Corpus Christi Juice

The most startling about change is how effortless it is when it happens. One day you're admiring the view from the 46 floor of a Massive Bank and the next day on the other side of the Bay you're ordering sushi and admiring the City from a distance as if it were nothing at all. And all of those weeks spent in a fever were for a tremendous not.

It's like a break up, when in one day life without the Other seems a chasm of despair, and the waking up without the Other remote. And then from one day to the next the beloved has had a change of heart and you're waking up on your own and two years later you feel like you've been waking up alone since time immemorial, but aren't we always rousted from our independent dreams alone.

And doesn't Jeff Buckley put one into that kind of contemplative mood?

Change is a sidle and a slide, fraught with implication, but in execution just the gasp of an afterthought.

And I am so glad that I did it, I think that I will be happy where I am, and since I don't want to be fired, I'll simply say that I am on the buy side now, and as a perk they have given me membership to a ridiculously posh gym in Marin. Where I sandwich my shiny black (and brand fucking spanking new) practical Hyundai between the Porches and the Rovers and hold my breath. Marin is fucking weird. Oodles of money and a decidely draconian leftward bent.

This evening the posse went to see the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" starring two men that are on my list of men I'd like to get busy with if presented the opportunity, Sam Rockwell, because, lord knows, I have loved me some crazy fuckers, and Mos Def because the man is lovely and can sing and the man can dance (and the man can do comedy)

best line ever: (back story: Ford (Mos) has put a thinking cap topped by a juicer on the President of the Galaxy's head (Sam) and juices a lemon, "that should give him some zest". Forking Brilliant.

Alas and Alack, I am not likely to get busy with either, so this is the point when I petition the internets for the resitution of my virginity, where I draw up the contract in numbing legalese, wherein I the undersigned does solemnly swear etcetera, etcetera... Do humbly promise that due to egregious neglect, my hymen has reconstituted itself and needs a trimming like a verge, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum, what, what.

Well, there I go again, running my thoughts, running topics like gamuts, ruinning the tropics like game mutts, uh oh, I'd best quit now before I decide to run the word association game.... Pruning the GOPniks like shame nuts, grooming the shop hicks like game chicks, dooming (too late, too late) the cop licks like blame sicks.....

Reformation

I've got to give up my night owlish ways, but it's so hard to give up the night. Cold nights and cool nights and nights when it's balmy enough to let the walls breathe. Nights cornered between four walls and a long hallway, nights haunting the perimeters, nights spent threading bare the carpet in solitary tango. Nights spent falling over furniture and wreaking havoc on the internets, nights of wine drenched carpets, and baths with the accidental shard of glass. Nights wandering the neighbourhood peeking in other people's windows. Nights that accidentally slide unbidden into mornings, nights between girlhood and wraithhood, nights of jasmine, nights of munificent moon, nights of tears and nights of love, however transcient. Late nights in bars, last stragglers, last gulps, last songs, a last kiss, a late night bath. Nights of the three AM dance on the bar, nights of the last line in the last bindle, and nights of the deep and regretful pull off of the last cigarette, nights of the last condom, nights of the bottom of the bottle and the end of the record. The bittersweet nights of error, and the cabbie taunting his captive, but waiting until the key is in the door before driving off to the next late night fare. Less glamorous nights of throwing up into a cupped hand in the back seat of a cab. Less glamorous nights of solid rejection, or a glorious rebellion that ends in simpering catastrophe. Nights of restaurants, nights of dive bars. Nights of music and nights in silence. Nights of hues of virgin blue and nights of iron grey and nights of impertable black, nights without stars and nights without a moon.

And all of them gone from me now.

Now I will be a creature of the dawn, and I had forgotten how beautiful it is, crossing the Golden Gate at 6:30, when the sky is breaking in the East, so pink, so new.

Love me, Love my navel

Have you ever noticed how the recesses of the navel sort of resemble the folds of the brain, minus the lint, or not... Or maybe lint is an appropriate metaphor for all of the ridiculous clutter that intrudes on my deep thoughts, for example, I may be in profound contemplation of a question that has serious anthro-economic-historical connations, and somehow my brain will skid on some lint and suddenly I'll be giving money to the oddsmakers on the name of the SpearsFederletus spawn, I'm voting for Rita-Lay Kabalala, and a beat or two will pass and my selves will shrug and my inner Nelson will cackle ha-ha.

