Just a girl, watching a speech, coddling risotto

It wont be the last time that I flippantly, so flippantly say these are strange days, and it won't be the last time in the near future where I opine that I think I might be living history. And it feels a little weird, a little outside. If I am anything like my mystified peers, we all thought it began and ended with MTV, it all began and ended with other people on television, making spectacles of themselves, with conveniently appropriate soundtracks that we culled and edited for ourselves, this was back in the heady days of mix tapes, from walkmen to discmen to iPods, from bit technology to the wild, wild internets with its sideways combination of news and porn news and just plain old porn. It was always about other people, it was never about us.

So here we are slightly baffled before our screens and our news feeds. Digesting our dinners, along with god only knows what and my poor brain pan is already completely saturated.

And yet, strange rays of light beamed through the television and npr and the computer, our President, that beacon, that beacon of reason, quick (homage to the Simpsons) let's break his legs.

I'd ask a sage if there were any left, is this what it is like, to be aware of just how likely these days are going to be put through the spectrum of history, just who records this anyway. I am just a blip of an uncommitted blogger paying half my mind to the risotto on the stove, wishing I had more sex in my life above money, wanting to hug the President, I've got a free account and dammit I am throwing my two cents out to the world. Because I can.

And there you have the crux of the modern world, a citizenry armed with lap tops and opinions, how to sift, how do you even begin. Naturally, I am right and you should all agree with me, right? Because my iPod thinks I am gay man, and this is a problem, while on topic my iPod would like you to know that I am not having enough sex and beseeches the reading public - shut up iPod....

Note to iPod shuffle, stop already with the Jane's Addiction, what is this 1989??

Put a dollar into the machine

And spin.

Queen and Aces, jacks of spades, king of diamonds, good luck, bad luck, no luck at all, just a little chance, a room in Vegas wall-papered in fools gold. Iron pyrate. I learned that early growing up panning by the river in gold country. It's illusory and it floats. But it sure is shiny, there under the midsummer sun.

Just like everything else that isn't heavy enough or bolted down, floats to the surface, like oxygen or the belated truth.

Who wouldn't be beguiled by all those beautiful things leaking out of clouds and fissures, patched up by a little bit of lover's spit. A poor choice, a misguided notion made beautiful by a clumsy two step and a long kiss.

If it were only so. I spent Friday on the mountain, flying. I spent yesterday crying. Then I smoked a joint and watched Wall-E. I thought you weren't supposed to miss what you don't have, but I do, and I do. If only I weren't so completely terrified of casting the net, if I weren't so zealously guarding my heart. A guarded heart knows no love, an open heart breaks, nobody wins, unless by some fluke of willingness and timing and stars and the confluence of the moon it just happens. And it might, or it could. If you let it, or if you made it, if you let go, if you could let go.

Recession is the new black, skinned knees are the new blue

We sit in groups around tables around kitchens around televisions sound muted, men in tight pants against a background of vibrant green, men in blue suits, hovering over slow cookers simmering inexpensive but delicious things. We keep our voices down, to coat the panic, to toe the line of nonchalance, we'll be alright, we'll be alright, we tell one another, nobody is going to let anybody starve, we will all keep our houses, we will keep our roofs and our blankets and ramen if it gets that bad, pray that it doesn't, we'll make it through.

We hush involuntarily, drink too much, accidentally kiss the ones we should not, mire a little in guilt, mire a little in exhilaration, move forward, keep moving forward.

Survive a layoff, feel an avalanche of sympathy for those who fell before the axe, and a surge of relief that it wasn't your skin, not this time, not yet.

Where did this world come from, because it isn't mine. Or it is mine, it's my inheritance after all these years of a recklessly bejeweled search for wealth, where everyone was entitled to exorbitant handbags, where there was a long stretch of time when I only bought matching sets of frilly french lingerie. It's true. Right along with the shoes and handbags and really expensive hair. I am keeping my hair, fuck you, you can pry it from my cold ramen noodle hands.

I keep wondering why none of the talking heads remember the cyclical nature of history, we are on the precipice of decline, it happens every three hundred years or so, accept when the cycle is accelerated: see Europe wars I and II.

With that comes art, and literature, and all of the beautiful things that break our hearts and keep us human. That is a trite answer for something that greater minds have puzzled over.

Still. Still. Here comes the unknown. We've pitched all of our expectations at unexpected President. There is hope, there is always hope, that magical, elliptical silvertine thread, it's the quiet that underscores those hushed conversations, it's starlight and moonlight and in the pinking of daybreak, it's the cold hard practicality of weighing eggs against milk and beef against lentils. And also this, some of us are going to weather this and learn some hard lessons that will serve us well, some of us are going to lose everything, some of us already have.

I have begun to count my blessings every minute of every day and I am determined to pay it forward, where I cannot account for cold hard dollars I will pay forward in small acts of kindness and good neighborly-ness. I'll tell you this, these days, more than ever, in a really long time, I wish, I wish I had somebody to nestle into. Just a pair of warm arms, that is all.

In local news, I fell up some stairs at a super bowl party took off a good seven layers of epidermis and nominally won the chili cook-off. Since then my left knee is threatening to go septic and I was laid out by sinus infection. I am missing something, it itches miserably like a phantom limb, I could probably pinpoint it if I chose to.

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five years. I have been doing this intermittently and sometimes with ferocity for five years now.
Congratulations my dearest alter Emma B., you got gumption girl.