![I was in Palm Springs, amazed at the rage of a freak rain that filled those streets with water, flooding for lack of drains & having absolutely no place else to go… except back up into the sky once the sun came out to dry it. & it did. Meanwhile, we drank date shakes in the desert. We drove around in sprawling squares listening to Gram Parsons & real country radio. We bought watercolors after dark & painted on the hotel bed while the television set played commercial ads broken now & then by brief stints of programming. I opened beer bottles on the coat rack, floated across a warm pool on my back staring at the mountains.
Then I was in San Francisco for awhile, long enough to wrestle a traveling flu to the floor. You do this by sleeping each time the exhaustian finds you & drinking more tea than you want to, moving less than think you ought to. I wore a Halloween costume Matea made: The Oil Spill, all green felt fishes w/little Xed out eyes & blue clothes head-to-toe marred in black ink. Then gone again.
& I was drinking a terrible coffee in a beautiful cafe on the banks of the St. Croix River, near a public library the size of a greeting card aisle & trees w/no leaves & lakes half-frozen over & trembling in a wind that sees only the autumn states outside California in preparations for winter. There was a memorial in the morning, & that was sad… because we are unfortunate animals who understand goodbyes. But we said them anyway & stuffed memories in our pockets, & together went off toward some kind of tomorrow. Just before my birthday, I was back on an airplane. The world I saw outside my window never seemed so lovely or uncontained.
[photo note: a friend kindly sent me his collection of short stories, which i read in an appropriate setting]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbjd1eYMTs1qz7avgo1_500.jpg)
I was in Palm Springs, amazed at the rage of a freak rain that filled those streets with water, flooding for lack of drains & having absolutely no place else to go… except back up into the sky once the sun came out to dry it. & it did. Meanwhile, we drank date shakes in the desert. We drove around in sprawling squares listening to Gram Parsons & real country radio. We bought watercolors after dark & painted on the hotel bed while the television set played commercial ads broken now & then by brief stints of programming. I opened beer bottles on the coat rack, floated across a warm pool on my back staring at the mountains.
Then I was in San Francisco for awhile, long enough to wrestle a traveling flu to the floor. You do this by sleeping each time the exhaustian finds you & drinking more tea than you want to, moving less than think you ought to. I wore a Halloween costume Matea made: The Oil Spill, all green felt fishes w/little Xed out eyes & blue clothes head-to-toe marred in black ink. Then gone again.
& I was drinking a terrible coffee in a beautiful cafe on the banks of the St. Croix River, near a public library the size of a greeting card aisle & trees w/no leaves & lakes half-frozen over & trembling in a wind that sees only the autumn states outside California in preparations for winter. There was a memorial in the morning, & that was sad… because we are unfortunate animals who understand goodbyes. But we said them anyway & stuffed memories in our pockets, & together went off toward some kind of tomorrow. Just before my birthday, I was back on an airplane. The world I saw outside my window never seemed so lovely or uncontained.
[photo note: a friend kindly sent me his collection of short stories, which i read in an appropriate setting]
