is bound to follow the exploits of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, he cannot help admitting that his genius shows an uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide. In view of the rapidly increasing avalanche of world population, we have already begun to seek ways and means of keeping the rising flood at bay. But nature may anticipate all our attempts by turning against man his own creative mind, and, by releasing the H-bomb or some equally catastrophic device, put an effective stop to overpopulation. In spite of our proud domination of nature we are still her victims as much as ever and have not even learnt to control our own nature, which slowly and inevitably courts disaster.” ~ Carl Jung
Today marks the final installments of The Divine Diva Tour: A Fairy’s Tale, my 2005 project that is finally getting its online publication premiere two decades after I first took it around the country. A lot has changed since that time (hello gray hair of the silver fox era) but so many of the themes and ideas explored remain as relevant and resonant today as they did back then. In the end, this fairy’s tale is a cautionary one, cloaked in sparkle, pissed on by pizzazz, and shrouded in the sequin-splintering dazzle of this multi-trick pony.
Suzie has been advising on this string of dazzling footballers on the road to the World Cup. This is Virgil van Dijk, a Dutch footballer who captains Premier League club Liverpool and the Netherlands national team. (Do I have this correct, Suzie?) Virgil earns his first Dazzler of the Day, thanks to his talented work as one of the best defenders in the sport.
Quickly approaching the last days of summer, in some ways the whole season feels like a mirage. Did it really all happen like this? A summer recap is coming up after the final installments of The Divine Diva Tour, and then it will be fall. Sadly, I’m ready for that. Turning a new page, beginning a new chapter, or throwing out the whole goddamn book – anything is better than this status quo!
For now, it’s the final Friday of summer. I intend to head into the office, do my work, take a walk in downtown Albany on lunch, come home for meditation, have some dinner with Andy, work a bit on fall blog posts, and fall promptly, or lately, to sleep. It’s almost time for the gardens to slumber too. And maybe I’ll slip a few spring bulbs into the ground to surprise myself come spring. At the very least, the chipmunks and squirrels will appreciate that. Never let it be said that I’m not a giver – and I’ll give until it hurts.
