Kiss your homies hello
Home scents intel blowout, free the skippers, and more unbeatable recon
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The Plane by your side once again. In today’s sletter we’ve got:
Fantastic incense, incense holders, room sprays, non-nasty pot pourri from an aroma master, and more in a major “Mach 3+ Home Scents Intel” extravaganza.
Kiss the Homies Hello, then Hold Hands with the Homies, to unlock a better, more joyous world.
Haters say he’s lazy, but he’s actually hard at work gathering light and color for the cold, white winter.
Let’s get to it —
The other day, a complex insight came to me: I wish it was socially acceptable for a grown man to skip down the damn street every now & then.
I used to skip as a little kid, the way little kids have done since the first cavechild pranced neolithically upon the Fertile Crescent. I can still summon the sensation of a good skip: more propulsive than an amble or saunter, a bit like running, but with a jauntier cadence, buoyed with air-pockets of extended float, abandon, and senseless esprit …
There’s nothing else like it. Subtract all cultural information, reduce it to the sine wave, and skipping is just an objectively fire way to move through time & space:
And yet. Since childhood, skipping has steadily fallen out of my daily routine, and my thoughts.
In adolescence there were times when, hanging out with friends, I might break into a skip here and there “as a bit,” in the winking, absurdist style of the class clown. The notion of a ~12-year-old boy skipping sincerely registered as untenably infantile and, from a middle-school POV, untenably zesty. But I realized that if I skipped ironically, as a joke where the punchline was, Your boy is skipping, then I could get in some skips without risking the mockery of other kids.
I’d still break into an “ironic skip” of this kind every now and then in my twenties. Under the protection of alcohol, I might skip down the sidewalk real quick for the amusement of the fellas.
And once or twice in my thirties, on a hike out in nature — bathed in birdsong, overcome by the Wordsworthian sublime — I skipped for a magnificent minute along the trail.
But for the most part I not only stopped skipping, I almost entirely forgot that I loved to skip in the first place. Until the other day, when Erin, in a moment of unburdened happiness, started skipping on a hike, and it all rushed back to me: I love a little cheeky skip here and there, and I miss it terribly.
As a prominent scholar of Sauce Semiotics, I can say confidently that there is simply too much semiotic barbed-wire around skipping, to the point that it’s impossible to “just skip” without signifying a hundred different things beyond your control.
There are some socially sanctioned proxies for the adult skip, most of them fitness-coded — jogging, jumping rope, broad jumps, squat jumps, burpees, etc. But Heteronormative American culture does not sanction the adult male skip itself, and real talk, it doesn’t smile all that kindly on adult women skipping, either.
The other day I experimented with the “fitness” angle, trying out an uphill skip on a hike as I ascended a steep grade. Between the Nordas, the sweatshorts and the incline, it looked and read like the great workout it clearly was, and it felt amazing. This approach deserves further exploration.
But I believe there is a more deeply liberating path back to the youthful joys of skipping, open to all of us, outside of any “exercise” pretext:
We, as men, need to start Holding Hands with the Homies. I’ve been talking about “H.H.H. Mindset” for a minute, but I never actually sat down to write it out. The concept occurred to me amid Covid lockdowns and the social-distancing era, when we were all starved for company and physical contact. At the end of 2021, I was at a party and felt so happy to see some homies that I proposed we hold hands the way our brothers in countries such as India do without a second thought. We pushed through the initial titters and awkwardness and just sat there, hands clasped, chilling — it was sick.
We, regardless of gender, but especially the fellas, need to start Kissing the Homies Hello on the Cheek as well. This one comes easily to me because my mother is French, so I’ve been kissing French friends and relatives hello since I was a jeune garçon. Handshakes and hugs are cool, but kissing your homie on both cheeks? It’s an unbeatable way to push past all the bulls--t, lock in, and talk MF turkey.
Both of these practices are currently verboten in broad swaths of the western world, for stupid reasons. But as we’ve noted, there are precedents in other cultures, and these offer us toeholds as we try and rise to a better place… a place where inane social stigmas around “dignified male behavior” — and with them, inane social stigmas around “dignified adult behavior” — fall away.
I can already glimpse the contours of a world where the barbed wire rusts and crumbles along with those stigmas, and the joys of Socially Acceptable Adult Skipping (S.A.A.S.) rush in, available to us all.
Meanwhile —
The other day in the SpyTalk Chat Room, a reader asked for leads on sick incense holders.
We realized it was time for a lil Home Scent Intel Extravagazna, covering not only incense holders but our favorite sticks, cones & spirals to put in them and set on fire, some very sick lighters, room sprays and other smokeless options, and more: