September’s marinade centers on fragrances that transcend literal description—the ones so deeply embedded in memory they work whether you can smell them or not. These are meditations on atmosphere over notes, exploring everything from windswept shores harboring corrupt inns to woodland paths where forest spirits might dwell.
I know I said no more free Patreon posts, but I realized I probably need to give people a taste occasionally, to see what they are missing…
You’ll notice this roundup looks different – some reviews are just glimpses, with full versions available on my Midnight Stinks Patreon. I’m experimenting with this format because while this blog draws readers interested in all sorts of weird and strange things, not everyone who follows me here is necessarily obsessed with whether something smells like “the Crypt Keeper’s signature ice cream flavor” or “a vampire with a bizarre sweet tooth stumbled into a Precious Moment gift shop.”
The Patreon is a dedicated space for fragrance obsession – where the actual scent nerds congregate and where I can dive into the more challenging, uncomfortable perfumes that need proper context. It’s become this wonderful community of people who specifically want to geek out about whether a perfume conjures “goth California Raisins” or makes you wonder if “someone fed all their perfect girlfriend material into an AI machine.” The full reviews live there because that’s where my fellow stinkers actually want to explore the full spectrum of olfactory weirdness with me.
Marissa Zappas Carnival of Souls An involuntary grimace quickly smoothed into polite blankness, a gagging masked by a throat-clearing. “Is everything ok?” “Oh, it’s nothing, I’m fine” and proceeds to throw up in mouth just a little, not too obvious. Honeyed floral cream turning sour, saffron like dried grass mixed into warm milk that’s started to separate. Coconut cream sweet and plasticky with oddly-spiced grave dirt patchouli sediment settling at the bottom. An eerie seriousness that doesn’t land and instead evokes a wobbling, wonky naiveté, dewy-eyed and desperate so much as to be repellent. I’ve found everything I have tried from Marissa Zappas too subtle, too fleeting, stories in which the characters and plots are instantly forgettable, leaving you wondering if anything ever happened at all. Carnival of Souls continues this pointless parade of almost-perfumes.
4160 Tuesdays Rhubarb & Custard No tart fruitiness, no bright rhubarb sharpness but rather waxen vanilla cream, powdery musk, the ghost of an Avon moon pomander. Unctuous citrus-like-but-not sweetness filtered through something fatty and cozy and comforting, maybe cheesecake, maybe childhood. Motion sickness of the soul as memory unlocks behind glass. The queasy pleasure of nostalgia in a bottle. I wrote more about this scent for my Patreon folks!
Arcana Wildcraft The Stars Aldehydes, electric, immediate; sharp brightness dilating your pupils involuntarily in a dark room. Charles Burchfield’s Orion in Winter translated into scent: stars throbbing with impossible light, night sky crackling with energy. Meadow grass electric chorus, alive, buzzing, participating in the same frequency as hyperaware consciousness. Three in the morning and your mind is racing, a thousand moth wings, each drawn to multitudinous flames, darkness reaches its deepest saturation point, clocks hold their breath. Not anxiety, not exhilaration, but a secret third thing that my typo revealed to me just now: axhilirating [axhilirating: adj. the specific exhilaration that contains within it the seeds of its own anxiety; excitement at the precise frequency of existential dread.] Fairy lights threaded around the orange tree, infused with the spirit of the fruit; juiced, bulbs and strands and all; gulped in a single breath, time hiccups, everything shifts and blurs, cold light pooling in your lungs like a chandelier of stars, like the crushed peal of a high, clear bell, like swallowing the click of diamond high heels on marble. Something plasticky, glassine and strange—this entire thrumulent, glintiform experience sealed in a clear envelope, preserved for examination later, when you’ve had proper sleep and can make sense of this crackling complicity with life the universe and everthing, when standing in a winter meadow looking up at burning stars felt less like metaphor and more like a language that you, the only person left in the world awake and alive, can speak.
