Going to Whole Foods these days in DTLA is a bit like being in a real life dating app. As you line up outside, people done up in the way only LA people can be, stroll by to get into the back of the line waiting to enter the store, which is limiting occupancy due to the virus. Everyone is putting on a show, and the collective group’s head swivel from left to right as if we’re at a Wimbledon for hotness. In each persons eye you can see if they swiped left or right based on how fast they lob their gaze back to where the next person is most probably going to enter the scene from.
I guess there’s not a lot of places to get noticed when you are locked up all day in your apartment, so grocery shopping is sort of like heading to the club now. Walking up and down the aisles I’m bound to see more flesh than heading over to the deli. It also makes me think about how this time of coronavirus is a bit like having a lot of casual sex. Anyone who has never had a slutty period of their life can at least now feel some of the emotions associated with it.
Much of social distancing relies on your trust in another person and about them being upfront about who they have been around and how careful they are. My decisions on who I hang out with is not only about keeping myself safe — maybe I’m someone that doesn’t care if I end up with an alphabet soup of STDs — but also making sure that others are aware of my views on the virus so they can take precautions and have ownership over their own health. I can’t wander into someone’s space these days, maskless and ready to talk 6” from their face, since that’s basically like a new form of non-consensual contact: I’d be taking up a persons space and putting them in danger based on my own willingness to take on risk.
I guess if you want to run around as some biological weapon with no mask on, do it, but don’t feel you can detonate wherever you want: coughing over all the fruit in the grocery store and trying to shake my hand. That’s like failing to tell me you have herpes before sleeping with me.
I think in preparedness for this situation, I accidentally created the perfect fragrance, which I named Cat Fancy. This occurred on my friend Rebecca’s birthday, when I took her to The Institute for Art and Olfaction in order for us to make our own fragrances. I know a lot of people say “I think I got coronavirus back in February”, and I don’t want to be another person jumping on the “I already had it” bandwagon, but back in February when we went to this event, I had a fever and no sense of smell. I was very perplexed by these symptoms as not a lot was being said in February about Covid-19 and I didn’t hear of any cases in California, so I went ahead and tried to make a scent while sweating profusely (sorta normal for me) and not being able to smell (not so normal).
For some reason with these systems I was certain I could still make a great scent. It reminded me of when I was in 8th grade band practice, forgot my trumpet on composition day, and thought I could compose a piece of sheet music from my incredibly tuned inner sense of music. I had no such inner ear. (As a side note I think my friend Dan Davey’s had such an ear, and I remember his trumpet being shinier than everyone else’s trumpet and having a lung complicity of two small weather balloons. He played waterpolo and seemed to skip and hover across the water like a dandelion seed refusing to come back to earth, which I think was due to his enormous lung capacity.) But on this new occasion, at The Institute for Art and Olfaction, I believed I had an inner nose of some sort, I guess.
Rebecca walked away with a delicious tobacco/wood creation, while I apparently picked 5 materials (that’s what they call, in the industry, the different notes of a scent… the MATERIAL that is used to build the home of scent. Although, maybe this is a good use of vocabulary since memory seems to find its place within the walls of scent, so eluding to materials which can be fabricated into structures make sense as the basement vocabulary of fragrance) that when mixed together perfectly replicated the smell of cat piss. What I love about this experience is that I was very enthusiastic, as was Rebecca, and she was incredibly supportive as I dug deeper and deeper into my unbenounced alchemy of cat piss.
In this time when some people don’t give proper distance, what is a better deterrent than cat pee? For marketing, I’m obviously going the route of calling it Cat Fancy. Perhaps the logo will be of a cat spraying a person’s face in a sea of other’s wearing masks.