This week’s newsletter covers cozey couches and cozy socks, a local martini spot, a psoas releaser, some music and some fiction writing… you’re welcome?
Cozey
After months of sitting with my neck bent like an L watching shows from the day bed I decided to schlepp from Crown Heights to Flatiron to check out the Cozey pop up. Cozey is a modular couch company that offers a range of styles and products. I wanted to try before I buy, because I would really like a cozy couch and so many reviews of similar companies online claim that the furniture is glorified outdoor furniture with pillows i.e. wooden frames strapped together with velcro… I saw this comment many times when reviewing Anabei couches. Anyway, I sat on a few different options, honestly all were great, some more plush, some more firm, but the biggest thing ended up being the size and look. I originally liked the atmosphere sectional, but it didn’t quite feel like it would go with our apartment, the ciello was the one I felt would go best, but when I came home and measured again I got a little worried it would be too big, so we ended up settling on the gaia (pictured above). The gaia is a bit smaller, but not too small, the arms are not big enough to rest anything on, but because we don’t have a foot of arm space we can fit a side table in to rest things on. I think they have a 30 day return guarantee so if we decide we really want some arms we should be able to return and buy a different one—kind of a hassle, but probably worth it!
Le Bon Shoppe
Small things worth splurging on every once in a while: socks. Socks similar to a couch is something you will utilize every day, and while every pair doesn’t need to be high quality, airy, and fit like a glove, having a few pairs to throw on with that going out fit really make the difference. I bought a pair of these Le Bon Shoppe for $12 while in store at Faherty a few weeks ago. I grabbed a free beer as I browsed the store and felt obligated to buy something so I ended up snagging a pair of these… worth it.
Altar
A small, crowded, but intimate bar just off Franklin St a short walk from our place is Altar. Known for their martinis and ambiance, this place is a nice spot to meet up with friends, which I did this passed weekend. Although we quickly moved on due to the crowded nature of the bar on a Friday evening, I did end up heading back for dinner earlier this week and really enjoyed the inside. The prices are a little steep but if you swing by on happy hour it’s worth your while.
Pso-Rite
The Pso-Rite has been one of my go-to rehab products for sitting all day since the pandemic when I would spend most of the evening and late into the night putting together subscription documents and signature packets together for the law firm I was working at. Sometimes I would move to my laptop and lay on the ground with this plunging into my stomach to hit my psoas and loosen up my back. To be honest that might have been one of the last times my lower back was feeling really great… which is sad to say. As I write this I am thinking up a new routine to spend more time staying loose, because when I stay loose, I feel good, and when I feel good I tend to feel more motivated to work out. So this past week I have used this a handful of times as I have been in the gym a little more frequently and I hope to get a good routine in!
Bisou’s New Favorite Spot
No Youtube Video…
I am currently in the process of editing this weeks video and unfortunately it will not be out before this goes out, so instead I will provide you with some writing from the book I have been editing for what feels like 5 years (please for the love of god read the footnote, I spent so much time on that) and then I am also bringing back the playlist this week because I have been listening to some new music and I don’t want to gatekeep!
The Playlist
Back on some dumby rap which honestly is some of my favorite… I really don’t know exactly what it is but there is something about really dumb lyrics, and I am not talking about lyrics that don’t make any sense, but lyrics that are subtle like old school lil wayne lyrics that when you start to think about it make sense but in the dumbest way… “the square root of 69 is eight something” thats such a good bar… now not all of this is quite like that but I also love when a crazy hard beat just ruptures my ear drums so that makes its way in the playlist too… Im not going to walk through the artists, if you want to hear give it a listen!
The Writing
ANT DROPPED SOME KNOWLEDGE ON ME today. Now Ant, if you don’t know by now, the guy is an oddball, my father might go as far as calling him, “a whack job,” though he holds this term close and would never label a stranger in such a way. Ant is… he’s the kind of guy who approaches life's minor inconveniences with the determination of a mad scientist and the methodology of a stoned philosophy major.
We went to College Town Bagels [your intuition has now been subtly confirmed] where I was nursing a coffee—not much of an appetite to speak of—while Ant, demonstrating his usual disregard for gastrointestinal consequence, got a Flat Rock and a Round House and a coffee and some pastries, a combination that would later prove relevant to our story in ways neither of us could have anticipated.
I drank my coffee slow. It was black and had a nice molasses taste to it. We settled in at a table and several birds1 walked in wearing Canada Goose jackets (retail price: approximately $1000, or roughly 143 cups of CTB coffee) and decided to sit right next to us, their laptops adorned with vegan stickers—a contradiction that Ant would normally have spent 45 minutes analyzing, had he not been preoccupied with what came next.
Out of the blue, Ant started sniffing with the focused intensity of a drug-sniffing dog at an airport, which made me sort of instinctively try to smell what he was smelling, a mimetic response I immediately regretted. The smell hit me like a wall of invisible wrongness. It was eggs, raw eggs, methane—a fart.