Chanel Paris – Deauville Iced lemon slices in a cut-glass bowl, encased in ice; fresh, crisp herbs soaking in ice water, subtle as a lacy front or two. The memory of a glass of sweet white wine, a honeyed, floral Gewürztraminer wisp; round, rich, luscious, and strangely absent for all its suggestion. Somewhere between charming and refreshing, gentle with a glint in its eye; Not overly polite yet definitely inoffensive, nothing weird you can put your finger on, but there’s a phantom shimmer, a flickering presence, an impossible-to-name thing, which makes it either perfectly frustrating or frustratingly perfect.
Mark BuxtonWood & Absinth The phrase “fresh and clean” makes my skin crawl, probably because I associate it with people who make cleanliness feel like a personality trait, who turn basic hygiene into aspirational lifestyle content, who kind of make you feel like a slob just by existing. Meanwhile, I hate to shower (I do it, but I don’t like a single second of it!) and generally resent having to participate in hygiene theater; the whole thing is exhausting. Wood and Absinth sidesteps this entire obnoxious charade. Saponified anise, woody-soapiness that hits the sweet spot of ease; herbal bitterness like the toothpaste I’d choose because mint grosses me out, because the sight of someone working gum in their mouth makes me want to puke, because what’s wrong with breath that smells like bagels and lox anyway. This is uncomplicated, which I mean as praise—not complex, not trying to conjure memories or transport you somewhere else, just a reliable background scent for everyday wearing when I don’t want to think about it, but I also want something that smells like me. Wood, water, bitter leaves; simple, straightforward ingredients that coalesce in a scent that is ….what would I call this? An unfussy staple, slightly elevated? A functional fragrance, unembellished but not boring? This is a competent perfume that might benefit from a less clunky summation, but I’m not sure if a fragrance that’s merely competent deserves much more work on my part.
DSH Perfumes Prophecy My immediate reaction to Prophecy: “This is an incense for the GIRLIES.” Not austere or monastic or churchy or smoky-sacred; this is more of a “burn this stuff in the background of your IG reels while Hozier sings something brooding about desire and divinity and you arrange rose quartz crystals on your nightstand” vibe. Pastel tarot deck spirituality. De-saturated dragon’s blood. A dreaming without a dreamer, that ethereal mystical atmosphere floating free, no deep spiritual practice required. An outer light reflected or an inner light unveiled, either way it’s been retouched for social media, aesthetic enlightenment run through a vintage Lightroom filter. Creamy, almost fruity, almost floral incense—except not quite incense; aureate suffusion that smells like how luxe body cream feels. Whipped honey vibe; you could take a juicy bite of this tawny chunk of resin. Baby’s first incense, but I can see how it becomes A Whole Vibe, build an entire aesthetic around it. The DSH site notes that it’s a bestseller, which makes perfect sense…it works well enough for what it’s trying to be, but it’s too sweet, too fluffy for me. My prophecies need a bit more doom and gloom.
Reviews for all three scents from Poesie’s Persephone Uncrowned collection can be read by members over on my Midnight Stinks Patreon. Someone on Reddit yelled at me about these reviews!
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Angst Psychic shockwaves of cognitive estrangement – what demented pleasure to recognize beloved scents transformed into their shadow selves. Of the two wolves inside me, this delights the freak who admires a perfumer capable of subverting grapefruit and ginger so thoroughly. Grapefruit distilled to its most accusatory elements; ginger gone a bit septic, medicinal rather than spiced. The feverish chaos of sickness made olfactory, an eerie parade of familiar notes whose expressions now exude subtle paranoia, discomfort, distrust. The landscape of unease settles: coniferous shadows lean too close, fruit-sour brightness concentrated to vinegar and bitter quinine, the delirium and dread of existence seeping through pores like chilled and electric, frantic fever sweat. It dries softer, and tangier and fizzier; a jittery-prickly rose-gold ruby panic shrub.
Orto Parisi Seminalis is another one that can be found as a Midnight Stinks Patreon review. It might be a bit triggering, and just dropping in here if you’re not expecting it feels like a not cool thing to do.
And finally some first impressions of some very kawaii, extremely literal and hyperrealist Asian dessert fragrances from Mochiglow. This, too, can only be found on my Patreon.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Artists construct worlds and invite us to enter – but not all of these realms exist in the same dimension of possibility. Some paint shimmering aquatic empires where sea-born royalty holds court among coral spires, others sketch ethereal meadowlands where fairy folk conduct their moonlit parliaments or crystalline metropolises that scrape the bellies of alien clouds.
