these days have been perfectly perfect, it's all part of the international weather consortium, just a series of days of mild weather and blossoms, just to foil and aggravate any designs I might be entertaing about going away. It's really not fair and I suspect it might be deliberate and not just seasonal -- who could possibly concieve of a more perfect March, in every fragant variation.

I sat happily in traffic tonight on the bay bridge, an unhappy artery at any time, and yet there I was in the slowest of slow lanes, tracking the sun's descent into the Pacific, there goes the orange distortion and there goes the last gasp, here I am expending my expensive gasoline, miles yet from home at this pace, but the windows are open to the ambient sounds of somebody elses screeching brakes and the citie's peculiar sound of building up. Pillars of half built vanity projects and new billboards, I find myself in a new landscape, where all my old visual cues have vanished to some other ether. I take my cues by rote and by landmarks, I find myself asking when did the BofA clock become a high rise, when exactly did it cease to be mine, when did I let progress dilute my idyll, where did these condos come from and when did I relinquesh the notion of "mine", when it was never really mine, I am just a denizen afterall, one of those flame-out glitterati of the remember- whens.... and it's only verging on fifteen years..... only. Only all of my cognizant adult life, only all of it, all here within the seven square miles, all peaks and valleys, and all of the metaphor and myth conjured between stop lights and cross walks.

I have grown weary of inertia.

Again I am beset by the queer legacy of equity, at what point, if ever, do we surrender to these fixed notions of adulthood, as if ownership and maybe even marriage were banners of honor. Closing in close to 36, which back in somebodies day would have been well into middle age, well past vielle fille and straight into maiden aunt* ....

* where could I go, where can I go*

* I have an answer.*

*at least, I think, at least I have been formulating....

fyi to all commenters past and present - perhaps the comments have been corrected with this new format -- so hey anna! and hey queenshiv! and hey austin dave! and hey my brother! here's to all our far flung friends and family, I don't proudly wear the mantle of worlds shittiest correspondant - but know that you are always in my heart. Also to the family Dow-Milligan one hundred thousand flowers for your new edition,

hello then, hello again.

It's a new blogger, it's a late day, there is change afoot in the blossoms, everything is coming apart at the seams, but the night is fair and the climate temperate, perhaps if it were foul out I might be already in a car or an a plane for anytown, anywhere.

There is a song I have on repeat, I can't not listen to it, it's like a desire as strong as sex. I am driving in the morning with this song in my head, I am laying my head on the pillow with this song in my head, I am missing sex with this song in my head, I am running away with this song in my head. I am going and going and going with this song in my head, though I am still here, at least for now.

I can't write right now, nothing comes, no lament and no joy, just nothing. It's the unpleasant buzzing between my ears and it's pain of my shoulder blades knitted together, it's my jaw that unreasonably won't unclench, it's the long drawn out end run of an era that I can't quite begin to parse.

I haven't written of it here, mostly because I'd like to forget.... but the genesis of my writing here was the end of long and horribly debilitating bout with clinical depression. I used to look up and not know where I was, then came the rage, and I raged, right through my divorce, through an affair, through all sorts of ugly that I inflicted upon myself. For several years I raged and I wept, and suffered through long periods of inertia, didn't eat, ate too much, beat the crap out of my television, did a lot of drugs, drank my self to paralysis, played solitaire compulsively, slept with strangers, spent many thousands of dollars on therapy, washed back the celexis with red wine.... but I wanted to be free of the cage of misery so between bouts of self destructiveness I worked, on my self, and eventually it took. I had a great therapist, and I was committed, when I wasn't drunk... or fucking for the fuck of it. I also had the support of my family insofar as I revealed - they knew that I wasn't well, but shame prevented me from revealing the true extent of my misery, and debt.... And all the other reasons we don our hair shirts and do our strange penance.

(and here I just erased a paragraph that I can't retrieve)

The therapy and the antidepressants saved me. I resisted and resisted the drugs, crutches I don't need no stinkin' crutches..........

I have friends who are in crisis now, it's been tearing me apart. In a way that is uncomfortably familiar, I see myself in them, I see myself where I was. I have been falling stoically to pieces in quiet corners knowing just how hard it is to drop your guard long enough to thread through the bullshit. It's been tearing me apart in ways I hadn't expected to be torn. I have been thinking about that time in my life, prodding the sore spots, when I wasn't well, when I wasn't me, and I think I made the decision that when I was alright I'd coast on that for awhile.

I am ashamed that it takes my dear friends to be in trouble for me to take a good hard look at my life -- I have been coasting on goodwill for a number of years now, neither looking back nor forward and I kind of realized with the onset of my 36th year, well girl, you are no aimless child anymore...

It's time to go, it's time to leave. It's time to go exploring, it's a time to own elsewhere. I write that sentence after a pitch perfect day in San Francisco, Emma sweet, I think it might be time to grow up just a little.

A wise man told me tonight, a wise man in the guise of a monster, he told me things fall apart, and just as surely as you had a good long run, something is borne of it, for good or ill, but that will always be the tantalizing question.

Things have very definitely fallen apart, the very gossamer web and the curious radar that has bound me is rent asunder. I cannot say so it goes and so I roll, because that would be a lie. Ever felt like you were nearing an apex or a crux or the point no return, ever been full of heartache, ever been dumped by your best friend, ever given up on principal, ever tried not to hurt and been summarily dismissed, ever sworn off liquor only to purchase a bottle of wine to soothe the keening knots in the stomache, ever wanted to run away. because I am starting to question these ties to geography, maybe I would be better off elsewhere, far from this maddening crowd, tango my way free of these entanglements or just cut the cord.... but the cord I fear has already been severed.

It's one thing to have your heart ripped out by your beloved, it's quite a different bit of breathlessness to be quit for all the varying degrees of reproaches and recriminations that constitute the lifeblood and the lifeline of a friendship that spans a decade and a year. I miss you terribly and it hasn't even been a week. I wish you well, I wish you well.

And in calamity there is also revelation, and for me I think it is that I will need to quit this lovely geography and all of it's sepia memories, as reluctant as I am to cast my gaze from my navel to the practical future, I very reluctantly admit (and fully reserve the right to balk and to fret that nothing could compare, and nothing really could, it might be less lovely and less erudite elsewhere, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be better) can't forget after all, my small town legacy.

After a twelve year battle with a city I am girding myself to throw in the towel, it's a lot to do with we sparkling glitteratti, we are having are a hard time keeping our shit together, we are watching friends break at the reefs, and those that haven't have gone onto grown up things that continue to mystify with indeciperable vocabularies.

as for me, it's a belated resolution, but I am just going to let go. There is some addage about lambs and lions, and breaking and entering, but I just want to let go, surrender it up, air it out and get lots and lots of sleep. What the hell I can always try to parse it through the din of all tomarrows hangovers. Because the more things change the more they stay the same. I thought about trying to dance Britney Spears a little earlier in the confines of my living room, but my phone is on vibrate for noone, plus I am really fucking tired and part avowed monastic. Right.