The Hokey Pokey

You put your big toe in you pull your big toe out, you do the hokey pokey and turn yourself about and about and about and about, and now that the waters have been tested and the metaphors thoroughly jiggered, can I kindly get naked and burrow beneath the duvet with a pack of cigarettes and several liters of water and I ought to be set til armaggedon. When the roaches and the socially retarded shall inherit the earth. Fuck heaven, anyway. Saccharine makes my teeth hurt and I have no use for grapes unless fermented, and a bunch of virgins just sounds like a labor intensive headache.

Am I the only one who much prefers Orlando Bloom as an elf? Crusader my ass.

Full Moon Amok

I thinkI have a hang over from this week's moon, which would explain why I am listening to Madonna's latest single and have a not so subtle itch to dance my ass off. At the height of the moon's tumescence I engaged in some safely saucy behaviour (hey, what the hell is a matter with blogger, why can't I make a paragraph) Oh well, Proustian it is. Safely saucy. I replied to a Craig's list add, bolstered by several spicy slugs of zinfandel. I am experimenting you see, I am thinking that after two years of shrinking violethood, I should get back on the dating train before I reach my dottage and am too wrinkly and desiccated to give a flying fuck, let alone have one. I love trolling the ads on craig's list, it is deeply satisfying to know there are some truly depraved and demented souls out there. I could cackle from my armchair, and very smugly mock the idiots and the poorly pixellated pictures of borrowed cocks and fairly frightening pleas for some kind of company. That is until I went and joined the ranks of the demented and replied. Oh and such fun! I had an explicit bilingual exchange heaving with innuendo and fraught with bad grammar, mine in french, his, in english, via IM, with a purported 34 year old frenchman. Plus words I can do, I can contort verbs and modifiers to simulate my delight, and I'd like to think a have a budding talent for the piccaresque, in person I only stammer and blush and choke on my desire, or worse, I become a 3o engine runaway freight train, barreling towards the last depot, Abject Humilation. There under the full moon, brighter than the street lights, with the windows thrown open to warmth of the evening, while the nutcases were barking at the moon and shouting at parked cars, I was fanning a perfect flame. It is entirely possible that I was chatting with a basement troll proficient in French, the internets are a strange universe indeed, you've got to take it on faith and a shot of rock salt and veracity is amorphous. Because he's disappeared into broadband ether. But since, even when fortified by several slugs of spicy zinfandel, I have pretty accurate recall, and since I do internet research for a living, it didn't take long for me to piece together the clues he had dropped to track him down, it's likely that he is not a basement troll. I will do precisely nothing with that, I like sleuthing, and have not yet become a freaky stalker. Next week on Emma, craig's list amateur porn junkie and depraved stalker -- tune in! As to the photo he sent me of his purported manhood, sadly not google cached, smart cookie, that. I can neither confirm nor deny. But as B said the following day, after I had recounted my adventures in Instant Message Imaginary Non-Coitus, as we were on our way to hit balls in Marin, "everybody on the internet has a big dick."

look I can make paragraphs now!

yes, that's right, I am back on the courts. Tennis the Mennis, ankle braced and totally graceless, with a flagging forehand, only my backhand has survived these months. It's comforting to know I can still stick as many skritchy balls in the short shorts of my tennis skirt. My ass as chipmunk, source of endless good natured ribbing.

But I had such good dreams the other night, so technicolor solid, that I swear I reached out with my leg and my toes curled around an illusory heel that was blood warm and pulsed, and I awoke in the forgotten part of morning muddled in my sheets and reaching for a dream.

So when I am old and in my dottage, wizened and milky-eyed, cobwebbed in house slippers, am I going to be the oldest living craig's list lurker. A purported 34 year old blond, with tits out to there, cooing over my key board to some soft susceptible young thing with a huge dick (they all do on the internets, dontcha know)

I've been asleep for too long, and while I was sleeping they went and changed all the rules, I've got no bearings, everything is strangely coded and transgressively baroque. And so very fleeting.

30 second movie reviews

Millions: I want to lap vanilla icecream off of the beautiful boy's head and then play tag. Everybody should have a spliff smoking saint to talk to. Delightful, weepy. Danny Boyle - who knew?

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Johnny Depp has lost his crackers and should only and evermore play drag queens. I would like to have a pet oompa loompa and a glass elevator at my disposal, also Helena Bonham Carter needs to stop with the bad teeth already. Acid flashback invoking, loads of fun.

Rize: Holy shit how do they do that? That's amazing, they are amazing, bodies are amazing, can I get my ass to do that too? A fucking awesome documentary on clowns vs. krump, these truly visionary young people sculpting their new art form. David la Chapelle, from fashion rag to ghettotastic - who knew?

First Lightening

It was hot at noon, hot in that way that should be Miami and isn't Marin. A stripped down and not uncertain sun and humidity pooling at the pavement. The birds were having a field day. Towards the afternoon the wind came up suddenly, tailed by massive and ungainly thunderheads. More like dark bulwarks, dark before dark.

So I went to have my hair cut. With one eye on the weather and one eye on the shears. By concensus I am growing my hair out. Both of my dear friends, colorist and cutter, concur that I have worked the pixie passed it's date of expiration on my head. Am solidly en route to a charming blond bob. This inspite of my protests. I can't work a blow dryer to save my soul, and so many brushes and products perplex me and drive me to doubt my girl credits. Why did I fall in love with the hairdresser, to have a year of good hair, naturally. I still have long hair dreams all of the time. Dreams in which I braid, ponytail and pigtail, dreams where I am still on my back, pegged beneath all of that hair, dreams where I thought it was short and run my fingers through it only to be delighted as if by an old friend.

Driving through Sausalito at a maddening 15 miles an hour, the bay and the branches are in disaccord. And there are still patches of calm in the baylet between Sausalito and Tiberon, as flat and glassy as an icerink, but big, fat splotches of storm are starting to peel off my windshield, and the gulls are wheeling in.

On the bridge my windshield is bleeding brakelights, bright red rivulets between swipes of the wipers, bridge toll, long grey streamers of traffic, merge to the channel, hold your breath through the tunnel, make a wish, Lake Street. A bright white streak of lightening over the peak of UCSF, wait a beat or so and miss the thunder, maybe the music is too loud, maybe it's all electricity and no fury.

The windows come down. Atmospheric ionization is sexy, thunder or not. There is enough electricity to make the hair on my arms rise and I keep waiting for that much wanted rolling thunder, and one eye cocked on the road and the other searching the sky, for that bright, white break in the early winter sky.

And wouldn't be just my luck, that I roll into rock star parking and the skies magestically clear, when what I really wanted was a doozy of a gale to knock out the power lines so I could sit in the tub with all my (scented) emergency candles ablaze and listen to the angels bowl*. (some baby sitter we had when we were living in las vegas taught me how to count thunder and lightening, also told me that God and the angels were bowling, thence thunder, and somehow, it captured my fancy, and I have never let go of SHIT (she/he/it/they) and the hosts in rented shoes, stinking of anti-fungal spray and bumbling towards victory, poorly shirted and swilling cheap beer.) Somehow that image pleases me, like I'd kinda like to imagine God as Randy Quaid in that bowling movie, you know the one, the one where he wakes up with a tatoo on his ass and woody harrelson loses his prosthetic hand... yeah, that one.

Heavenly hosts in bowling league shirts aside, no thunder rolled over me, and my power is still on, and with the windows down and the windows open in my apartment and the curtains modestly drawn I am perfumed in ozone and cigarette smoke. I'll recline in the tub regardless and try to reconstitute my very own thunder.