These brush-wielding conjurers birth pocket universes hidden within dewdrops and volcanic paradises, where phoenix-flame gardens might bloom eternally. Whether bound for territories unmapped or realms beyond discovery, these visual doorways help us abandon reason and dive into the secret chambers of wonder we’ve locked away inside ourselves.
Martina Hoffman, Universal Mother
Martina Hoffmann charts entirely different territories – the vast inner cosmos where thought transforms into blazing visions and dreams acquire the weight of sinuous reality. Her painted domains throb with otherworldly enigmas that exist beyond telescopes or diving bells, territories where gossamer wing-forms curve through oceanic depths of perception and feminine archetypes emerge from coiling galaxies of living energy.
Here, landscape constructs itself from pure mind – swirling tentacled vortices of cognition, mandala-patterns forged from solidified meditation, and floating forms where undulating wisdom flows through currents of liquid contemplation. Personal awareness expands into cosmic recognition, every painted detail marking waypoints in the infinite terrain of consciousness knowing itself, of perception awakening to its own vastness.
In her painting The Garden, we step through the looking glass into what Hoffmann calls our “secret garden, where your soul unfolds its wings unhindered and freely.” Here, beneath a pale, radiant orb, twisted trees stretch skyward with the fluid grace of dreams gaining substance, their branches curve into the glowing moonlight as if drawing sustenance from pure illumination, while dense foliage creates canopies of emerald contemplation that pulse with ancient rhythms. Even the shadows here are glossy and glowing, transformed by some alchemical process that turns darkness into another form of light.
A pathway of warm, golden radiance winds through this verdant mindscape, inviting exploration deeper into territories where the familiar laws of botany yield to the stranger logic of inner sight. The blues and greens that saturate this realm become the visible frequencies of tranquility and growth, painted reveries where every leaf carries the weight of revelation and every shadow holds the promise of hidden wisdom waiting to unfold. This becomes the inner sanctuary where, as Hoffmann suggests, we can “safely connect with your inner self and consciousness to ‘in-vision’ your life’s path anew daily.”
Martina Hoffman, CONTACT II
The same sinuous energies that curve through these moonlit trees flow throughout Hoffmann’s painted territories, manifesting as the biodiversity of consciousness itself – coiling tentacles that undulate through cosmic depths, ethereal appendages that bend like thoughts given substance, and snake-like forms adorned with phosphorescent patterns. Her explorations deliberately echo the planet’s biological richness, bringing forth what she calls “new varieties” of beings that may exist in undiscovered oceanic depths, or perhaps represent “projections of future species” emerging from our collective unconscious.
Martina Hoffman, Creatrix
Her Universal Woman archetype emerges repeatedly from these swirling forms – sometimes crowned with mandala-like radiances, other times merging directly with the undulating wisdom that seems to carry DNA-level knowledge through her painted domains. The oceanic blues and cellular greens that define The Garden resurface across her work, creating underwater atmospheres where otherworldly enigmas pulse with the rhythm of expanded awareness.
Martina Hoffman, Vessels of Stone
Hoffmann approaches these painted explorations with explicit therapeutic intent. “Paintings may function as mirrors reflecting the individual viewer’s consciousness,” she explains, positioning her work as both personal archaeology and collective healing tool. Her stated mission extends beyond individual transformation to planetary awakening, an attempt “to portray spirit as the one universal force beyond the confines of cultural and religious differences.” Growing up between cultures in Cameroon instilled her early understanding that “there’s only one spirit and one humanness,” a conviction that infuses her artistic practice with social purpose alongside spiritual seeking.
Martina Hoffman, Dynamic Life Form
Through her brush, Hoffmann offers us passage into territories that sprawl both within and beyond our familiar borders – painted proof that the most exotic domains we might explore are the infinite landscapes of our own awakening perception. Her philosophical uncertainty enriches these explorations: whether her creatures “truly exist, are yet to manifest in nature, are pure projections of future species, or are part of our collective unconscious” remains an open question she cherishes exploring through art.
