Random Free Flow Balderdash

So, I feel lately that I am floating through life in a creativity bubble.  I’m seeing the world through an artist’s eye, my mind giving all a dreamlike patina that is pleasing to my sensibilities.  However…nothing will coalesce into something tangible.  With that in mind, I found myself with extra time to drive through the Metroparks to work today and holy gorgeous, Batman, it was fantastical.  I parked, I walked a little, I snapped some pictures, and I jotted down whatever randomness popped into my head.  This is what I got.

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Being alone outside is one of my all time favorite things

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I was looking so closely at the sky through my phone to get this picture that I slipped on a muddy slope and almost tumbled down a big ass hill. When I was done laughing at myself for an idiot, I remembered coming here with the kid a few years ago.  We crashed around through the woods, skipped stones in the hidden creek, climbed some trees.  As we hiked to the top of this hill (insanely popular in the winter time for sledding) we figured, hey let’s roll down it, because why not.  Giggling and gasping, end over end, on the second roll I forgot to hold my feet tightly together and my ankles clacked together hard enough to loose a yell of OUCH into the quiet air.  That earned me nothing but a mouthful of grass.

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Recalcitrant teenagers need compassion and a firm hand, she reminded herself, not angry faces or over indulgence.  You can recognize their feelings without validating them.  ~snicker~ good thing he couldn’t care less about what I write in general as I’m pretty sure he’d be pissed I put his picture here (he’s also making a face, his face isn’t really crookedy)

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Sometimes when I drive through the valley in the mornings, spring sun gilding the tops of the bare tree branches and DJ Drez spinning his super sweet yogic beats, I can’t help but think of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and see graceful ninjas float-running on tiptoe across the tree tops, arms outstretched, finger tips pointing towards the horizon…

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The last thing that I wrote down, completely apropos of nothing, was “I’ve never sung karaoke.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone do it, either.”  I have no idea where that came from.  I bid a beautiful day to you all 🙂

This post brought to you by Jahta Beat: A Path to Light by DJ Drez.  And my rambling brain.

No Photographs, Please

“No, don’t take my picture!’  She batted his phone away, giggling but serious.  “I’m like Dorian Gray.”

 

He stopped trying to hold her still and stared.  “What?”

 

“Dorian Gray.  He’s an Oscar Wilde character,” she began before he interrupted her.

 

“I know who Dorian Gray is, asshole.  I meant what, like what the hell do you mean you’re like him.”

 

“Oh.  Ha.  Um, I mean that the camera doesn’t really give a shit about the details behind the details and it just shows your ugly bits.  Like, it’s all haha look at those wrinkles, but it doesn’t know if they’re from laughing or smiling or scowling.  It has no idea the circles under my eyes are from being up the past three nights with a pukey kid.  It just says, hey, freeze frame this moment so she can forever remember the giant zit on the middle of her nose.  Plus, I look like a dude in pictures.”

 

He laughed so hard at that he had to curl on his side.  “What,” he gasped, “are you talking about?  You don’t look anything like a dude.”

 

She punched him in the arm.  “I do too,” she insisted.  “Strong jawline, strong nose, big forehead.”  She flexed her muscles.  “Like a dude.”

 

“You’re so stupid.  Also, you’re starting to make me uncomfortable.”

 

She heaved out a heavy sigh and flopped back onto the pillows.  “What’s your problem now?”

 

She sat back up and gave him the hairy eyeball.  “What makes you think I have a problem?”

 

“Your body language.”

 

“Oh yeah?”  She grinned, flipping her arm behind her head and hunching over, bent at an odd angle.  “What does my body language say now?”

 

He grinned back at her.  “That you can be flexible and deflective at the same time.”

 

It felt good to laugh along with him, so she did.  “Seriously, though.  Don’t take my picture.”

 

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I told my kid the other night that I was giving him the hairy eyeball because he kept ignoring my directive to wash the damn dishes, already.  This prompted much too much thought about this weird saying and having it stick in my head, so I stuck it in here instead.

Oh, and while trying to look up the origin of the saying, I found out there apparently is a condition that actually causes HAIRY EYEBALLS.  There’s pictures….http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2256639/Hairy-eyeball-Rare-limbal-dermoid-causes-Iranian-man-sprout-hairs-eye.html

 

Burn for me

 

 

 

 

 

You could never love me enough

 

I want you to drown in it,

revel in it,

as your head goes under the waves

 

I want it to burn in your gut,

to flame through your eyes, and your fingers,

your skin reflecting the glow of a thousand embers

as you reach for me

 

You could never love me enough,

there is no such thing

The Elusive Perfect Moment

Last night, I got a perfect moment.

Everyone gets a handful of these in life; Anne Rice’s vampires talked about them, Salinger, Terry Pratchett.  We all know they exist.  I used to worry about only recognizing them in hindsight, but over the years I have continued to practice the whole Being Present thing and I feel like I’ve made some headway in being aware of moments as they happen.

Our living room tv, after over a decade of service, finally passed on.  Well, it’s kind of haunting us actually, as it will continually turn itself off and on for no reason and we can’t move it out til garbage day.  Everything in our house is haunted, I swear – the Haunted Collector would have a heyday.  Or a heart attack if he actually saw something that wasn’t scripted….ahem…(ever see the one where a little cermaic giraffe pokes his head around a corner and then slides across the floor?  Hi-LAR-ious).  This leaves a tv in my bedroom and one in the kid’s room.  Since his room isn’t set up for cable service, it meant that if he wanted to watch the new episode of The Walking Dead he would have to come and hang out in my room and watch it.  15 year old boys are elusive creatures.  They love their moms but need their space.  When they feel like hanging around you they will and when they don’t they won’t.  Apparently the thought of not watching zombies and having psychological discomfort before bed outweighed any need for space and at nine o’clock he came and stole a spot on our bed.