Yeah, I know you know what I'm talking about, and that serious question, the one, that answer that surely merits a nobel laureate dissapates steeped in nicotine exhalation and plonk, and back to the navel board we go. Fluke, coincidence, that brass ring.

In other words, it's a lot like writing, this whole living thing, but less stationary, which begs the question, can one not lead a happy life in the confines of one's own heavy head. Need one venture out? Can't one be the persuasive hero, she of the cool hand and level head. Can't you live a perfectly cinema worthy fraught romance, complete with epic fights and reconciliations, but minus the missed communications as you and your head understand each othe completely, so instead you spend a lot of aimless time making out in exotic locals. And money simply isn't an issue in your head, one of those abstract notions foisted upon us by the logicians of the world, happily they are not in my head, everyone in Marc Jacobs and that person with the cool name that sounds like Proenza Schulersomethingsomething, but it matters not, as everyone is lovely and strong and eats like horses, and drinks nectar straight from the vat, and no one is ever sated and not satisfied, and the weather is always obliging save the occaisional thunderstorm. I mean Proust did it, confined and phelgmatic, a whole life inspired by a fucking biscuit, or morsel of cake depending on the translation.

Back to my navel and unrepentent self-absorbtion, the navel that is currently, to my endless distaste, surfing the paunch of my belly. The navel that has a hole in it thanks to the caprice of my nineteen year old self and a really big needle. Much like my back, patches of which I willed to be inked, and so they were and so they are, but when you are seventeen years old and with reckless lack of foresight your flesh is but a canvas for tawdry rebellion and sunblock but a ruse for suckers and you have a secret longing for durability, so what better thought than to ink it permanently onto your skin...

That said, I've got one tatoo that I adore, and one I'd like to be rid of, and I would like to thank a certain Phil I know for talking me out of getting a tatoo when I was schlitzed on cheap tequila and my former spouse was egging me on in fucking Cancun, because of all the tatoos of dubious provenance, Cancun seconds only Tejuana. Year after year some pathetic sorority girl is going to wake up face down in a shitty "resort" with a tatoo of Senior Frog's on her ass, and have to explain it away to her future spouse...

Again with the digressions.

So anyway back to my fascinating navel....

I would like to thank the commenters, the eminent MM, my bro, Shiv, thank you for indulging my shameless fishing... And I think that you should all insist that frere Emma start his own blog, he might be a lesser bloviator than his sister, but he has a tale or two to tell.

(WAVES AT THE CANYON)

True, I have been a negligent blogger to my vast audience of two, the two D's.
I will admit to superstition, and below is what I wrote in the throes of an anxiety ridden vodka fueled drunk, subsequently (with exceptions) I have sacrificed the sauce for liters of water and well (ha!) that's all well (ha!) and god I spend a goodly amount of time trying to empty my boundless bladder and wishing I were somewhere else. Somewhere warmer, with sugar sand and umbrella drinks and free tennis lessons, and lava floes and aged turtles, somewhere between the tide and the dune I wouldn't have to turn 34, where under the full moon the tall palms would be my tidal lover, pendulous nuts aside, or astride, if you must take it that far, and I did, would, should, if only I could.

update: I did end up buying a car, parking is a bitch.

plus ca change

I don't mean to be deliberately evasive internets, well, scratch that, I do. It would seem that I will be making rather a large transition in the coming weeks, and while it might equate to feeble sums of filthy lucre, damn, damn, still not enough to coat my walls in goldleaf, it means that my J.O.B. will not be in the City. It means that I am likely to purchase a vehicle by this weekend. It means that I will strive to be one step ahead of the always strident People Who Issue Tickets in Roving Boxes. It means that I will sacrifice having the same salad with my very best girl friend. It means that I will have to get to bed earlier. It means change.

And change is good.

Except when you are a gentle Taurus and Ferdinand the Bull is a childhood hero, and sniffing the daffodils in an endless pasture is your idea of paradise, as it is mine. Mind you, it's not that the great shambling bull doesn't boil with passion and insult, it's not that hard is daunting, we bulls born in the year of the pig are very good soldiers, then again we also frag, first to the trigger, but then there are the flowers, and the first tomatoes, and the promise of dappled sunlight and buttercups and cypress bending on the breeze, and the bluest sky, and the bluest eye, the insecure pinks at sunset, the tentative ivory of cresting wakes on an unsettled bay. Senuality, the clarion call, from the soft swathes of cottton, to dappled sunlight of a purring cab.