Martina Hoffman, Traumtier
In this creative freedom, every spiral and serpent carries us deeper into the mystery of what it means to be conscious in a universe where imagination and reality cross-pollinate each other like wandering comets seeding gardens across stellar nurseries, where undiscovered species might emerge from the depths of both ocean and psyche, and where what is and what might be live and breathe and exist fantastically in symbiotic communion.
Martina Hoffman, Meduse
Martina Hoffman, Dragon Rider
Martina Hoffman, Bioluminescence
Martina Hoffman, Aligning to the realm
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I got yelled at on Reddit* today, so this explosion of runway ridiculousness was exactly what I needed.
Kevin Germanier turns haute couture into a glittering trash compactor’s fantasy ball where carnival debris, parade detritus, and party store castoffs become evening wear and rejected plastic bottles metamorphose into sculptural flames shooting from shoulders. This Swiss designer has appointed himself the fashion industry’s most glamorous garbage collector, transforming literal waste into a rainbow-bedazzled ball-pit apocalypse worn by models who look like they’re preparing for Crayola Eurovision end times.
The runway showcased gowns of toilet paper origami meets ice sculpture architecture, Big Bird pom-pom warehouse rave explosions, and lite-brite ninja fantasy attack catsuits (which sounds like a Sailor Moon move – “In the name of sustainable fashion, I’ll punish you!”) Watching a model stride down the runway encased in a phallic riot of colored balloons while Hello Kitty mascots shimmy in the front row feels like witnessing a children’s birthday party but make it DRUGS.
His “Les Joueuses” collection closed Paris Couture Week with the kind of unhinged optimism that comes from one who has perfected the alchemy of turning trash panic into glittering catharsis and sequined salvation.
*Anyway, sorry, Reddit lady, that my experience with and opinion about a totally subjective thing was not expressed to your liking and that I triggered you (despite my multiple content warnings!) Go look at Hello Kitty dressed up in your grandma’s old fiber optic lamp from the ’80s and calm down! Also, someone else patronizingly told me what I write amounts to “perfume fanfic.” Which…okay, that’s fair.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
This is typically the sort of thing I might write about in my end-of-the-month newsletter (which is a different thing than my blog! Here’s an example of what I sent out in June) but we’re going to be traveling at the end of this month, so this will be the first time in three years that I am skipping a monthly newsletter. The dictator in my brain who holds stubbornly fast to arbitrary rules and deadlines that nobody but me cares about is trying hard to make me feel crappy about it, but I am attempting to resist.
Also…where should we go in Seattle? Coffee shops, tiki bars, nature walks/gardens, museums, please tell me where to find the best of these things! I have been there once before, but that was back in 2017 for a friend’s wedding, and we didn’t have time to do very much.
Anyway! Being off social media since early June has resulted in two noticeable things for me. A massive sense of peaceful unbotheredness, which probably merits getting into more, but all I will say is this: there’s a lot to be concerned and upset about in the world, but at least my time hasn’t been wasted by irritating people on Instagram. I get irritated/annoyed/peeved/infuriated for a lot of reasons, and a lot of them, I realize, are my own damn problems and issues and insecurities…but it has been SO NICE not to have all of these people in my face every day.
And the second nice thing about these people not being in my face every day is that they are not influencing me to buy whatever it is they are selling/shilling/whatever. I have saved so much money in the past two months. I bought a new pair of walking shoes for our upcoming travel (ok, on recommendations from Reddit, but I don’t consider Reddit social media). And one dinky thing from Amazon, and that’s it. I am that much closer to retiring in approximately 100 years!
Speaking of Amazon, the first inexpensive thing I have purchased lately and have a vast, weird fondness for is the little record display stand featured in the photo for this blog. It just makes me so happy. I cannot explain it. The second thing is this Ravi Shankar album that Ývan found for me in a local vintage shop for maybe $5.
But it’s not just the record, it was the whole day. Fans and Stoves is a really cool antique mall in an old Presbyterian church, and the afternoon we spent there was booming with gloomy, thunderous weather and downpours, and afterward we met up with friends for boardgames at a nearby brewery and had such a lovely time chatting and laughing that 3-4 hours had passed and we hadn’t even played a single game!
