The life lessons they keep hurling themselves underfoot, you momentarily stagger and blithely walk on, and the lessons they just shrug, maybe you'll get it and maybe you won't, they are just heeding their mandate.

So tonight I had dinner with the hairdresser, he's got new hair now, then again, so do I. And we are a little bit more careworn from the last time we met, days and months and expectations all over simplified by the dimensions of a table for two, at a bar-slash-restaurant that is full of my history and full of his, at different times and different ages. And no matter how mediocre the food is we will safely retreat to familiar boundaries, for recognition for and bragging rights.

But this lesson, slapped me hard midway through my entree. Timing is everything. Not for we poor guileless females excercising our wiles on men with agendas across the globe and forever into the rosy cheeked dawn of time. It's just dancing for an indifferent and hurried moon, it's me be-bangled and burning with the whitest fires of bright and flagging love, it's the ignored shuck and jive, it's the universe inverted on it's axis, it's me flying through the stratosphere divesting myself of my bothersome entrails, flailing on the equator because the motherfucking timing is not right. In fact it's entirely wrong, it's gloriously out of sync, four years ahead of my time, always and eternally vindicated in the future that I will not be party to, just some blonde catalyst for someone else and way off the mark. Even Miss Congenial gets a prize, I get the winsome and obliged consolation that I mattered enough.

Maybe that is winsome in it's way, it's not enough to keep me warm through the winter, like the cold is going to ever break through the hot, like this desiccated indian summer so late in October, just like he won't come back and just like I am never going to be perfect, just like my drummer marching to his own peculiar contre-temps, a beat ahead, two beats behind, weary of the seasons, grateful for the light. Falling down often and stopping to sob. Starting over, gathering momentum, for a minute or two before dreamland. Me and my romanticist's timing, off the logic map and deep in the fissure, shortly before I shut the whole show down, and just after I start it again, but of course it will be too late. It will of course be too late. Or not late enough, or too early. I couldn't tell you, my metronome is beset by anomaly and my piano is out of key.