heat on, windows open

I've been really fucking happy lately. peaceful. peaceful with myself, peaceful with the universe. lotuses from dirt 'n shit. this sensation is shamefully rare for me. this time I'm trying not to feel immediately wary about what details I must be missing. 

*

it's black & white weather! my favorite of all the weathers! 

*

Montlake. ever consider what the dullest neighborhood in Seattle might be? or at least the most blandly pleasant? Montlake would be the bronze medalist, after Laurelhurst and Magnolia. 

there is a cloister of brugmansia versicolor outside the UW greenhouses! they've been considered extinct in the wild since March 2014. I did not know this until I tried to just find these guys on the internets. I love these trees. they conjure up idealizations of a fancy 1950's tiki bar. 

django django! these guys were so good and so young. perhaps I am merely old? not as elderly as the fellow in front of us, at least 70, dancing in a suit. 

this was here when I sat down on the bus tonight. I left it. 

self-portrait with teapot. i quite like the wristiness. 

"how false it is to say that love is blind. I could even judge her, I could condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer. but this was still the stuff of paradise because I was a god and I was involved with her in some eternal activity of making to be which was of sole and absolute value. and with her the world was made, nothing was lost, not a grain of sand nor a speck of dust, since she was the world and I touched her everywhere." Iris Murdoch 

the perpetual epilogue

I take the ferry a few times a year, usually alone, usually maudlin. it's where I can most feign anonymity. open water gives clarity: seeing the city from another angle, everything functional and linear, surrounded by people who are simply admiring the view without any weird emotional undercurrents. 

it was a gorgeous day. "starless" came up on shuffle. a toddler ran up and down the deck, avoiding his father, making everyone else smile. I stared into the sun and thought about what I need to do differently with my life. it was and remains pretty fucking obvious. 

*

everyone filed off the ferry at Winslow. an older man walking next to me glanced over a few times and then said "excuse me, but I have to tell you, you look very nice today." 

I was wearing a dress and heeled boots and had applied mascara to hide my swollen eyes. "thank you" I said. it caught me off guard. 

"striking, actually" he added. 

"thank you" I said again. "I really needed to hear that today." 

he wasn't being swarthy. his kindness and ability to not sense what the previous 24 hours of my life had involved was intensely, I dunno, empowering in a way- like, a reminder that I'm okay. I'm always, ultimately, okay. my internal dissonance and frustration and anger comes from involving myself with situations that aren't positive, and not getting out of them or being able to resolve them despite "knowing better." that's all my dischord ever is, really. 

...and fuck it. despite myself, I did look pretty good that day.

I walked ahead of him so he wouldn't see how much that affected me, and I cried like a dork. poignant tears: this is the first moment of the rest of your life, baby. 

and I walked up the street with my weepy waterproof-mascara'd self and impulsively bought fortune cookies from the bulk bin at Winslow's amazing grocery store. one of them: others will take notice of your positive attitude. 

and I found myself eating fortune cookies in the sun on a day-trip, watching seagulls, feeling better... 

the sunset that night. 

the valerian coffee grounds incident. 

shadows erupt from the light of my life. 

Fremont. this is a horribly framed image, but I really loved all the different textures and angles, and that fire escape thing, my god. 

I saw this downtown and immediately thought of "cups & cakes", that twee song from spïnal täp, and posted it on Facebook because it made me laugh, but after walking a few blocks I realized how this is funny to exactly no one else, so I deleted it. but it's still kinda funny to me. I imagine the naming process; did everyone converge around a table with tea and cigarettes and debate long into the night? I think of variations of that stupid Saturday Night Live skit: eggplants: neither eggs nor plants! I wonder if there was an argument over the ampersand. 

and then I was on a bus and saw the ad for the allergies. underneath it specifies the contact info to participate in clinical trials. but what was weird was that for the first few minutes that I stared at this i didn't notice the kitten as being part of the ad. i thought it was some nihilistic lonely is that why everyone's avoiding me? Seattle thing. I mean, what better ad to put on a Seattle bus in the darker seasons, really? 

the princess is the Entro-pea. 

"good sense does not always rule love." -Molière

the newer normal

gettin' lucky. wait... 

my old building is still not demolished. apparently the entire block will be uprooted. proposed in its place? 2 towers, one 7 stories and one 11, with about 500 residences and street-level commercial space... likely to be occupied by, like, a Pilates studio and a small-dog daycare. and there's already a Subway nearby, so maybe a pho place instead. I'm getting depressingly accurate at this. 

*

I threw a rotten pumpkin off this roof once. 

two nights ago I had a dream. I'm walking along this shiny orange metal ledge, at least 15 floors above a dark empty industrial street. it's the middle of the night. the ledge is illuminated quite brightly by lights attached to the building. a gleaming copper-colored dumpster is in my way. I'm already feeling intense vertigo and don't look down shit don't look down. I have barely any space to move around the dumpster so I hold onto it to steady me as I inch by, but it's fucking empty and as effectual in stabilizing me as grasping an empty carton of milk would be and suddenly it and I are slow-motion-falling off the ledge. I let go of the dumpster and think this is how I'm gonna die? seriously? a weird lazy lucidity takes over, hey you, make this a flying dream, but I can't. I grab onto the rough concrete wall of the building- no windows, only random bits of rebar. I'm holding on by two fingers and it can't last. if I let go of this I will definitely fall and die. there's nothing left to catch me. and I make myself wake up. 

*

points contemplated later: 1. didn't actually die, or get to that point. 2. letting go of garbage/useless shit, even if it was empty and beautifully hued. 3. narrow path of my favorite shade of brilliant cheerful orange... there was actually something rather fanciful and optimistic about this dream, in a fucked-up kinda way. 

and later that same morning I saw this. 

others, on recognizing the dissonance in

started it last night, completed it this morning: the first ill-fitting hat of the season. yarn's on sale at Jo-Ann's, y'all. 

blurriness secondary to rapacious croppage. the sky tonight was coquettish as fuck. 

15th & Republican. 

I started this scarf a few months ago and finished it earlier this week. this is therefore, technically, my first completed project of the fall. you know, fortunate folks and their chilled necks. 

I apologize for the lack of focus. Christopher Walken is inexplicably popular around these parts. my future-icon streetside stickery predictions: Kurt Russell fucking with his, um, garb (don't call it a wife-beater, shit! tank top? muscle shirt? that's somehow more offensive) when he's standing in the closet in Overboard. Michael J Fox and the gum on the bottom of his shoe from The Secret of My Success. the screenshot of when they're contemplating the anatomical computerific possibilities in Weird Science. any of these would be excellent pervasive-iconography, ye wily youths! enough with Christopher Walken. 

-sincerely, I'm Old, I Guess

"we were so very much in love.

and then, one day, he went away. 

and I thought I would die,

but I didn't. 

and when I didn't, I thought:

is that all there is to love?"

-Peggy Lee