I didn’t even know this sweet photo existed until recently, and now it is my favorite thing ever. This is from our teensy tiny wedding four years (but many hair colors!) ago.
Gosh. These two. It took these two weirdos quite a while to find each other, but I am so glad that they finally did.
I realize I’ve been posting little tidbits here on the blog lately, not many long-form pieces. Hopefully, I will get back to that soon! I’ve been a bit overwhelmed and am trying to keep it together, and while sometimes it helps to lose myself in an afternoon of writing, sometimes it is quite literally the very last thing I want to do!
Anyway, I am back from my work-related travels, and obviously, I survived, so now I can breathe again. And no doubt, the ideas, the thinking, the brainstorming, and then the writing about all of those thoughts will follow!
We covered a lot of ground: my strange, sideways relationship with goth subculture, the heavy metal origins of my particular flavor of darkness, how symbolist and decadent art first found me through my mother’s tarot collection and album covers, the building of the Art in the Margins series, and some fumbling attempts to articulate what the occult in art means to me. There’s also some talk of what’s coming in 2026. I hope you’ll give it a read.
Art in the featured image includes Alphonse Mucha, Odilon Redon, Chet Zar, Unica Zurn, Joseba Eskubi .
The hand knows before the brain does. That’s the only explanation I have for this month’s marinade, which I didn’t consciously plan as an amber collection but absolutely is one — five fragrances that live outside of ordinary time, in the deep ceremonial dark where smoke rises and resin weeps and ancient rites are preserved in gold.
Sacred rituals, gothic romance, warrior queens, a heart on a scale and eternity in the balance, candlelit castles with terrible secrets, sweet and savage and smoldering all at once. The subconscious went looking for something and found it five times over.
I don’t always post on the Unquiet Things blog here to share when I send out my monthly Trinkets & Treasures newsletter… but sometimes I do, if only as a reminder to folks that it exists!
My newsletter is different than the email notifications you get in your inbox whenever I post on the blog, and is hosted separately. Because it is separate! It’s where I share a monthly roundup of favorite things and new discoveries, and usually feature a new-to-me artist. This month’s artist is me!
I’m posting this month’s collection of fragrance reviews a little earlier than I usually do! I am headed out west for a work-related trip and won’t be back until after March 1, so I’d rather do it sooner than later. Here’s everything I sniffed and pondered upon in February, including an elusive search for a new vanilla to love…
LBTY Hera Reigns(Wherein I reimagine Hera with mean-girl main character energy at the center of a domestic thriller…) Book club is three women deep into dissecting this month’s pick: a salacious true-crime account of a podcaster’s obsession, reconstructed movements, tracked patterns, and a hunt for gruesome details. Someone’s pouring more wine. Someone else pivots to the local murder. A woman from the neighborhood (not one of us, that tacky slut with her tits always hanging out at Whole Foods, at pilates, at parent-teacher day) was found dead in the park two weeks ago. Last seen somewhere on Riverside. Then Karen mentions (almost casually, refilling her own glass for like the 3rd time, Jesus Karen) that she saw your husband’s car at the Riverside Hotel on Tuesday. The one on the highway. She wasn’t even sure it was his at first, but that dumb vanity license plate. The rosé in your own mouth pools unswallowed, sours imperceptibly. You were in the middle of mentally cataloging the rosy peonies you need, the blush ranunculus, the garden roses with that specific peachy undertone for the gala centerpieces. Your phone’s open to the florist’s website. But Karen’s words pique and prickle, a tickle, a tingle. The imaginary floral spreadsheet fades, and other, uglier thoughts rush in, unbidden, unwelcome, unspoken. Tuesday. You were at yoga. He said he was at work. That piquancy, that bright, sharply-not-sparkly effervescent quality, suddenly feels less like exuberance and more like electricity. The itchy-eerie kind that precedes the air when a storm threatens. The room keeps talking. You keep smiling. But something underneath has shifted, darkened, as if the darkness is only just now becoming aware of itself.
Haute Macabre x BPAL Light As A Feather Stiff As A Board: a lullaby sung backwards, an incantatory influorescence. Ephemeral floral and shadowed herbal, somehow both purified and unblessed, a conjuration of the unseelie court and a glory of seraphim. Cool, slightly medicinal, pale translucent blooms drifting like shawls woven of mist and moonlight, a frenzy of elf maidens at the feast, trapped in stained glass. The incense of suspended places, a liminal hush of resins, dusty echo of wood. Tarnished silver, clouded glass, filtered light, words illuminated in the margins, scattered like moths, humming and glowing.
