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A bit of leftover JournalCon stuff: Even though I’ve got enormous dark circles under my eyes and a nose that seems to go on forever, Kymm’s got apparently the only picture of me at JournalCon where I do not look like ‘Mountain of Journaler’ (TM JenFu, who was not talking about me, but I’m borrowing it because it’s appropriate). Man, that was a completely awkward sentence, but you know what I meant.
A bit of Bix Trivia, Kymm’s also got a picture that shows my hotel door, as she was staying in the room across the hall from mine. That’s my room 704 right there next to the fire box (which is where I would set my Venti Mochas while I dug for my keys in my bowling bag purse) and across from the Three Pictures Of Floral Vomit. And tell me, does that hotel NOT give off The Shining vibes? Seriously. If you stare at that picture long enough, a big flood of blood might come rolling down the hall.
I’m feeling much better. Still a little fragile, but Esteban reports that my ‘color’ is back. Apparently, I was a bit Victorian for the past three days, sans bustle and corset however. The miracle that is juice and chicken soup. I don’t care what anyone says, I believe almost ridiculously in the power of 100% juice. I drank 64 ounces yesterday, in addition to constant water. I’m surprised I’m not in a diabetic coma now. Maybe the color that is back is really just cranberries. Go juice!
Of course, the 12 plus hours of sleep last night probably helped as well. I woke up and demanded pancakes, which was a good thing because I haven’t been hungry recently and my jeans continue their downward pull off my hips. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I hope it sticks. I may try on the small pair of jeans that hasn’t fit in five years today. I’m feeling optimistic. Well, maybe not. Optimistic is not the same as insane.
It’s dark and rainy this morning. I headed out to the farmer’s market alone but it was already past 11 and raining, so most of the farmer types had long packed up. The folks left had mostly been picked over. I really only wanted a butternut squash, some honey crisp apples, and a nice pumpkin to carve Martha Stewart-esque leaf shapes into, but I walked out of there empty handed. Maybe next weekend I can haul myself out of bed in a timely manner. GD sloth. It’s such a pain in the ass deadly sin.
Then I met Esteban at the local ‘home style’ diner so I could have my weekend pancakes, as is my nature. Or three bites of pancake, which is really closer to the truth. I have big intentions in the morning, but I’ve never really been able to commit to them, honestly. You wouldn’t think by looking at me that I would leave so many half-finished plates of food in my wake, but it’s true. I’m a horrible wasteful thing. I think that might be a deadly sin as well, but at least I’m not gluttonous. Or not with pancakes, anyway.
After breakfast, Esteban went off to work because he is very industrious. I, on the other hand, scampered to Seroogy’s, because I have been craving their seasonal caramel apples like nobody’s business. I will likely have one for dinner. I’m a shameless hussy with their caramel apples. The caramel is homemade. Or ho-made, as they tend to write on their labels. Freaking gah. They’re still incredible so I suck up my abhorance of all things cutesy and buy them anyway. I picked up half a pound of original dark chocolate cashew ‘snappers’ (like turtles, but, you know, NOT) for Esteban, as it is his birthday tomorrow. He wants to go shopping together for his present next week sometime, but I wanted to be able to give him something tomorrow. I also impulsively purchased a raspberry truffle for myself to eat in the car, but I ended up taking one bite and then spitting it back out because it just wasn’t that good. What’s up with that? Spitting out perfectly good chocolate. I don’t recognize myself anymore.
I had a dream last night that I woke up and all of the leaves were gone, leaving tree skeletons that made eerie screams when the wind blew through them. I hate that moment, the almost imperceptible moment when the autumnal color has peaked and the leaves are falling unnoticed and there is more bare than tree up there.
Thus, I went for a drive because while it is dark and rainy, it’s such a perfectly beautiful quintessential autumn day that I just wanted to inhale it all. You can almost hear the sounds of a slowing tick tock as the season comes to a close. The rain makes the leaves stick on the road, as though some grand aesthetician has pasted them just so, and my tires on the road made sort of dither sound, spitting with the rain. It’s such a juxtaposition compared to last weekend in San Francisco where it is sunny and hip and bright and everything is very populated and molded by humanity and built to accommodate thousands of feet rushing over it.
Here, everything is very modest. The environment threatens to overtake everything if you’re not careful. It will consume you, in one way or the other. There are probably more animals than people. The landscape is incredible, barren and dispersed but also somehow lush and giving. This is what molds us. This is what gives us our stereotypical Midwestern friendliness. This is what sets us apart, good or bad. Something in the land, in the way that the silos stand sentry over us, season by season. Something in the way that squat little barns, the womb of any farm, huddle apologetically amidst the farmhouses and cows. And cows. And cows and cows and cows. Something in the way a dog will run, tail wagging, up a long driveway to see if you belong to him. Something in the way that sumac, the most plebian of weeds, becomes a roadside ditch peacock and reminds us that things that are beautiful are sometimes poison too. Something in the way we settle in, like it or not, until we’ve worn a groove into the earth. And we belong. We belong to this strange often-ridiculed land, the butt of jokes we don’t even understand, far more than it belongs to us. It’s the soil in which our family trees grow. It’s beneath our fingernails. That’s Wisconsin. That’s my Wisconsin.
It’s almost a given that I’ll hurl out a big introspective entry whenever I go for a long solo drive on a Saturday. It really begs the question’ does the drive cause the mood or the mood cause the drive. Gah.
