I think the green algae I swallow daily is at last having a noticeable effect on the stinkies. I can’t profess to liking it but when you are an experiment in progress - you just hold your nose & swallow right?! And before you think it’s just that I have finally pinged right off my small sane rail - if you are a youngster in WLS world beware - you too are an experiment in progress. A GOOD one! 
I think sometimes I have a dash of something in me that is possibly related to something of a mental-chemical nature. I don’t get extreme high’s and lows, I just get elevated days. 
Maybe I am in denial or something but I have such a drive in me to grab life and squeeze the last drop of this vast magical elixir into my own much smaller life. So many adventures - so little time…and I am forever on some personal mission or other.
Most recently my mission has been to obtain a relatively hard to get essential oil. Oud. Or Oudh. It’s not cheap stuff and when you have a set budget (and a lonng list of ‘wanna-haves’ and booger me - have already spent too much the past month) you gotta work at finding a reasonable price at the very least. And hope you are not buying something so dilute it has lost it’s essence. Oud seems to originate from many places & those who love it say it varies. After trawling the internet intensively I found some Oudh at a very reasonable price. Dilute-yes, in sandalwood yes, but I thought I could live with that. I know nothing about perfume. Nada. I just dabble & play. It arrived today.
Oh my. At first whiff I laughed out aloud & somewhat hysterically. My first thought was thank the gods this is dilute as I think full strength would have knocked me right off my feet! What the # &*%$????!!! 
Then I was very pleased indeed that I had not opted for civet musk (which I was considering albeit, probably a synthetic variety.)
It erm, basically smells of shit. Then if one is curious enough (and brave enough to take another nose hit) it allows you to smell it’s other side. Deep deep and ancient… indigo, almost like night. For once I am at a loss to decribe it verbally. I saw the colour indigo flash in my minds eye. Sometimes when I can’t speak something, I see colours instead. I forgot the shit smell, although it still hovered around in the ether it became irrelevant. I thought how appropriate the name ‘Oud’ is for it. In my other language this means ‘old’.
I think if I was to describe it I’d say it reminds me of ‘the shadow side’ - something we do not usually display nor regard as gold in our beings…and yet it is the alchemy of this our human shame, our fallibility, our forbidden and taboo, that eventually brings us into an awareness and honesty and perhaps most importantly it is facing this, that brings to the human being an authentic compassion towards others. And I am not talking this pseudo crap political correctness either that prevails like a false perfume in our world. No - this is not synthetically fabricated out of some set of moral beliefs or deep seated need to present oneself as a ‘nice kind’ person. For that one can buy synthetic white musk - the sort of mass smell every other perfume holds dear.
I’m not saying white musk is not nice - it is. It’s just that it is generally not authentic and is far divorced from nature’s musky smells. Still it is clean and modern, it has some merits. And it’s popular. Oud is shocking. I think that is very clever of it - it has a built in defense mechinism for those who have not acquired a smell for it through years of living by it’s side, as is the case in India for example. I very nearly wrote it off as something I was soooo not going put on my skin. I nearly rejected it outright. But then it lured me…that strangely familiar ancientness of it kept drawing me back to the little bottle on my desk. All day this smidge of sniffing went on until my curiousity got the better of me. What would happen if I did something with it? What could I think of to put with it? In the end I settled for rose absolute. I thought it somewhat fitting that if rose was symbolic of the flowering of the human heart - it & oud should be together, at least in this perfume. I was desperate for some comfort tbh. I had stepped into a smell that scared me in someways.
To extend the rose and to give it a little ground I added a teeny drip of clove and some rosewood. Then I applied it to my wrists and blow me right over - the shit smell had vanished. Just like that!
Instead in it’s place came the soft slightly buttery smell of wood smoke & ashes. Past the wood, spice and rose - an ancient invocation. Something primal but intangibly beautiful like when I used to visit Credo Mutwa many moons ago and in his hut built of clay and wood, this smell would be there. It was never unpleasant - it was just ‘of the earth’…a smell of cooking fires, pots, grinding stones, of laughter and tales told and time would warp into something unknown. I’d call it a void of fullness because I can’t explain it. It was amazing. We would gather there in the small room in the morning- it was packed, it was boiling hot as the african sun beat down on the hut and he would tell us the history and tales of his tribe. We neither ate nor drank. (It was the only time I can recall that my then vorocious appetite did not start on me.) He would end…’and more than that my brothers and sisters, I cannot say…’ And then we would see that not just one hour had gone - no, the entire day was gone & night was falling on us all as we would stare in bewildered disbelief at our western watches! Oh Tata but I do miss you. I wonder where are you? Are you well? Has life been kind to you & have the sangoma’s reached peace yet? I want to tell you that I am still bobbing about rootlessly - just as you saw in the bones of my destiny. I am longing for a place to call home now. Where I can center myself and finally relax. It would be so nice. Damn this Aloeswood for it’s memory provoking qualities and for unearthing my loss and my missing!
The other name for Oudh is ‘Aloeswood’. When my vision and loss of a bygone time faded I could smell the aloes of my homeland. Even though Oudh is not extracted from the the same Aloes - it is from a tree that has fungi - still I thought of the aloes I know. Not too far from where we lived once, there was a mountainside filled with aloes. Buff rocky mountain and these strange prehistoric looking plants everywhere. They had candalabra orange spiky flowers and when the sun beat down I used to think I could smell them! Then I would think I was just imagining it because as far as I knew aloes had no smell! Out there on the mountainside I would laugh at my own madness. Sometimes, if I was lucky I ‘d spot a little bird hanging from them sipping the sweet nectar. It was a vibrant bird with colours of peacock blue, red and teal that shimmered in the sunlight. So tender, small & beautiful hanging from the orange flower above the spiney aloe leaves, it would put a lump in my throat.
But enough…enough. Aloeswood has unexpectedly and shockingly owned and opened my soul today, and so, once I have recovered from my memories, I will wear it again. What can I do? I am perhaps not wholly smitten but I am taken! Of all the smells - the wonderful sweet beautific pure scents upon this vast olfactory earth - yup - aloeswood is mine. 
I just hope & pray no one will say I smell of crap. That could be very very dangerous as a DSer. It could begin another ridiculous round of mythology about body smelliness and the DS - and I & Oudh would be responsible heaven help us! 
Perhaps in WLS patients company I’d be better off wearing something nice like white musk after all!!! 
Added:
I decided after writing the above to research oudh a little more. I realise that using the phrase ’smells like shit’ is probably not very succint. A better word would be it is an ‘animaly type’ or it is pungent. Other more often used descriptions are : leather, smokey
Of interest to me was that some describe it as psychoactive. I had no idea it was - but as you can tell my experience of it was very psychoactive. Men wear it to pull the opposite sex. It seems to be classed as a ‘male’ perfume but in a minute amount with along with rose it became substansially feminine…so I am not going put in a box. I think carefully combined with florals it will provide a woman with a very unique fragrance. 
However - don’t rush off to buy it in big quantities. Some people cannot stand the smell and consider it a waste the moment they open the bottle. Others find it just does not work with their chemistry - so buy teeny samples. I think the oud I got is lighter than the dark varieties but perhaps the sandalwood attar it is diluted in does this to it. There are sweeter oudhs, probably a better bet for the ladies.
And now I have written so much, that I can’t write the post-op body butter recipe down! I’m too finished - I need to go and rest! I shall post it up this weekend all by it’s own for those who wish to make some. and I promise, I will not add Aloeswood to it!