Diptique Eau Duelle rustles like a susurrus of sighs stirring through the reeds from that exact territory Algernon Blackwood describes in his short story/novella, “The Willows.” Dry vanilla, grassy and herbaceous, maybe even rhizomatic, swaying, shifting, and restless. A humming of place, a hollow wind. Silvered marsh lights, bizarre fancies. Soft moonlight on myriad murmuring leaves. Vanilla as the uncanny antagonist of the nature trail, the weird tale the willows tell.
Pigmentarium Murmuris a perfume of Lynchian vacuum and void, the kind where silence and absence are loaded with meaning, even if you have no freaking way to articulate what that meaning is. In 1993, my sister and I cut school one day, unplanned, out of the blue. We drove around the tiny downtown of Daytona Beach (we lived locally) and browsed used bookstores and record shops. Eventually, we got brave enough to peek into Wig Villa, a shop we’d always been curious about. Disembodied plastic heads lined the walls. The silence was absolute and inexplicably dreadful. Not a soul in the store. Just us and the heads and that weird, empty air. We later arrived home to find several packages on the porch. Our mother had ordered oversized plaster statues of Jesus and Mary from Fingerhut. This day and these moments live in my memory as surreal, dreamlike, slightly nightmarish… but somehow…not bad? Just deeply, impossibly weird. Pigmentarium Murmur smells like my memories of these moments, a little freaky, a little odd, but strangely very dear to my heart. A hollow plastic note (imagine “vanilla doll head” minus the vanilla), a rose that’s pale and powdery, almost like makeup dust on porcelain, muted and earnest and lurking but endearing rather than sinister, and a sandalwood that’s soft and creaky like old wood, dreamy and worn. All existing together, but also separately, dreamlit portraits at suspended intervals, vacant vignettes, in that teeming emptiness.
A variety of vanillas I have been testing throughout the month to find the ultimate vanilla…
Fugazzi Vanilla Haze: A plastic doll head full of ozone, like a Barbie farted canned air, disorienting, unpleasant, and deeply hollow.
Indult Tihota: A throwback to the mid-to-late 2000s MUA fragrance board obsession, and since I don’t remember it from the tiny sample I had at that time, I am trying it again. A weak cocktail of whipped cream vodka topped with a scant scattering of expired confectioners’ sugar and garnished with a few strands of scorched, frizzled hair. I feel the need to time-travel and interrogate all the Tihota fangirls because I do not get it.
Tauer Vanilla Absolue: Why is there rose in this one??? I mostly loathe rose, and for a scent literally called Vanilla Absolue, finding a prominent rose facet feels like a profound betrayal!
Arte Profumi Sucre Noir This is a sweetened condensed milk/wispy cotton candy/crispy-turned-soggy cereal marshmallow/Pink Sugar-esque little thing, and I would like it to be way more noir-er.
Parfum d’Empire Madagasgar le Baume Vanille …now this is interesting. A bit musty, a bit woolly, a bit vegetal. A sort of syrupy herbal liqueur-novelty-lozenge. Linty, fuzzy, stuck in a moth-eaten pocket. A powdered snow-vanilla bean phantom at the back end. Weird and unexpected, but this is not the vanilla I am looking for, either.
Shaman Bourbon Vanilla is a bit cool and medicinal; balsam and anise are listed in the notes, so it makes sense it would come across this way to me. The longer it wears, the more I am reminded of Myrrhe Ardente from Annick Goutal, so I will just give you the review I wrote for that one: At first, it is decidedly medicinal… like an antique herbal expectorant one might procure at the local apothecary run by an unlicensed homeopathic pharmacist. It might cure you, it might kill you. It soon becomes whispery smoke and mysterious veils and soft, powdery incense made from mystical dream-tree resins. I am pretty sure Myrrhe Ardente is discontinued, but if you ever wanted to try it, Shaman Bourbon Vanilla is basically the same thing!
Arquiste Architects Club is a sophisticated vanilla chypre with salt-spray Atlantic air crispness at the back end, which makes me think of an upper-crust aristocratic party on board a yacht in international waters, posh people drinking gin and tonics. Maybe a woman in cabin 10 fell overboard. Maybe there’s a mystery. Maybe not; maybe it ends as a very intimate vanilla-skin scent.
Il Profumo Vanilla Bourbon is vanilla extract dribbled straight out of the bottle. Not store brand, more like the good stuff from Penzey’s, with a filigreed sweetened floral honey threading through it like gilding on fancy notecards. Not super basic…but also not far off from basic.
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?
Let’s say you and your person have a weekend ritual of spending the mornings slow and soft and easy, sipping coffee, and reading books and listening to records.