A new job, a new car, a new fuck. Or not, or wishful thinking, or fucked over, or fucked up. My unfortunate brain, excited, addled and terrified has been running over increasingly "Alias" inspired scenerios. Of course you see, internets, like all mortals we occaisionally indulge in super hero fantasies, and so the fleshed out nearly thirty-four year old woman, the one in the sugar pink PJ's, the one with short hair and the good highlights, the one with the epic tits, and they are, it's genetic, the one who can't write in concise sentences, the one who P insists can't perish as a spinstress as I am techincally a divorcee, ( I have strayed and lost topic) (oh, yeah, super-heros) Super Heroine, blithely kicking ass, all over the fucking place.

and then there is the regular working day heroin, like the junkie on the bus holding her gear in one hand and a sagging gladiola in the other. Maybe all of those sadly misguided hippies were onto something, maybe there is Flower Power, or maybe, just maybe, I od'd on acculturation somewhere around Market and 6th, and an essential part of me got off the bus and got acquainted with needles, s'okay, and acclimated to the pervasive stench of my compatriots, blood, and sweat, and sweet and needles, and general, unflagging degeneracy, also the buttoned down perfume of defeat in the face of bureacracy, and then there is the misguided love of the unrepentant addict.

Here is a dirty little secret that you can use against me internets, when I decide to run for president. I know myself well enough to know that I should stay far, far away from opiates. I can get past the puking for all of that sweet, sweet synthetic, lulled false bliss. And the scary thing about so much therapy are the provisional hazards of knowing precisely what you would like as a junkie, as I sat next to a version of myself on the bus today, she had her needle tucked behind her ear, I could see she was all the best and all the worst of me in a leathered skin and wasted body, and the sickness was eating at her hands and the corners of her eyes.

The other is that I cannot gamble. I have never dared. I have never dared, because I know a little something about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, it snakes through my blood, it made my grandpa put a gun to his mouth while grandma was on the phone downstairs, and I can, and I will battle that goddamned slot machine like Cervantes windmill, and we'll see who caves, bones to mettle, mettle to bones. Oscification. My bets are on me.

(re-edit note, this is where I totally lose my marbles... three bucks and a pack of smokes to the first person who can figure out what moonbeam tangent I am chasing after, I was sort of shamefacedly tempted to delete the screed, but it begins to coelesce towards the end, plus this about saying the things that I'll regret, like my very own bloggity hair shirt, so read on...)

So long as the tender boyscouts and the brownies seek bleached for bones for seasonal ornaments, jesus, if you were my poor brain, you would be... you wouldn't be Terry Schiavo, and you wouldn't be the Pope. The ashes, my ashes they'll be scattering on the banks of the Yuba River - hello, maudlin, and still, someone shut me up as I prattle on, and I will, and I do and babbling onward and downstream, like a cool brooke, she of the waning sunlight, and the tall trees, and my own personal soundtrack, and the shock of mountain water, and past loves and the eternal grany black and white of granite smoothed by centuries of a capricious river and half clad oiled bodies fitted onto contours of rock, white hot and river cooled, forever and eternally sixteen, young and sleek and possibly dehydrated flushed with Manzita berries and an explosion of Scotch Broom and lavender lupine skirting the trails you could walk blindfolded.

If this is what is is meant to be grown up, then give it back to me, give it back to me, give me back the first flush of driving, give me back my second kiss, just take me from this, take me out of hindsight. A sweet furlough, a summer evening in the graveyard...

not gonna happen.

So come the benignly curious, when you have strayed far from your bedevilled twentyearold self that you pine for in restless day dreams, and your car is more expensive and sucks a particular kind of gas, and you're pretty jaded by now, and then, a snatch of song, an empty stretch of road, speedlimits disregarded, oilfields, joshua trees, long memories, former spouses, flat bed trucks, and the undeniable desolation before the Grapevine. Snow and sporadic fog, well that's entertainment, well that's someone's heart ache, that's someone's sound track on the radio, and it's all fun and games until you realize that you were standing, frantic on the boardwalk as your fifteen year old self bade farewell to your fourteen year old self, while your once and decidedly future self was calling the shots under the boardwalk. Almost virgins are a lot like selkies, pomposity of myth, sounds andtempered furies, the quiet and inferred disappointment, and oh, and oh, such a long farewell. Such a long, such a languid and fractured hello.