what's better than a Dragon

i used to think there was nothing better than being a Libra, but certainly being born in the Year of the Dragon can only make that cake sweeter.

think about it.  a Dragon really is the shit, seriously large and in charge.  shimmery, scaly, slow but deathly precise, alternately silent or terrifyingly deafening when need be, fiery, mysterious and just pretty much straight up superior...you kinda don't want to run into one, but then again you kinda do in which case you just want to stare and be transfixed by it and think holy shit, i hope that thing doesn't look too closely at me and then when it does, you're preeetty dang sure you've never seen anything as mortifyingly gorgeous, right before it comes down from its mountain perch in one fiery swoop and then i'm not really sure what happens after that.  it either utterly destroys you, in which case, what does it matter, or it scoops you up onto its massive back between silver or gold or purple wings and flies you off to some super magical land where you'd much rather be anyway.  

i don't have a problem with that.  

here's to the Dragons.  happy Lunar New Year.

cross wide end over narrow

about two months ago, i stopped thinking.

a lot of people expect me to say that i stopped drinking when i start out like that, but i can't really drink anyway, so what would be the point?  two drinks and it's more than a solid nauseated sort of night for yours truly, so no, i'm not talking about grey goose sprites and lemon or maybe malbec maybe syrah maybe a nice blend, you know?    

BUT

you see, two months ago, i realized that many of my anxieties comes from overthinking and rethinking and eatsleepwalkrunjumpthinking and just always always always thinking and then those thoughts from thinking reach/sink from your mind into your belly twisting it all around tight and small in there making you want to right away straight puke into the face of the next person you see in front of you and from there that poison reaches out of your belly, grabbing your shoulders tight from the inside with these long skinny invisible anxiety skeleton arms, and it's a miracle that you can get off of your chair to look out the window and maybe raise your face to the sun for a minute, those invisible, cold, anxiety skeleton arms reaching up from your gut and grabbing your shoulders and all, so, as you can see, it all had to come to a definitive end - somehow.

i read some line somewhere in one of the endless self-help books i [used] to be addicted to that you can stop any destructive thought by thinking something along the lines of, "i don't need this piece of shit thought cluttering up my mind right now, so thanks but no thanks and now just beat it"  well, evidently, i became so aggressive in my use of actually saying that line that my mind decided to not think at all, lest it be chastised for thinking too much about whether or not i really should have dessert after dinner say, or where whoever really was if they really were there at the time they said they were there.  and p.s. that self-help book addiction is a straight up legit addiction, so kindly keep your sneering mockery to yourself, please - evidently, mass numbers of Americans fork over exorbitant amounts of money every year to slurp on whatever the next Deepak Chopra has to say about the current and always state of Happiness, which is, evidently, that it's all in our minds anyway.

so, just like that.  not a peep of overthinking thoughts coming from this head now, two months and counting.  people tell me that this newly induced close-to-meditative, perpetual state is probably a rather advantageous place from which to begin any number of successful endeavors, but i don't seem to have gotten the hang of it yet.  what the f am i supposed to do from here?  run for president, run a revolution (calm down, big brother), write a book, feel fulfilled, take a pet, have children?  i'm really not sure what the logistics are on "next steps forward", so i wondered what Buddha would say.  i tried a search on "Buddha" and "thoughts", but just when i thought i really had the peaceful peacefulness of things going, this is what i came up with instead:

You see what you are thinking and feeling, seldom what you are looking at.


great.  do you know what that means, then???  absolutely NOTHING!

righteousness, a mighty stream

what with today marking the birth of one of America's absolute finest, i thought i'd take a moment to discuss the art of oratory.  earlier on with a friend, i dilemminized over whether or not MLK came up with his own words himself or if he had a speech writer in the wings - imagine all those years and replays and thousands of various deconstructions later and it turns out that the "i have a dream" speech was written by some scruffy hipster who just happened to land the "write" gig right out of college??  obviously, we decided this couldn't possibly be the case, but once again, we had to sadly face the fact that not only do we not have anyone cool to rally around and thank and lead a cause for us, but people just can't even speak for shit anymore.  we can't speak, we can't think, we can't do...   

