Alcool
During the last project of the semester, Alex and I needed rubbing alcohol (alcool) to clean some of the plastic parts used to house our project. I ran off to the market and discovered alcool is artificially colored this florescent, cotton-candy pink, and that it’s concentrated at about 90 percent. Let me just say that we had to bring the stuff into the paint room (which is ventilated) because the smell was so strong. Yet it was a familiar smell…
A couple of months ago, Victor’s grandmother visited him after a trip to Romania. She brought with her a plastic bottle of Romanian moonshine. Everything about the bottle promised blind drunkeness. The bottle looked drunk: its base was somehow distorted so it never stood upright but leaned one way or another. I couldn’t read the words on the bottle, but I have the suspicion it was, shall we say, repurposed. And the plastic conveniently meant the bottle wouldn’t break if you dropped it in your drunken stupor. I didn’t try any of the stuff, but I did catch a whiff of it. Disturbingly, its potent fumes had more than a passing resemblance to those of the rubbing alcohol…