(Sometimes, that is. Other weekend mornings, you might be out in the full sun at 10 am, 85 degrees on A FEBRUARY DAY, spending three hours raking up the oak leaves that muck up your yard.) (And yeah! I know raking leaves is not great for all the little bugs and things that like that sort of ecosystem, and I wish I could leave the yard alone to do its thing! But oak leaves are leathery and full of tannins and decompose very slowly and smother the grass, and the HOA here will literally have you thrown in the dungeon if your grass gets all nasty!)
Anyway, we we were listening to records. It’s the early hours, so you don’t want anything too jaunty or jangly, anxious, or aggressive. I love me some Colin Meloy, for example, but I don’t want to hear his nasally voice singing about ghostly Victorian children and maritime vengeance at 9 am on a Sunday. And as much as I adore Florence Welch, I can’t stomach her caterwauling (gorgeous though it may be) that early in the day.
I am having one of those low, gross occasions when I know there is something looming on the horizon that I desperately do not want to do, and so I’ve lost all motivation to do anything productive or useful, or anything good for me in any way in the meantime. And those are actually the things that will bolster me and give me the strength and mental capacity to tackle this thing!
But…that’s not the way my brain works. This is basically an extended version of the “I have an appointment/phone call/whatever at 2pm, so I am paralyzed until it’s over with” scenario, ugh. Except my thing is happening later next week, and it’s a work thing, a conference that I have to travel for, where I will have to mingle and be professional and shit. NO THANKS WE HATES IT.
(Yes, yes, in recent months I know I mentioned I was worried about losing my job, and now I am complaining that ~gasp!~ I have to do my job? Be happy you still have a job, right? Listen, I can both like a paycheck and resent every moment I spend earning that paycheck!)
(This is also why I could never quit my day job to focus solely on writing. Firstly, I just don’t “trust the universe to provide” like that, and secondly, I just like money too much, okay?!)
Anyway, when I get to feeling panicky and overwhelmed like this, I just have to remember that it helps to do one thing. Just one thing. It doesn’t even matter what that one thing is. Just something to focus on for a second; make room in my brain for just one freaking thing, and sit with it until I finish it. Usually, this clears the way for me to do the next thing. And then something else. And in the middle of it all, I start to feel a modicum of normalcy again.
So I took a photo of my new planner! (I never said it had to be a super important thing!) And now I am working on the second pass of edits for my forthcoming book. Sort of wild how it’s listed on Amazon and it’s not even properly finished yet, ha! After that, I plan to write the monthly cards for my Patreon supporters. And no doubt between all of that, I will need to take Lucy for a walk, or several, as she’s an old gal with a tiny bladder. And yes, I am doing this all between tasks for my day job, hehehe.
My brother-in-law (Yvan’s eldest brother) is in the hospital right now; he just had a massive tumor removed from behind his ear. He came out of the surgery okay, and I think they removed most of the mass, but think good thoughts for him, please! No doubt this, too, worrying and fretting about poor Tony’s noggin, is also sending me into a tizzy.
Anyhow, what a useless braindump of a blog post this was, right? But! Typing out a rambling little blog post gave me something to focus on for a few minutes, so maybe not! I guess it is on to the next thing…!
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?
The new Wuthering Heights adaptation seems to be generating a frenzied onslaught of overblown responses. Early reviewers are calling it “lust worthy,” a “god-tier new classic,” a “beautiful mess of passion, destruction, lust, revenge, and unhinged behaviour,” praise that swells toward “explosive toxic desire.” The words weirdly float free of the thing itself; the reviewers can’t say what happens, so they’re throwing adjectives into the void, doing the best they can within the constraints of all they can’t yet say.
As I’m digesting this, thinking through this hyped-yet-hollow praise that lacks the substance to anchor it, I find myself returning to an image I featured in The Art of Darkness: Laurie Lee Brom‘s Cathy’s Ghost. Brom’s vision carries a somber intensity entirely free of sensationalism. When you stand before Cathy’s Ghost, you encounter a woman behind the diamond-patterned pane of an impregnable old window, her eerie luminosity against the gloom. Frost or mist obscures her form, yet she remains visible, more visible perhaps for the obstruction. Her gaze is piercing, direct, and the weight of that presence settles into you. Trapped behind glass. Held at the threshold between worlds.
Laurie Lee Brom, In the Flames
Laurie Lee Brom, The Gaze
Whether Laurie Lee Brom is painting a literary ghost or a woman in a 1960s kitchen, a figure contemplating a crystal ball, or a woman smoking behind rain-streaked glass, you don’t know what any of them are thinking. And yes, I’m aware of how that sounds. The unknowable woman. The eternal feminine mystery. Etc, etc. But really, who knows anyone, anyway? Here we’re looking at women who exist in their own right. Solid and real, not a projection, not a mystery to be solved, not invented to satisfy your desire.