i worried and worried until NPR played a few clips of King speaking frankly at some event he was at, before "I have a dream".  i don't know if it was scripted or spontaneous, but the whole short sentence of it practically brought me to my knees and so i realized, who cares??  the man was magic.  

abracadabra doesn't quite seem to do the trick anymore.  

money and underwear

an interesting thing happened this week that has never really happened before.  i began to run out of money at the same time that i began to run out of underwear.

by "run out" i mean that suddenly i realized how strapped i'd be until the next handout came along, as in not soon enough.  ruminating on this unsightly situation, i realized that over the past few days, i'd likewise really found myself digging around for the black hanky pankies.  now, i don't leave my house without a full face of makeup, bikram yoga be damned, or a pair of black thongs, so when things get low, it's really more than enough to get the nerves on.  i don't know exactly what happened, where they were getting lost, in transit or laundromats or overnight bags, or whatever the case might be, but there was a severe deficit, which also just happened to be the case right then with my dollar collection.

so there i was, scrounging for clean underwear and a quarter, when suddenly i realized that tonight i'd finally be able to do my laundry, AND, it's payday.

QUITE WARM, FATHER

this "winter" sucks and i hate how people are walking around all effusive in their love for this wimpy weather - hello???  it's almost January, it's NOT supposed to be nearly 60' out!!

when i was little, i used to play outside in the snow all the time.  since there was literally nothing else to do in the hills, i spent a lot of time alone in the woods trudging through snow up to my knees, making snow forts, snowmen, snow angels, sledding, slip-sliding across frozen waters and just generally freezing my ass off.  not only did our perpetual poverty at that time make ice-skates or really good slippery sleighs completely out of the question, it evidently also put the kabosh on real snow-wear: i remember just layering up pants and pants and pants over socks and socks and socks, which the snow and ice would inevitably make its way through, quite confidently at that.

regardless, i loved the snow.  at night, it would sparkle like nothing less than magic under the moon and stars, and every snowfall had a special signature of its own.  sometimes it would leave thick white fluffy flakes that screamed "every day is Christmas!!!!!" or sometimes it would leave fine, gritty, nasty snow that would pelt you mercilessly in the face like a million tiny knives, but no matter which, they both sparkled like straight up fairy dust under any kind of light.  and it was cold, but being that everything was enveloped in this cozy white, it was somehow warm too, the odd way that only winter can make it.  

one of my favorite tales growing up was a Russian one about an evil stepmother (naturally), a spoiled stepsister, a meek father, and a perfect daughter who suffered tremendous grief at the hands of the first two.  to make a really great longer story short, the stepmother sends the good daughter out in the freezing Russian cold assuming that she'll quickly keel over and make life a lot easier for the rest of them, but when Father Frost comes along to the poor thing - i imagine he swooped and swirled down around her with his white, sparkling, shimmery robes - snapping and crackling his fingers to make it even colder out and asks, "Are you cold, my dear?", she responds, "QUITE WARM, Father."

Frost keeps it up, snapping his fingers all mad crazy making it colder and colder, yet each time she lets him know that she's just snug as a bug, even though her teeth are practically chattering right out of her head.  finally, he gives in, and, evidently impressed with the strange tenacity of this poor little peasant girl, wraps her kindly in all sorts of fine furs and sends her home atop a chest full of other precious goodies to boot.  of course the nasty stepmother eventually gets her very sad due, and i imagine that the snow maiden went on to lead a very posh and fantastic life afterwards - most likely in the south of France.

  

rêves de lavande

the problem with myself is that i have always been a dreamer.  now, i understand that the first step to accomplishing anything in life is probably to have a dream, but it seems that my own general issues come from actually stepping out of the dream world and making things happen in real life, so if you're looking for me, you'll find me having tea in LaLa Land.