The Ravi Shankar album was a neat gift, but it was wrapped in the package of a wonderfully memorable day, and I think of it every time I listen.
Pickled onions, how do I love thee? To the depth and breadth and height of your glorious pink stink! This is a batch that I have steeped in strawberry vinegar (when you’re chopping up strawberries, save the tops, cover them with white vinegar overnight and strain into a jar, et voilà! Strawberry vinegar!) I have them in my lunctime salad every day and I can assure you, I smell delightful afterward.
Also on our daily salad are these sourdough discard crackers. It makes me SO MAD to throw away the excess starter after you feed it, so I either save it in the fridge for a rainy day (where a big gluggy vat of it sits forever mouldering) or I try to do something with it immediately.
For these, I spread the discard very thinly onto a silicone baking mat and sprinkle the top with lots of pumpkin seeds, slivered almonds, and hemp seeds. Bake at about 250° for 15-25 minutes, or until they are brown and shattery, break them up into satisfying shards, and store in an airtight container.
Ah, my dear library holds. Invariably, the anticipation of the thing is much more exciting than having the thing in hand. And inevitably, there are titles on this list that I won’t even get a chance to read in the two weeks that I am allotted to finish them. That’s okay. It’s a thrill just to see them all lined up, all the possibilities and stories that might unfold, like a buffet of potential worlds I may or may not have time to visit. There’s a tantalizing romance in the overly ambitious library haul (which, funny enough, is aggressively and intentionally devoid of romance), the eternal optimism that this time, somehow, I’ll read faster than humanly possible and finish fourteen books in as many days. Please note that I started 157th in line for the Stephen King book. Yikes.
There’s something to be said for the quiet pleasures that emerge when you’re not constantly being told what to want or buy. What small, unexpected things have been making you happy lately when you’re not being sold to or influenced by algorithms? And while we’re chatting, drop your Seattle gems in the comments. I’m collecting recommendations like I collect unread books, hehehe.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
When I write about the artists whose work appears in my books, the focus is usually on showcasing the visual creations themselves. But with Forest Rogers, I find myself equally enchanted by her language. Her words cast spells – quite literally, if we consider Alan Moore’s insight that to spell is to manipulate words, to change consciousness. When Forest writes about “wrestling with devilkins” in her house “like a proper Baba Yaga hut,” or describes a pigeon dancing “a pure call to cast one’s very soul upon the waters,” her prose channels the same otherworldly quality as her sculptures.
Which presents me with a delightful challenge: how do I write about an artist who already expresses herself so beautifully? Forest’s mystical voice feels like incantations emerging from the same mythological realm as her creatures. But we’re going to try anyway, because her sculpture, The Beautiful Crustacean, graces the pages of The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That Is Unreal, and her work deserves deeper exploration.
Forest Rogers, La Belle Crustace
One gets the sense that Forest Rogers is an artist who has experienced first-hand both the joy and despair of mermaids singing, has felt the euphoric, incandescent flutter of angel wings, held the literal hand of the dark night of the soul, and maybe even danced a tango with a prehistoric skeleton or a luminous beam of starlight. How else would this artist instinctively know how to sculpt the ineffable, the transcendent, the staggeringly unbelievable into such a graceful and dynamic reality?
These creatures, marvels of myth and imagination, monstrously beautiful and tinged with melancholy, seem poised at the verge, a frozen moment of fragile movement – as if they may at any moment take flight and disappear with their secrets into the mist, or skitter close and whisper mysterious revelations. Approach them with care, take only what is offered to you, and let the world go on, knowing that you have experienced a bit of the magic that made them.
Forest’s path to these mythological beings wasn’t direct. For 25 years, she created dinosaur sculptures for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, alongside an eclectic array of commercial projects, but her artistic vision was seeded much earlier. As a child, she spent hours sitting on her grandmother’s floor studying volumes illustrated by Rackham, Nielsen, and Dulac – “I think I’m now digging through the universe for my ideas, just as I was looking for treasure in this house,” she reflects on her blog.
