Truck Stops and Weddings

In the short space of a week I turned thirty-six, I got an A on my French final backwards and in heels, drove past a volcano on my way to a wedding, where I biked through midges, discovered white pelicans, danced with a good friend, slept with an Irish and then rode a horse, drank lots of the hot brown water they call coffee in Klamath Falls.

I am pretty much swathed in flames, if I am going down, or if I am going up, I am going in style.

Here comes this birthday, edging closer in minutes and evenings, here I was beset with a casual dread, here it comes, the other side of thirty-five. Here I am with my absence of milestones, I've got millstones aplenty, aplenty. So I threw them out the window. I have been throwing them out the window like milestones, so I am coming around, marking my journey by the excess weight I am jettisoning, like balast, like jetsom.

Sitting home tonight after a short absence, I go through my apartment fingering the familiar, a nostalgic heartache steals over me, saddle bags to tether my current state of ether, driving back these three hundred and then some miles through myriad climates with one couple feuding and one couple just beginning to find a way to the opaque light of sobriety, I step on the pedal of the minivan and wish I could stop at every gilded neon truck stop for a large slice of americana with a side of cool whip. Coupledom is becoming as exotic as television for me again, I stare agape at the utter randomness of television commercials (hello! oregon! my future home! you're weird! also! anything with rasberries does not count as a vinaigrette! thought you'd like to know! love california!!) (also hot tan water is not coffee!)
so I stare agape at the colorful box and am completely mystified, just as I am mystified by couples, and weddings. I am beginning to think it might be easier to have your occaisional fuck and run at receptions, preferably with fellas who live in say - Ireland. Get your rocks off and get out.

OK, that's cynical, but easy and fun.

K and R and I went horseback riding after the wedding shenagins, and it's true that it might have been that much lovlier had I not been running interference between two snarky boyfriends and our straighter-than-thou cowboy of a guide, replete with rodeo belt buckle and the tell tale tin of tobacco a myth of an outline on his cow boy ass. I was tender to begin with, trotting just exacerbated the situation, yet it was magestic in ways that I can't begin to describe. Dappled Apaloosa, rolling into the horse's gait, posting in the stirrups when she breaks into a trot, the holyshitfucking panic when my horse was startled by an aggro cow, and you realize this animal is way bigger then you are and the drop is long, when she starts to rear you grab the reins and instinct wins, there is magic when a horse gallops, momentary weightlessness between hoof beats. For a second or two I flew in Oregon and thought I might perish, but all was well. Coated in dust and beauty, lathered in sweat and sun, perfectly filthy and happily so.

It was almost as awesome as riding through a never ending cloud of midges lakeside on mountain bikes the day before, nothing is better than cracking open a coors lite on the golf course with a mouthfull of bugs, or for that matter breaking all the resort laws by riding bikes on the golf cart paths with the beer lady fast at our rear wheels. Then there are naps, crappy service, weddings and dancing, and winding up in the Irish's room in the bath tub. Good times.

Still, try as I might to shed the vestiges of the engineer, he's been hanging about the shadows. He is still there in the wind that rattles the aspens, and he is still there at the summit, fading but still vibrant. He told me he is on his way to falling in love with someone else, it cut, it carved out what was left of my heart. I regret that I am not half the man/woman I wish I were, so that I could wholeheartedly wish him the best and get about the business of being the superstar princess that I should be, pardon my lack of magnamity, but I hope, and I am telling you this secret internets, I can't help but hope that he'll get his heart ripped out a little bit. There I've said it. And then I closed the door. Because I had to.