currently, i live in a shared space in Brooklyn.  i do love my cozy little quarters, but it's a FAR cry from the grand, airy, stone villa in the south of France surrounded by fields of waving lavender that i always imagined to be my official place of residence since the time i learned to read and figured out there had to be sexier rural settings than upstate NY.  Paris would be a few hours removed through a pleasant drive in my small Renault or Peugeot, or top-of-the-line, latest BMW hybrid suv, which would be just fine, too.  in this version of my dream, my trunk would be packed with fragrant cheeses, some crusty breads, fresh picked field flowers and a fine Bordeaux to share with my Parisian city-amis, where i would switch up all those fresh trunk goodies for some equally nice city goodies, say shoes and shirts and scarves and dresses and eccentric hand jewelry, from the Marais.  on the way home, i'd call my stable-keep on my cute, non-smartphone Euro-cell to get my finest Arabian mare ready, as we'd be going on a long trail ride when i returned, me with my velvet-lined black riding hat (which i really do already own, in anticipation) topping off the rest of my finely tailored riding threads.  after that ride, i'd take a light meal consisting of cream-and-wineish something on my stone patio overlooking a fine Provencian valley, where i'd sit and wonder, in my now fluent French, how everyone back in the States is doing, being that, why not, i could think about them from time to time.  a perfect breeze would toss my hair lightly about my shoulders a little then as i checked my watch (in Europe, i might wear a watch.  a nice dainty silver one picked up somewhere in the back streets of Paris) and figured that right then would be as good a time as any to take an early evening dip in my perfectly unobtrusive pool before heading out for the night to a small theater production in Aix.     

wow.  coming out of that one back to the reality of Williamsburg sure ain't no Parisian Picnic, but you know what?  I'd like to take a moment to think of and thank Thoreau here, with his seriously-Frenchy sounding last name: "Go," he said, "confidently in the direction of your dreams."  

i'm goin, buddy, i'm going. 

sand

this dumb Christmas season really has me up in arms.  there's a girl i know, sort of a colleague, who i started to mad-respect a while ago, who then became an amazing, first-rate friend.  i love it when that happens, as it really almost sort of never does these days.  anyhow, she was the only one i really wanted to get a gift for this year - other than for my nearest and dearest, of course - so i've had my eye out for a while, but i have to admit, i am just NOT a good gift-giver.  finally, i bought her a little glass perfume bottle like the kind my mom used to fill with rose oil when i was a kid and filled it with a little bit of sand from the Sahara desert that i keep in a glass Coke bottle from the time i was there.

what a time that was.  the Sahara is like practicing tantric yoga by accident, those flowing creamy dunes for as far as the eye can see.  you're in the midst of this grand white silence, gazillions of tiny pieces of rock from time inconceivable blasted into particulars so minute that if you swallowed one you'd probably never ever ever even notice, yet get gazillions of them together and you might be saying good night forever in the face of some of those.

sand is just no joke.

you know what else i like about it?  take one tiny particle of sand at the west end of a beautiful beach somewhere.  now, imagine another, similar-minded, gleaming particle of sand on the east end of aforementioned beautiful beach somewhere.  technically speaking, these two wouldn't have a chance in heaven, or the Universe, or whatever Nirvana it is that particles of sand subscribe to, being, in this instance, significantly separated by both distance and mass [those gazillion of other particles of sand], but look at it like this:

- first of all, they're not really separated.  yes, they might have a gazillion other little particles of sand pressed between them, but being that they're all pressed so tightly together that you might as well not even count that space, does it all even matter then?  it's like they're already pressed up, one against the other.

- secondly, if you don't want to look at it like that, consider those two same particles in the following fashion: let's say they really are separated the west from the east end, with a gazillion other particles of obnoxious sand in betwixt.  well, the beauty of sand is that it's always shifting.  one day, it might be on a dune in the Sahara, and the next it might be making out with the sea.  granted, perhaps i'm taking a bit of time-lapse liberty here, but i'm sure you get the drift (PARDON the pun).  ANYHOW, along those lines, in terms of constantly shifting sand, and time and earth and all of that, who's to say that those two luckless particles of such-separated sand might not just end up running into each other like it's all out nobody's biz?  just like that, and then it wouldn't even matter if there had previously been a gazillion other particles of sand in between them or not, if there had been a whole world or an ocean, it just wouldn't matter because right then, there, now, or at least for that moment, they'd be together.

i met someone so very very very dear to me at a place called "Ammos", or "sand", in Greek.  being a person who has to read into the metaphysics and further symbolism of every breath and step i make in life, i've long pondered the meaning of meeting at such a place, and now, some time later, i finally understand.

fuck, i love sand.  it's so tiny, yet so grand, and all of that into one tiny glass perfume bottle.

here is some sand stuck to my toes after i went to the beach right after a pedicure.

merry Christmas, Jess.