My baby towers over the main man Dennis...

This day to myself

I started running again and now it calls to me everyday. I'm a much happier person in this state, though there've been times when i ran out of sadness, ran for exhaustion and a subsequent weariness nearly incapable of thought. But even then it was the antidote and i knew it; i used the negativity as fuel.

The sun has been unobstructed for days. I'm over it. My shoulders and neck are pink and hold my fingerprints where i touch for a few seconds, the pink slowly filling the white. I've drank so much water today i'm afraid i'll overhydrate or some such thing. Cathleen was telling me she'd been to the hospital one time for drinking too much of Eve's ale. Seems i'm always recovering from some water-stealing episode afoot~ running the trail along the lake, the tennis courts, or more recently pacing about the house with a bottle of chardonnay to myself. This a.m. i questioned whether last night's drunk was worth this morning's bright welcome. Good god! The sun was so bright! And did i drink and dial? I did...

I climbed out to a quiet house, Cathleen gone for the weekend to play with 50 thousand Burning Man carousers testing the melanin content of their skin. I can see the leather-hided new-agers of Los Angeles drawing mandala in the sand, or Berkeley beats discussing their latest trip over maté. Just the thought makes me wanna go hug my pillow.

I walked around with two cups of water, one for me and one for the plants. Spent some quality time with the herbs building up a chopstick and twisty-tie support system for the basil, which has dumbly outgrown its stem capabilities and flopped over like a dejected sunflower.

It was a tough day for decisions but i managed a call to a potential employer and surprised myself by declining the job, despite desperately needing the income. Hanging up i had a great sense of relief and had to pat myself on the back, and i did quite literally. It's a thing i started doing a few years ago, usually when ending a long hike or run, a personal yet stupid self-congratulation.

I decided to go spend a few dollars to celebrate the fact that no paychecks would be coming for a while longer still. Walking into the bookstore i realized it would be one of those shy days where making eye contact with people plays on the nerves. A pretty common affair for a hangover day. I fidgeted at the counter as the lady ran about the shop finding my book. I grabbed the new Josh Ritter and fumbled for payment acting like an underage kid at a liquor store. Remember when Michael J. Fox got that keg of beer in Teen Wolf? His canine eyes burning red, he leaned over the counter to say,"Give me, a keg of beer!" He was my hero after that...

Valerie summons Astaire and Kelly to her kitchen

It was a curious Saturday night with improvised cocktail concoctions in hand, playing a board game while pizzas baked in the oven. And that's when Val made her move donning tapshoes on the kitchen linoleum... The beautiful art of tap, slight inebriation and an air of nonchalance.
*Link on title

Ano Nuevo State Reserve

Scientists posit that primordial landlubbers crawled from the sea 700 million years ago... After three months at sea, wallowing alone in search of food and the passage of time, an elephant seal finds shore.
*Link on title

Half moon glowing yellow over the Oakland city skyline
I can see it from my bathroom window
Wondering who else is looking at it now

Tonight we're sitting on the couch watching the tele...
and passing a pint of ice cream between us
For a moment there as I gazed out the window
I almost got it...

Megalomania strikes at Circuit City!

What seemed another above-average day in our normal, yet above-average happy lives... became something quite different. There was a sloppy sky overhead terribly uncertain of itself. Am i sunny? Am i cloudy? It was clueless. Our bedcovers looked quite the same, disheveled and lost over the edges. We could've powered our home were my night's nocturnal revolutions harnessed. I like a good toss from time to time.

Everything began quite the same... crossword and coffee in bed, finally beat that fucking Washington Post which had been testing our crossword abilities as of late. I made a slow uncomplicated meal of bacon and potatoes and eggs and melon, plenty helpings of coffee. Finally struggled out of the house after noon. Then began the mad escapade of boxstore hopping, staring up at riddled walls of tele screens looming in lens like umptagonal bug eyes. And the white noise surround sound began its number, and our eyes shifting like tweekers, and the pockmarked faces of salesboys in overwashed hand-me-down staff shirts. Emeryville almost ate us!

The day ended in epic fashion with a three-hour Circuit City stint where i bore witness to the amazing shopping strength of Cathleen. Pen and pad in hand chronicling the pros and cons and picking the minds of multimedia zombies. I couldn't believe her stamina and articulate grace when asking about analog v. digital and tuner types and contrast ratios, meanwhile weighing consumer reports on her handy laptop popups. Fucking amazing!

And as the sun set on the city of Emeryville, which should NOT have its own zipcode, we rode away with a 37'' inch flatscreen and somehow shining guiltless of the grand venture.

as if to say... I really love those Seattle Mariners... wanna
make something of it?

Painting and the Art of Happiness

We took on a sum of white walls yesterday... the glowing morning light playing through the windows, music through the french doors and our brushes sticksticking with pastel paint. Blue tape borders and us between in our least favorite rags laying down paint on tiptoe and knee.

For past years i've been tied in thought, torn by the process of decision making, under the small weight of having little to go on. I've been happy yet uninspired, unmotivated, driven by nothing more than my personal want of feeling as such, making my own world and feigning any solid understanding of what exactly i'm doing in it. In part, due to some missteps but moreover simple advents of craziness that i wouldn't pin to any notion of fate or even coincidence. Some downright strange occurrences that i'd like to accept just as are.

It would be hard to claim any discontent, though there has been struggle. Somehow i've stayed up all along and still lingers a sense askance Would i have stayed on my feet much longer? Cos i found something and now with previous direction recoursed it's hard to compare anything, hard to remember what i was doing and to where i was going.

When i first met Cathleen and we were making a telephone plan to get together, i suggested some dumb logistical struggle that might impede our union... and she told me in a matter of words, that we are in control of most everything, and that's the bottom line. That thought really drew me, and i guess in retrospect how could it not? And yet there are times, many of them happy, when i stop and look around wondering, how can i possibly take credit for what my life holds? So many of these things have been beyond my ability and rather occurred of their own. And why would i assume my own control in things and, why would it matter if i weren't?