“Dude! What are you doing?,” I whispered in agitation, though I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer. I looked at him confused and a bit disgusted. “What?” He glanced at me briefly and kept sniffing like a dog on a scent. “Why are you sniffing? Did you fart? It reeks!” I couldn’t hide it, I was disturbed, typically I might chuckle at something like this but being caught off guard by the habitual mimetic sniff created only pure frustration. “Keep it down!” he muttered, “Actually, let's get out of here before those girls get back, it’s not working this time.” He said it disappointed like he was trying to accomplish something. We quickly get up and walk out.
We are walking down College Ave and I had to confront him, “Dude stop. What were you doing in there?” He played dumb, “What do you mean,” shrugging his shoulders as if we didn’t just leave because of him. “Don’t make me ask, you know exactly what you were doing,” I pressed him, I’m not sure if he had to sneeze or what was going on. “You mean the sniffing,” he says as if it wasn’t at all obvious.
“Yes the sniffing, what was that about?” “You don’t do that,” he is serious, I have no clue where he is heading. “Do what?” I was confused and frustrated. But his next words. They’d stick with me forever.
Ant’s Theory2: “Well farts are gas right? So I have this theory—if you can sniff the fart gas up you can eliminate the smell from the air, effectively making your body an air purifier.” He said this with utter seriousness, “So, I farted. I mean it was going to happen. I ate a whole mess of food, and finished it off with a coffee. Something was going to come out of my butt, it was a ticking time bomb.” I chuckled, despite my general disgust. “After I farted I saw those girls coming back to sit at the counter and I didn’t want them to smell my fart so I had to sniff it away. I didn’t want them walking into a complete stink bomb.”
He shrugged his shoulders again, sipping his coffee, avoiding eye contact. “Ant… that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.” I said, shaking my head, but chuckling at the absurdity. “It truly is pure stupidity, however funny the idea is, there is no way that it could possibly ever work. But sometimes the dumbest ideas are the ones that stick, and that’s why you are a genius.”
We walked a little while longer back to the house. It was nice to be back with Ant and see people and live life, even if "life" sometimes meant watching your friend try to vacuum up his own colonic air in a public space. No matter how anxious or depressed I got, it seemed like the whole damn campus was battling mental illness in the winter, a kind of collective seasonal despair that manifested in ways ranging from the mundane (excessive sleeping, caffeine addiction) to the bizarre (theories about fart gas elimination).
At least we all had that in common, though I doubt anyone else shared Ant's peculiar belief that you can sniff away a fart—a theory that, while objectively wrong, contained its own kind of desperate optimism: the idea that our problems, even the smelly ones, might have simple solutions if we just approached them from the right angle. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Maybe sometimes a fart is just a fart, and a friend who tries to sniff it away is just what you need to remember that not everything needs to make sense.
how is my writing??? do you hate it? do you love it? please comment and let me know so I can muster up motivation to finish this gd novel
An alternative and more subtle way to say “chicks” or “girls” without sounding like a highschooler, even though deep down Finnley still felt this was maybe even more childish, but did his best to push those thoughts away as not to get in the recursive rabbit trap he always falls into.
The theory, it turns out, wasn't just some random spark of coffee-shop inspiration but rather the culmination of years of gaseous trauma and subsequent psychological adaptation. Growing up in the Bronx, in an apartment that perpetually smelled of his grandmother's Bengali cooking—a aromatic mixture of curry, cardamom, and what his Dominican mother called "proper spicing"—Ant's digestive system developed what could only be described as a kind of ethnic-culinary-meets-biological perfect storm.
It started in fourth grade—around the same time Ant began hitting puberty and began stress sweating—during a particularly quiet moment in Mrs. Rothstein's math class, when Ant's body decided to process last night's goat curry in what would become known in P.S. 124 folklore as "The Great Rupture." The incident itself lasted approximately 7 seconds, but its social repercussions would echo through the halls of multiple Bronx educational institutions for years to come. School districts in the Bronx still occasionally reference this incident in their emergency preparedness protocols, every teacher within a 20 block radius knew of the incident due to wild fire viral social media transmission.
By middle school, Ant had acquired various nicknames—"Gas Master Flash," "The Bronx Bomber," "Toxic Tony"—each one more creative and deameaning than the last, as if his flatulent reputation had somehow inspired a kind of perverse literary renaissance among his tormentors. Kids from rival schools would actually seek him out at sporting events, having heard the legends. "Hey, you're that kid made his own Tight End false start with a fart" they'd say, their faces showing that unique mixture of disgust and admiration that only middle schoolers can truly master.
It was during this period, specifically during a particularly dark month when he'd been banned from three different school buses (because the drivers assumed there was no way the smell was possibly human and must have come from some sort of fart spray), that Ant began developing his theory. If the gas had to go somewhere, he reasoned, why not back into the body that produced it? It was a kind of closed-loop system thinking that would have impressed his physics teacher, had Ant ever dared to present it formally.
my spine is deeply excited for our new couch
Cracking up at the fart purifier