About A Ball

Oh hi. It's Friday and I don't have anything to say. I haven't read anything or watched anything or heard anything or done anything good lately (with the exception of red wine and spicy almonds at Box Social with Trish the other night—which was a kinda chocolate sauce on the top of my boring week). Besides that, though, all I can do is live vicariously through Lefty and hope I stumble upon one of life's unmolested softballs to dig my own teeth into, ya know?

Stay Home

Think of a reason (mine was out of town visitors), and take your reason wandering all over your town—eating, drinking, crossing back and forth over bridges and walking up dusty trails. Leave behind all semblance of budgeting and schedule restrictions. Buy 5 dollar almond-milk lattes at Heart without a care. Spend hours sitting around a wooden kitchen table drinking pine-scented cocktails and just, ya know, talking. Make a list of every restaurant you ever wanted to try in Portland and knock ’em off, one by one. Drop face-first into bed exhausted every night after so much walking and so much sun. It's what they call a "staycation" I guess. It's what I did last week. And it was SO good. No airports, no train rides, no itineraries. Just good friends, sun-toasted days, and my very own bed at the end of the night.

Wild

I just read this poem and suddenly knew that I HAD been riding too long in cars and that I SHOULD probably get a horse and that I NEEDED to be full of public joy much more often and that it was HIGH TIME to be riding through orange groves in the dust and heat of southern Spain. Do you ever feel like that?

Wild

By Stephen Dunn

The year I owned a motorcycle and split the air in southern Spain, and could smell the oranges in the orange groves as I passed them outside of Seville, I understood I'd been riding too long in cars, probably even should get a horse, become a high-up, flesh-connected thing among the bulls and cows. My brand-new wife had a spirit that worried and excited me, a history of moving on. Wine from a spigot for pennies, langostinas and angulas, even the language felt dangerous in my mouth. Mornings, our icebox bereft of ice, I'd speed on my motorcycle to the iceman's house, strap a big rectangular block to the extended seat where my wife often sat hot behind me, arms around my waist. In the streets the smell of olive oil, the noise of men torn between church and sex, their bodies taut, heretical. And the women, buttoned-up, or careless, full of public joy, a Jesus around their necks. Our neighbors showed us how to shut down in the afternoon, the stupidity of not respecting the sun. They forgave us who we were. Evenings we'd take turns with the Herald Tribune killing mosquitoes, our bedroom walls bloody in this country known for blood; we couldn't kill enough. When the Levante, the big wind, came out of Africa with its sand and heat, disturbing things, it brought with it a lesson, unlearnable, of how far a certain wildness can go. Our money ran out. I sold the motorcycle. We moved without knowing it to take our quieter places in the world.

Positively Waikiki

I'm a human animal in need of a vacation. And lately, my mind's been on Waikiki. I went there around this time a few years back and it was an effortless trip that kinda just stuck with me.

I'm not saying I'm gonna go again—all I'm saying is that I've been thinking about the place, about the way the pineapples tasted there—perfumey, about how the sun felt all over my skin as I lay there on my towel listening to the waves roll in, about the sunsets with the soft sweet air, and about those open air restaurants with the teak ceiling fans slowly turning—circulating the sea breeze just like they did back in the days of the Tokyo Rose.

It's nice to think about that stuff, isn't it?

Partly Leaves

What a morning, eh? The kind of morning that makes you want to drink coffee out of doors and brush the shit out of your pets until big wafts of hair make cirrus clouds over your lawn.

Aaaanyway, working now, but I read the below passage recently, about how road trips can sometimes make you feel—inside  a car, but all connected with everything. I'm ready for a road trip, like, now!

"I could feel the road entering me, through tire, wheel, spring, and cushion; shall I not have intelligence with earth too? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself?—a man of infinite horsepower, yet partly leaves. "—E.B. White