Growing up as the daughter of visionary artist Lou Rogers, Forest learned that art could be both wound and healing, a lesson that infuses her current work. Her creative process now begins with morning observations at a coffee shop, watching pigeons dance while she sketches on tracing paper, contemplating the same subjects repeatedly until they reveal their essential nature. From these loose drawings, she builds each sculpture methodically – first the head to establish identity, then an armature wire framework, gradually filling out the creature until it achieves that ineffable moment of transformation.
Forest Rogers, Night Bloom
This gift for capturing transformation reveals itself across her mythological menagerie. Night Bloom captures a creature suspended between violence and grace, its delicate bat ears framing a face of porcelain serenity even as it holds a moth caught mid-flight at its lips – a dainty dinner frozen in breathless moments before consumption.
The being’s coloring whispers of twilight’s most tender palette: cream and pale salmon, the palest of lilacs, like a sunset with the saturation washed out in the inside of a seashell. Yet for all its predatory purpose, the creature has taken root, its lower body flowing into a plant-like stem that suggests it belongs as much to the garden as to the night sky. Here is hunger made beautiful, the hunt transformed into ballet, a reminder that even the most essential acts of survival can be rendered with exquisite tenderness.
Forest Rogers, Winter Siren
In Winter Siren, Forest presents us with a figure draped in the deepest winter’s palette – plum and midnight blue feathers that seem simultaneously cloak and natural plumage, rimed with a scrim of frost that catches light like captured starshine.
Her pale face gazes cool and quiet with devotion as she holds aloft a golden Venetian mask fashioned as a sunburst. “She holds a mask suggesting the Sun, ever eagerly awaited in the longest winter nights,” Forest explains, and in her gesture we witness the entire drama of seasonal faith – winter personified as keeper of summer’s promise, the siren who sings not of shipwreck but of spring’s eventual return.
Forest Rogers, Octopoid Descending
Octopoid Descending embodies the elemental pull toward oceanic depths, her tentacles streaming upward as if caught in an invisible current. Rendered in cream and the softest coral shadows, she possesses an expression both serene and formidable – a being wholly of the sea drawn toward her natural element.
Her descent carries the weight of ancient purpose, guiding her toward realms where pressure and darkness hold their own terrible beauty. Her tentacles flow with liquid grace, yet carry the weight of inevitability, as if she bears messages meant only for the deepest trenches.
Forest Rogers, Goblin Spider
In Goblin Spider, Forest weaves together folktale and ukiyo-e tradition with her own dark humor – the spider perched as elaborate headdress while a mouse dangles from lips that once might have held silk fabric in classical prints. Where courtesans once conveyed coded desire through delicate tissue, the creature offers rodent prey with the same demure poise. T
The wordplay tickles the mischievous itch in my brain that delights in such things: from moth in mouth to mouse in mouth, Forest creates her own language of captured sustenance. The symmetry speaks to that eternal tension she loves – grace balanced against horror, beauty shadowed by predation, the spider maiden who watches with eyes both human and arachnid, equally capable of seduction and consumption.
Forest Rogers, Night Sphinx
Night Sphinx embodies the wistful contemplation of desert nights, her gaze turned skyward toward constellations only she can read. Rendered in blues softened by darkness and touched with subtle gold as if moonlight were burnishing her feathers, she perches upon her pedestal with the patient grace of one who has spent centuries watching the wheel of stars. Her expression carries that particular melancholy of nocturnal guardians – beings who know the secrets whispered between dusk and dawn.
A delicate winding stairway spirals around the base of her pedestal, leading to an entrance far too small for sphinx paws but perfectly sized for the tiny magician who dwells below. She stands sentinel not just over the desert night, but over an entire miniature realm where creatures of different scales share the same moonlit world.
Forest Rogers, Flemish Moth
Flemish Moth emerges from transformative slumber, her face blank with the serene stasis of a creature suspended between becoming and being. “Hatched from the Northern Renaissance,” she bears wings that crown her head like an elaborate headdress complete with spiral antennae, while additional wings spread where human arms might rest.
Rendered in the softest pinks, yellows, creams and blues, she suggests something that might have fluttered from the detailed margins of an illuminated manuscript, her pale luminosity recalling the lustrous surfaces masters once achieved with patient oil glazes. A bright orange moth rests at her center, vivid against her dreamy palette, as if marking the spot where metamorphosis concentrates its most vital energies. Her form extends downward in a long moth-tail that ends in a delicate tuft, structured like the lepidoptera she channels, poised in that eternal moment between chrysalis and flight.
