Midnight Toker
#perfume by Heretic

We've been blanketed in snow for weeks, and the heat in my room isn't working. I can't be in there for long unless protected by the safety of five layers of blankets. Today I pried myself from my bed and hastily pulled on a purple striped thermal undershirt. It needs to be washed. All I cared about was escaping the cold, not meaningless things like "looking nice" or "basic personal hygiene". As I pulled it over my head, I was greeted by the strong scent of perfume. I remembered vaguely that I had decided to spray it with something weeks ago.

It took me a minute to place it. It was like incense but edgier, dirtier. It was a warm scent for a warm garment, a scent that had been slept in, a scent that stayed the night then raced off to work, only stopping long enough to fish out a ci- ah, now I know! Obviously, it was Midnight Toker.

Despite its name, Midnight Toker does not smell like cannabis. This is probably for the best, since I usually smell like weed anyway. Instead, Midnight Toker smells of clove cigarettes; specifically, it reminds me of the cherry Djarums all the goth-of-center Cool Kids smoked before they got banned and I grew up and stopped hanging out with Cool Kids. (Cool Kids exist on a goth to hipster spectrum. Hipster-of-center Cool Kids, naturally, smoked American Spirits, preferably hand-rolled.)

Because I am, at heart, a stupid, basic bitch, I eventually got hooked and settled on menthol Marlboros — the kind labeled "Smooth" and sold in a teal and silver box — which tasted like Thin Mints baked in an ashtray with the secret ingredients: arsenic, cyanide, and hemlock.

If anything about this sounds romantic, it's because stupidity and recklessness are romantic qualities.

Midnight Toker is not my favorite Heretic perfume (that would be Nosferatu), nor even my second favorite (Dirty Grass). I'm still working through my sample. Still, I return to it often. It feels a little naughty. It's the smell of bad decisions. It's what it smells like when you're messy, slutty, and too fucked up to care. It's the warm glow of a cigarette, the friendly scowls at the smoke spot, the relief of your drunken stomach settling down under the weight of tobacco. Midnight Toker is that cute emo boy's breath, and it's the hoodie he lent you when you stood around listening to him talk even though you were not dressed at all appropriately for the weather.

Smoking is a lot like love. You know it will almost certainly end badly — life-rendingly so. It's a dumb thing to do, and that just makes it more attractive. The future doesn't exist yet. Maybe our bad decisions will never catch up with us.

Midnight Toker: +1.

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