(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.