Paint Your Wagon, Paint Your Kitchen

At some point last week, when your shoulders are rioting and you are up to your elbows in gray paint, you giggle with your partner and bless the skies for funemployment. This is ephemeral, this is so very ephemeral, just like every other joy and every other love, but just like every other joy and every other love it's fleetness is a worth it's weight in all of the gold goodbars stacked against cataclysm.

So a hallway and a bedroom, then it's your turn. It's my turn. I pick a color with a swish and a twirl, this after three years in search of the bestest yellow ever, I am bold, I am determined to paint this motherfucker, and I decide. I am the decider. I have decided. Tape it up. Mubarak resigns, Obama on the radio, E and I have already given in and given up to OPB, thousands upon thousands are crowded into a square in a land that is far, far from where we two follow edges closely, neither of us where we ought to be, in an office somewhere, earning our keep, like every other self-made America. Instead we are listening to revolution, painting my kitchen the most lovely shade of sunshine. We are pleased with ourselves, we weep for joy, for them, we paint fiercely, we paint in solidarity, we are not sorry that we are not there. (crowds scare the bejesus out of me, as does she.)

Paint your wagon, there goes history. Just like that, thirty years and a breath of fire, just like that an immolation can topple a regime, don't put it past us, the most curious things will catch like a wildfire, like a spark on a highway, there we go spilling into causeways and throughways and ruining it for politicians and the status quo, quite accidentally, of course, until it wasn't.

They, even on public radio, can't resist the Pharoah metaphor, paint your wagon, paint your hieroglyphs, color your very own revolution. Naturally everyone who is anyone has something to expound upon. Naturally opinions are wildly disparate. That's why I didn't put my color choice to concensus, that's why I just chose. That is why I walked out of my workplace, having cleanly said my peace, my own little rupture, my own little revolution, despite the despair, how quietly liberating, to stand in front of the befogged wall of all that happens, and quake and shiver, and not to know which direction to take absolutely, so to choose, without choosing, to leave.

So then I left, and I spend a good deal of time dreaming, strange dreams without rancor, strange dreams full of water and sunlight.

Here, in the hereafter, things are not so mythological, they have heft, they are the bills that come due. They are the ironclad manifest of all that should have, could have, would have (if only this, if only that) been.

I still need to finish the trim in the kitchen, a sort of muted but not muddied kelly green, they call it herb garden. The ceilings are high and it's kind of a bitch, kind of a lot like revolution I'd suppose. You tape it up, strive to stay within the boundaries, when you can't you use what's available, spit and wattle and temerity.

As-Salamu alaykuma

May God be with us all.

Plus ca change

So I missed my flight, after a long night of drinking with my ex-husband's best friend.

That was weird and good, I guess, mostly.

So on the phone with the airline, after texting the Most Organized Person in the World, who texted back that she just spit up half her beer, it was nine. AM. Their time. I flew first class to Cabo San Lucas for a week. It was the best week, ever. It's a tale for another time, it's long and tangential, but if you are fortunate enough to be beloved and be beloved amongst your beloveds, please don't miss it, come hell or highwater, jump that flight, drink champagne, then mix some drinks, lay out, talk and talk, talk and talk, watch for whales, beneficent, talk until the tequila runs out, then talk some more, get tan, fall in love with your old friends all over again.

So then you disembark, radiating sunshine and a week with eight girls (women, I guess) and you cab home through the dismal weather of the Pacific Northwest, and you go back to work, resynch that stupid clock and continue on until Friday. When something is notably amiss, as in who is that girl? Whose rabbit hole did I just fall into, am I fired, what the fuck?

I was sitting in a meeting planning our summer picnic when the axe I was anticipating fell.

Let go. "we really like you."

The day before the winter party that I had planned, I was disinvited. That stung, a lot.

So all that good vacation like so much wasted ether out the window. And then what, and then precisely what, what to do, where to go, what now? For god's sake what now.

I am four months shy of turning forty, which is not all that momentous, seems like I ought to seize or at the very least grapple something or someone, just for the moment, whatever that might be. Pinion, that's a good word.

I got good and stuck, I've been good and stuck, come'on then, unstick me me, up where, up where we'll ride and rein the clouds, slip past Nertiti and her long neck, up to the stars, as hungy as they are, hungry and blythe.

How many dragon teeth or olyphant ivory would I trade for a pair of strong arms, a million or so, if only I believed that such a thing were real.