I gaze at this sculpture and want to sniff it too. What would a Flemish Moth perfume smell like? What is the fragrance of transformative slumber? Maybe dusty parchment, the powdery residue of ancient wings, pressed flowers between gilded vellum pages, the metallic sweetness of metamorphic silk.
“When I am creative, I realize: ‘This is Love,'” Forest has written, and this devotion permeates every carefully sculpted detail. Her creatures emerge from that same loving attention – beings caught in tender moments of transformation, rendered with the kind of patience that only deep affection allows. Each figure seems to hold knowledge born from their suspended state, as if their eternal pause between becoming has given them time to gather wisdom from both sides of transformation. What whispered revelations might they offer?
Perhaps the Winter Siren knows how to hold hope through the darkest months, while the Night Sphinx has memorized the true names of every star. The Goblin Spider might teach us about the duality that exists within us all, and the Flemish Moth could reveal how to sleep through our own metamorphosis without losing ourselves entirely. The Night Bloom understands the delicate balance between survival and grace, while the Octopoid Descending carries knowledge of what treasures wait in the deepest places we fear to explore. Forest’s work echoes ancient wisdom about transformation, a recognition that becoming requires both death and birth, that the spaces between are where magic gathers and essential truths dwell. Her creatures remind us that we, too, might be poised at the verge between what we were and what we might become.
Below waits an assembly of further enchantments, each a testament to Forest’s gift for seeing what mysteries live at the threshold, for coaxing them forth and offering them form.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I designed a Magic: The Gathering card for a perfume today—Witchly Mixologist, complete with mana cost and flavor text and everything! The full story of how Winter Nights by Dasein became my olfactory black/green deck, is waiting in the Midnight Archives feature for Midnight Stinks Patreon subscribers today.
Harbingers of doom, vessels of secrets, survivors of catastrophe—rats have worn many historical hats (often that of “carrier”) but now they’re the ones being toted. Copenhagen Fashion Week has given us a metallic disco rat clutch that feels like ancient plague vermin reincarnated as glittering dance floor devotees.
Models prowled runways and lurked in photos with shiny vermin tucked under their arms like tiny, glamorous familiars, creatures whispering of witness to humanity’s cycles of excess and collapse, and which now spread fashion contagion instead of bubonic plague.
These are rats who’d fit right into a Studio 54 revival, complete with glass eyes that have seen civilizations crumble and probably know where to find the best after-party powders and pharmaceuticals. Anne Sofie Madsen and Esben Weile Kjær have created familiars for the disco apocalypse—rodent companions carrying FASHUN FEVER instead of actual fever.
To whoever is going to comment on this, I know, I know, someone else did it first. Probably even someone before that! You’re very smart. You know all the things. I probably should have consulted you before I wrote this. As a matter of fact, you probably should have written this! Wait…where are you going?
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Again, this is something I might typically share on my Instagram stories but we’re not doing that right now. We harvested a very sad dozen of carrots that looked like diminutive, diseased dingdongs, and I said “no thank you and good day, sir” to that!
But these warty little weenuses had a profusion of bushy greens, so I thought it would be a shame to toss the whole vegetable. Thus: carrot top pesto, pictured here with freshly made gnocchi. The recipe bloggers always say that baked potates make better gnocchi than mashed (lower moisture content) so that’s what I did this time, but I am not sure I could really tell the difference. I didn’t use a recipe for either of these things, but there are plenty of recipes for both all over the internet and YouTube if you had a similarly freakish carrot harvest.
In other news, I had a blood appointment last week, and the results are in. I am winning at cholesterol! I am apparently within normal range now. I am losing at iron. Probably because of these reasons.
In other-other news (I guess this is turning into a little update list?) I completed my Goodreads reading challenge on August 7th. I finished my 100th book of the year when I read the last page of Catherine Dang’s What Hunger. Anytime I announce my progress (which is loudly and all the time), Yvan always deadpans, “Does this mean you are done reading for the year?” HAHAHAHA WHAT. Everyone’s a comedian. By the way, if you liked Monica Kim’s The Eyes Are The Best Part, I think you might like What Hunger even better.
