As the Days get Warmer so too do my Words. (Gold Earring Theory Part II)

Although I did not wear gold earrings today, I felt as though I could have. Today was a t-shirt day. Now at 10:30pm I could still probably sit on the back steps playing the guitar and feel heat coming up through the concrete under my feet. Heat concrete, feet. That, my friend, is what gold is really about.
I woke up with a sore throat. But it was only on one side: Your left, My right. I squeezed a lemon at it. Then I got in a sour mood (was it the citrus?) I squeaked my way through a pot of tea, and finally got a friend to steal me a cup of coffee, but was I really breaking the law? My lack of gold earrings stirred about my face. I drank the coffee and began to feel just fine...

Does coffee count if you steal it? Who, other than A, will judge me if I drink coffee anyways? A always tells me not to drink coffee, but he doesn't give me convincing arguments.
I went to work all buzzed up and jittery. I was walking on shaky clouds. We played games on dry spring grass. A new student got the giggles. He laughed the whole time. His chuckling made me feel very successful. Mostly we mimed setting traps and falling into them.

After a sumptuous meal I found myself quite inexplicably forced into attending a potluck. We sat on a rug laid on a carpet, a volley of food piled up around our ankles. I was stuffed and thus refused everything but wine. I got very jolly and knocked down piles of plastic cups that Bryan built. He knocked down mine. We acted exactly like children.

(Note: At the restaurant a couple of really cute, small, french children turned to our table and announced "I have a cookie!" They were both very smug about it. Then then they started repeating themselves and adding nonsense words "I have a cookie mookie lookie dooky," "rooky tooky shooky pooky." We were being bombarded with "ooky" words. Streams of "sooky wookie looky zooky" poked our eyes and prodded our half drunk chai teas. Who taught them to do this? It was the most amazing thing that had ever happened!)

Back and forward in time now. In the strange apartment, on the floor, picnic adjacent, someone turned off the lights and we told each other of places we had been and would like to return to. My favorite was cape cod what with the coconut oil, roller blades, and salt water taffy.

I told a story about floating on my back in a lake. All I could see and feel was blue blue blue. It was like I was in the sky. To wrap up my theory on gold earrings I would like to put in one final thought --here amidst the blue sky. I guess living in Albuquerque is kind of like living in the sky. But you aren't weightless. There's something tugging at your ears.

Gold Earring Theory, Part I

I told myself stories as I looked in the mirror. The stories were about heavy eyes and a person who wore only one gold hoop earring. It looked so nice in the story that I tried on just one earring as well. My theory (as of today) is that one gold hoop earring only looks nice if you wear it out of necessity. If you wear the earring for the express purpose of melting it down for gold at some later and critical moment it will look beautiful. My thin gold-colored earring would cringe and smoke sickly puce if anyone tried to melt it down. It was obviously purposeless alone, so I put on both earrings instead.

"Wrapped in a dreamy state getting up was slow today."

The day was lazily hot and overcast. I wanted to bike languorously to work but ended up fighting wind, and trying to outrace mysterious cyclists dressed in black. I encountered tumbleweeds, swooping clans of pigeons, and dry warm dust. I took a path I'd never ridden before and stumbled upon the intersection of Don Quixote and La Mancha. "Huh!," I said, as I remounted my trusty steed (bicycle) and headed blindly back into the wind my cheap earrings clanking about my ears. I kept a suspicious eye out for windmills, but found none.

Todayism

Everything is Happening. And it's funny. The boy barked our warning and we stopped still, by the skate park. Holding hands, waiting for another signal. A dog barked at the boy, the boy barked, we started walking again, holding hands, as if we had been walking all the while.

I started a fire in the fireplace. I burned a lot of advertisements (in a variety of neon colored flames) before the wood caught fire. The wood caught fire! I thought about digging a fire pit with a stick in a hard flat clearing while it was raining. I thought about blowing on those precious bits of kindling and how the fire pit was not deep enough to stop the wind.



Everything is funny. My leg spasms when things are so funny that they are sad. Or so sad that they are funny. Or so sad/funny that they are beautiful. Everything is beautiful and easy.

The fire now, in it's very burned down state, reminds me of Christmas. That, and the colored lights. Both, together. I feel like it is Christmas eve. I am excited because I like laying next to the tree and smelling it. I also like to practice balancing while watching the fire. I have not practiced balancing since Christmas when I was eight. I used to balance for long periods of time in the living room, standing on small platforms with wheels (not limited to skate boards). I would pursue balance.

Today I am pursing health. I am stalking it. I am taking it to sleep with me, and drinking little bits of it, and putting my head over a hot bowl of it and breathing it in. I am taking brisk bike rides with it, I am putting it in the dishwater and rubbing it into my skin. I am considering constructing a small platform and labeling it "health." After I make it I will spend hours balancing on it in front of the fire.

There are so many things I could spend hours doing!




Why does Jesus holds up two fingers in the paintings? Because he is pushing a little blessing at you, bopping it along. His fingers are the paddle, the blessing is the Foosball.

I laughed so much when the blessing bopped Stef. She got three Yahtzee's in a row and couldn't stop shaking with joy. My stomach ached in horrible spasms of empathy. I was afraid I would stop breathing, or that Stef would keep on shaking, and then so would I. We would shake and shake and the fire would forget it was a fire. I would forget to balance, the blessings would wander off course, two dogs would be barking and we wouldn't know which one was meant to stop us or make us go.

Third Communion

Communion was made of magic, again. Even though everyone was sick and had been for weeks, even though I'd recently suffered a dramatic flesh wound, and even though a little yappy dog named Dooley had kept us up the night before Communion went off like a charmed fireworks.


Piles of firewood delivered themselves to our door (with a little help from our friend Dave and his truck), guests arrived bearing bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates, accordians, violins, guitars and harmonicas crowded into our living room, people I had never met before introduced themselves to me in the kitchen, little boys fell asleep on the couch, fathers suggested songs their sons might play on the banjo, Dooley (the little terror) settled into Stef's lap and never uttered a sound.



There were harmonies, covers, sailor songs, kazoo accompaniments, gospel solos, instrumentals, and breif strange acappella moments. I was watching the fire and listening to a song about Albuquerque when it hit me. I am someone who lives in Albuquerque and invites people to play music in her living room. I was shocked for a moment observing what my life had conspired to do with itself!



After everyone had swept themselves out of the house I lay for a while sleepily and wine(ely) on the couch, then tucked myself into bed. I woke up and in the same moment opened my eyes to see the moon peeking in my window. Then I stumbled into the kitchen to find some water and noticed with the same bright moon clarity that it was 4:44 in the morning. Before finally falling alseep again I mused on magic.

SEE THE MAGIC.

My Hand, My Window, The Breaking

Hey Edward Gorey, You're Really Great!

Today I spent a lot of time drawing wallpaper because I want to have a yoga class at my house on Wednesday morning. Um. That is, I drew the person doing yoga and then added wallpaper thinking: so this is what Edward Gorey does/did. My my my. I learned today that drawing wallpaper is a lot like going on a spiritual-spacial complicating journey into lines, ink, and the tendons in your palm. I enjoyed it and yet it make me quake. And my wallpaper is a total mess. Edward Gorey drew excruciatingly detailed and perfect little backgrounds on many of his pieces. I think this might make him a shaman. A journeyer into a more than passive realm.

I salute you Edward Gorey.

red hat in the morning.

I woke up to this.


Having arrived at night I didn't realize.




I'd checked out the stars, and they were pretty great.




But I didn't know that there would be an icy river, red rocks





and trees to climb.


It all came as something of a shock.