Sickle and hammer.

[jacktellslies]

Occasionally, whether because I'm visiting family or I've taken a lover or become the victim of some improbable adventure that necessitates my borrowing a stranger's shower, through subtle acts of piracy, intrigue, or their consent, I find myself allowed the use of someone else's toiletries. I always enjoy this a great deal. It's like finding an alchemists's notes: you don't necessarily have a bloody clue what it means, but you get a certain sense of their technical habits, of choices made in metaphor, chemical, metal, and scent. And finding, in this mess of fascinating ingredients, something that would work for you as well, some piece of yourself in them, is a puzzle, an exercise in identity, in becoming, in this small thing only, a reflection.

I just learned that my sister's fiance, whom I like a great deal, is the son of a gentlemen who crushes rocks in a perfume and cosmetics factory. He breaks the earth to bits in order to give us colour, scent, and exotic powders, and renders women, and I hope men, and any other manner of creature, beautiful, not through accidents of biology or luck, but through skill and art. I, of course, also dismantle the natural world for a living, but I deal only in small, aquatic souls and in keeping people alive and fed. He wields his hammer for beauty, and I cannot help but feel that his is the more noble profession.

Comments

[transversecity.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

This would, perhaps, be completely the wrong time to admit that my personal cleaning regimen primarily involves coarse sandpaper and (in its role as sanitizer, of course) Everclear.

[earlofgrey.livejournal.com]

Lovely! I borrow the fish de-scaler for exfoliating purposes, myself.

[transversecity.livejournal.com]

Man, you know, I never seriously fantasized about you exfoliating me until now.