And subsequently the things I set in motion in part on a lark and in part out of spite are gaining their own personal velocity, I've grown these accidental tendrils that are forking in the four winds, and curiously my twin hearts and minds are alternately driving and herding these wild winds and passively riding them. It's beyond my control, I am in complete control. For the first time, ever. I like it, it's delicious. Tastes like bacon. And yet tomorrow it could dissapate just as easily as a dust devil on I-5. I suppose therein lies the bitter irony, that sweet illusory nibble of promise, just as fleeting as the sudden absence of honey bees, just as sumptuous as the glimpse of a long dormant volcano fading to pink in the rear view mirror at eighty-five miles an hour, just as surely to quote a song I heard, just as surely as traffic and weather go together. Just as sweet as it is to spit cherry pits to the wind, just as we compromise to our old friends fucked up foibles as par for the course and love them anyway. And eat your gloopy eggs with mystery ingredients in companionable peace, because you know good and well your own personal foibles are just as good and fucked up too, but still they love you.

of course the romantic in me is demanding to know where the hell he is hiding.... because, because....

Seventeen sneezes (delayed reaction to the wine) and one Russian cabbie later, who was perplexed as to why the monster got in a separate cab - he lives in North Beach and I live in the Haight, and incensed that he did not buy my dinner, even though I felt I was fairly succinct in explaining that we are only friends... But that is not my point and it didn't do anything to dampen the euphoria of an evening of baccanalia, an evening of living way large and drinking great wines out of my stratosphere.

makes me want to put on my dancing shoes.

We had the chef's table at Quince and it was by far the best meal I have had in ages. I mean like glorious, glorious that after all the gorgeous food and wine I am sitting here wide awake past my bed time and not overstuffed, just giddy. And fuck me if it doesn't feel righteous. You know what is righteous -- sweet breads, also angoletti. I could die and done gone straight to the pearly fields of barley in a bowl of angoletti.

What is it about the perfect vortex of food, wine, excellent service and fabulous peers that fills you with such vitality, when by rights I should be sagging in the bed clothes and yet I am redolent of rosemary and barbera and the only thing missing is a nice warm body between my sheets, a touch of musk and a canvas of skin would just about make me complete and how I would laugh and go languid.

Still I tap my happiness onto my pliant keyboard, it's a poor and small square substitute for the body of a good man, but it will do for tonight. I feel good and alive tonight, I think it's the red lipstick, I should wear it more often, it suits me. Ah sweet, sweet food heroin, feels a lot like new romance. Tomorrow I will do my penance at the gym, but for now I am prolonging the sweet swell of sleep, to savor this a bit, before my eyelids droop and I can't dance, I'll only lurch -- that moment is nearly nigh, still I fight it.... I am not ready to surrender quite yet.

Wanted: My Mojo

Tuesday I was back from Portland, my eyes were swollen shut.
Wednesday I got hit on my way to work.

Thursday I fell apart in Berkeley.

Friday I imploded in the bathtub.

I should maybe back up and say I had a couple of crucial and much needed epiphanies along the way. It was one of those jarring weeks, where just like in the cartoons someone slid the floor beneath your feet and you comically fell through all nine circles and flashed on all the nightmares and woke up in one piece in your bed on Sunday and it was hot. The Santa Ana rolled in to town to huff and puff and blow all the clouds from the sky so that all there are boats on the bay and green and green and bridges and storied glass.

When the engineer left he took my mojo with him and I didn't even know I was missing it. I have spent the last eight months cocooning in a comforting misery, not so abject, just not feeling it, not really feeling anything at all.

I want it back. I want it fucking back. I want to own it, I want to wear it, I want to dance possibly inappropriately in it. And once I have it back, internets, I promise you, that I will never, ever, ever let it go for any other man. I'll never surrender to thinking that the magnitude and the grace of my love would ever be enough to sustain me and a man. My mojo is my own, my own rose, my manifest glory, my godliness, my power. And I fed it all to a torch I carried for a man who doesn't love and who played me for a fool.

I want it back, I want the mojo back. I want the joy and I want a life without fear. I want burgeoning possibility, I want to feel lovely, magnamanous, and coy. I want to rock this body, my own body, even with these extra pounds. I want a life without shame. Fuck suspended animation. I want my mojo back and I want magnificence, I want life.