We turned the lights off and each staked out our third of the bed.  The show started.  Craziness and blood and guts and distress and starving zombies.  My left elbow was just resting against my dude’s side, my right elbow against the kid.  We got into a debate about whether or not they should have stopped to pick up a hitchhiker running down the road, begging them to stop.  They left him.  Twice. (Aside: my dude said nope, don’t know if it’s a trap, can’t trust anyone after all this time…I said, yup, you should always make an attempt to save another human if you can, and what if it was our kid and we had been separated, wouldn’t we want someone to stop and pick him up?  Boom…I still say I win this debate but I’m always interested to hear anyone else’s POV).  I love theoretical debates, way more than I enjoy discussing what we should have for dinner or listening to someone tell me they have no clean underwear and could I please do a load of laundry for the love of all that is smelly…..

Anyway, as we laughingly concluded our debate (which basically went, oh my god, would you shut up so we can actually watch it) I realized- I was having a perfect moment.  Comfortably snuggled under the blanket with my two favorite people on the planet, watching one of our favorite shows, bullshitting and laughing.  I was lucky enough to catch it while it happened, and smart enough to keep my mouth shut so I didn’t say something sappy and get shoved onto the floor in retaliation.

This morning was a typical Monday morning. I didn’t want to get up and get ready for work any more than the kid wanted to get up and get ready for school.  It’s cold, the car needed scraped off, work stinks and I have a ton of stuff I should do that I don’t feel like.  But at least for a little bit longer, I can carry the feeling of that moment with me and smile through the worst of it.  For that, I am grateful.

 

Behind a Podium

“The past cannot be cured.”

His hands gripped the sides of the podium and he forced a slow exhalation, relaxed them. He had requested the positioning of the spotlight so that he wouldn’t be able to make out specific faces in the audience, but a few shadowy visages eeked through.

“You are here tonight to hear what I have to say on the causality of decision making on potential futures. As a re-incarnate, and one bound outside the circle of seclusion, I have a unique perspective on the concept of past and present. I still, however, am not able to gaze into a crystal ball and tell your future.” There was a polite murmur of laughter. That would end soon enough. This next bit had a tendency to annoy his new listeners.

“People agonize over decision making. They fear and desire the option that they didn’t choose. At unhappy moments they pore over their memories, which, as an aside, are rarely as accurate as they believe, and try to pinpoint an exact moment, an exact choice, that they made incorrectly. I am going to tell you an unadulterated truth that I have discovered over the past six lifetimes. The majority of your choices will make no appreciable difference on the outcome of your life.”

He paused, not for dramatic effect, but to let the scoffing and the outrage wash over the crowd. People hated this bit. Their determined ignorance was growing to annoy him and he stifled the urge to explain to them that he wasn’t taking their money to tell them what they wanted to hear. If that was what they wanted then they could go find a fortune teller with a crystal ball. He was here to tell them what he knew.

“It’s true,” he began, raising his voice over the protests that were thrown back at him. “Just listen for a minute. Listen. Most days, whether you choose to wear a white shirt or a black shirt it isn’t going to affect your day. However, if you choose a white shirt, and then you also choose to buy a latte and it spills down your front while you’re running late on your way to work, it can affect your day. It can alter your mood, which in turn can alter your decision making, your interactions with others, even your sense of self if your sense of self is tied into your appearance. Now, this is an important bit. What would you have done differently, if you had known you would spill that latte? Picked a black shirt? Maybe you got a white chocolate mocha instead and the whipped cream would stain your shirt. Spend thirty minutes in your closet, attempting to think through every possible outfit collaboration available for the least likely to show a stain? Life, and chance, will thwart you at every turn.”

“This is not the bleak outlook it may seem to be on the surface. One lifetime, I made my choices based on the heart. One, I followed my head. One life I let chance take the wheel. One I lived for a desire of power. The fifth I lived only for beauty. And the sixth? I choose honestly. I am honest with myself about what I want, and with others about who I am.”

“In every single life that I have lived, I have felt pain and heartbreak, I have felt joy. I’ve laughed and loved, made love and fucked like a bunny. I’ve been happy and sad, gotten and lost things that I wanted, lost arguments and won fights. It didn’t matter what color shirt I had chosen that day, I was either going to spill something on it or I wasn’t. There was no lifetime that I ‘got right’, forgive the air quotes. No matter what I did, I didn’t ever get through one life without making wrong choices. I didn’t attain enlightenment or perfection; I hurt others, mostly by accident, lost my temper sometimes. But I lived. I made choices and abided by them and didn’t look back. The only things that changed were my surroundings, my trappings, my details.”

“I have learned that life should just be lived. This is a messy, arduous and beautiful process. Stop agonizing yourselves into anxiety attacks, stop wondering if you should or shouldn’t. Stop preparing. It doesn’t matter all that much in the long run. Tomorrow morning, instead of dithering around about this or that, remember that, already? You have entered the winter of your life.”

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In her first turn as Professor, SAM changed things up in the Master Class. To keep things interesting, last weeks chosen winners each had to pick the first line of a book for us to both begin and end our story with. Michael of Innocents and Accidents, Hints and Allegations chose Winter Journal by Auster You have entered the winter of your life and Tina from Not Just Another Mother Blogger chose Shadow of the Night by Deborah Harkness The past cannot be cured (I’m not familiar with this book but I really like the line)