And in the last bit of news…I submitted the final four chapters in my upcoming book! I cannot wait until I can seriously start talking about this thing. I have had so much fun writing it and have so much to share. Any guesses as to the title or what it’s about? If you get it right, I will send you a signed copy, on the house!
P.S. I had to look up how to spell “wiener,” and I did a Google search for cocktail wiener, and the search results gave me “cocktail wieners near you!” and for some reason, I cannot stop laughing at that.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Predicting the future from reading coffee grounds, engraved by Charles William Sharpe
As a human of a certain chromosomal combination and a certain advancing age, my body is doing weird things, which often means doing more or less of what it should.
Take my period, for instance. Ever since my first onset of menses at the tender age of ten (and what a shock that was, nobody prepared me for the fact that it could last three entire months) my menstrual cycle has been what you might charitably call “unpredictable.” Less charitably, you might call it “completely unhinged.” After those initial ninety days of wondering if I was dying, my exceedingly awful male doctor put me on birth control pills to regulate things. Thirty-nine years later, I’m still on the pill, my uterus still chaotic.
For most of those decades, the pharmaceutical intervention worked well enough. Monthly cycles that arrived more or less on cue, lasted a reasonable amount of time, and then politely departed until the next month. But bodies can turn on you in an instant! For the past six to eight months, my period has decided to freelance. Spotting when it’s not supposed to, showing up fashionably late or scandalously early, generally behaving like that friend who says they’ll be there at seven and rolls up at nine-thirty without explanation.
The practical solution was simple enough: light pantyliners, all the time, just in case. Because there’s nothing quite like discovering your body has decided to redecorate your underwear AND your sweatpants while you’re standing in the ten-items-or-less line at the grocery store. So now I’m constantly prepared, like a very well-padded Boy Scout.
Between the practical preparation and the daily inspection of said pantyliners, I started noticing patterns. Not timing patterns – my uterus has clearly said “you may fuck off entirely” to all that – but actual visual patterns. The shapes that small drips and drops and globbets of blood make on thin cotton padding. At first, it was idle observation, the kind of thing your brain does when it’s bored. Like finding faces in clouds or animals in doctor’s office wallpaper – that human compulsion to find patterns and meaning in random shapes. Pareidolia. But then I started paying attention, really paying attention, and realized this felt different from seeing an Abraham Lincoln-rabbit hybrid in a cumulus cloud. (I don’t know how it feels different, exactly? But it does?)
Today, unmistakably, the small spot of blood had formed the shape of a sword. Not a vague, “if you squint real hard and look from the corner of your eye” sort of resemblance, but a clear, defined blade with what looked like a simple hilt. Sharp. Purposeful. Impossible to ignore. I wanted to snap a photo and include it with this post, but better-Sarah, classier-Sarah thought “um yeah maybe not.”
So! Welcome to my accidental practice of what I’ve decided to call playtexomancy: divination through menstrual blood patterns as captured on pantyliners. It’s probably not what the ancient oracles had in mind, but they didn’t have to deal with irregular periods and modern feminine hygiene products.
The sword, though! Did you see what I included in the “What’s In My Bag” post from the other day? If not, take a look! That felt significant in a way I couldn’t dismiss as pure pattern-seeking. Swords cut through. They defend. They represent clarity, decision, the ability to sever what no longer serves. And here’s my bod, in the midst of god only knows what all hormonal confusion, apparently offering me a symbol of cutting through uncertainty.
Is this ridiculous? Probably. Am I reading meaning into random biological processes? Almost certainly. But I think it’s oddly comforting and fun to find messages in the chaos; it’s a way of discovering my own patterns when my body has abandoned the expected ones, of paying attention to what it’s doing in a curious way instead of just being frustrated with it. Maybe it even connects me to something larger and more mystical during a time when my body feels completely unreliable, even if – especially if – those messages are materializing on mass-produced sanitary supplies.
Humans have been seeking signs in blood for millennia. I’m just upgrading the ancient practice with leak-proof technology and wings for extra protection!
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