In Cathy’s Ghost, that solidity is what terrifies me. Her gaze cuts through the frost. Her fingertips press into the glass in a way that makes it feel insubstantial, like it’s yielding to her. She’s looking straight at you, and you have no idea what she wants, what she’s capable of. The glass between us feels like the only thing keeping me safe…except I’m not even sure it’s doing that. Maybe I’m fucked anyway. Maybe she’s getting me regardless.
Laurie Lee Brom, Carol
Laurie Lee Brom, Reflecting
Laurie Lee Brom, My Little Friend
In some of these paintings, the women occupy the edges of ordinary domestic life. A woman in a groovy psychedelic dress, vivid with orange and green and neon pink, standing behind rain-streaked glass. Another smokes a cigarette, bouffant insouciant, looking for all the world as if she’s about to meet her lover, Casanova Don Draper. A third gazes downward at a spider suspended on its web, her bright blue eyeshadow catching the light.
They could be contemplating the texture of their own existence, or they could be thinking about what’s for dinner, or the way their underwear is cutting into their bum, or an Alice in Chains song stuck on loop in their head, the one they’ve rewritten so it’s about their yappy dog now, “yeahhhh she wants to bite the roofers, oh yeahhhhh.” Brom doesn’t tell you which. She just paints them there, solid and present, their interior worlds as dense and unreachable as Cathy’s behind frosted glass. The settings are ordinary. The interiority is not.
Laurie Lee Brom, Swamp Bride
Laurie Lee Brom, Contact
Laurie Lee Brom, Queen of Night
Elsewhere in Brom’s work, she loads her women up with supernatural flair and costumes them in excess within a brooding, fantastical atmosphere. Vines and branches crown their heads, flowers cluster and wind through hair, ghostly hands reach from shadows, peacock feathers and stars and crescent moons adorn them. Gold and crimson and cobalt saturate the fabric. It’s lush and dark at once—ornamental but eerie, decorated but shadowed. Every surface blooms with magic and strangeness.
Their eyes roll upward, turning inward the way you do when you’re contemplating deeply, searching your heart, taxing your memory, listening to your gut. Lost in your head. As these figures seem to be lost in theirs. All that ornamentation surrounding them can’t hold a candle to the landscape of their own thoughts, the interior worlds that exist only for them.
Laurie Lee Brom, Spectre
Laurie Lee Brom, Beyond the Veil
Brom portrays women’s interiority as constant and irreducible across all aesthetic registers. Whether she dresses them in gothic finery, domestic ordinariness, or fantastical excess, the core is always the same: a woman who is present, conscious, thinking, and fundamentally unknowable to us. This unknowability isn’t mystique. And maybe this isn’t about women’s mystery. It’s simply the human condition, the basic fact of human consciousness: private, impossible to fully reach. After all, no one can ever fully know what’s happening inside another person’s head.
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?
Acquiring a villainous little blanket-stealing gremlin wasn’t on my list of 2026 goals, but the universe is a wily rascal sometimes.
This is Lucy. She is my in-laws’ little guy but they are struggling to care for her, time and attention-wise, as their health continues to decline. She’s been staying with us off and on over the years when they traveled , but as of this morning it has officially become a more permanent situation. Lucy is a grand old dame herself, I think she’s 13-14! Any readers or friends who have elderly puppy knowledge, stories, whatever, I would love to hear about them, please share!
I have never considered myself a “dog person” (but I have also never considered myself a jazz/bath/crafty person, and look what’s happened! More on some of that stuff soon.) So what do I know, anyway?
Meet the Stinker Spotlight, where I’m chatting with one of my Patreon supporters each month. I’ve never been particularly good at building community on Patreon—I’m not a Discord person, I don’t encourage people to mingle—so I thought this might be a way to actually get to know each other.
Kicking things off with Heather Vee, a fellow magpie whose interests span historical romance, darkwave, occult studies, color theory, and perfume. We talk first perfume memories, current obsessions (Heated Rivalry, anyone?), and the scent she’d conjure into existence.
Are you a supporter of my Midnight Stinks Patreon? You’re here for a reason; perfume, yes, but also something else… and I want to know what that is! Your stories, your obsessions, the way you move through the world. I want to sit with your strange and specific loves and the corners of culture you’ve made your own. I want to share your story with all the other Stinkers here, and I’d love to feature you next! Hit me up via DM, Instagram, or email.
