Sometimes when you’re sitting amidst crazy confusion and stress and your phone at your desk just doesn’t stop ringing and you’ve got so many meetings on top of meetings that it’s simply impossible for you to breathe in between, sometimes, just sometimes, your brain rescues you and says “hey, look at this delightful thing”. I love my head some days. Some days it is a clueless stupid casaba sitting atop my shoulders but some days, this day, it is a lovely thing indeed.
My new favorite phrase is “ass plunder”. And you know what makes me giggle insanely? That in Jenfu’s Nibelung ring, this page is linked as ‘Weetloaf’.
It’s incredible outside. Absolutely incredible. At lunch, I could only drive around with one window open, then the other window open, then both windows open, then only the passenger window cracked halfway because it was just so nice outside that I wanted to suck it all up and never let it go for even a second, even though it was really cold driving around with both windows open at 60 mph. It was just so nice. I can’t even begin to tell you how nice it was and have been reduced to wanting to write the word ‘nice’ four hundred times so that you get the idea.
Sometimes my head is not such a very intelligent thing.
After I fled work at 8 pm, I drove home and then drove completely past my home, toward the Bay. A wildlife sanctuary lies between my house and the crook of the Bay and there is one delicious road that splits the sanctuary in two, like the cross-section of a sandwich, and there are enormous whitetail deer that hang out near the bluff overlooking that road. Inside the sanctuary, there’s a place where you can feed dried corn to the deer, a gallon bucket for $2, but the locals know that this is the real place to see the deer, after dusk when the sanctuary is closed, the deer come here for garden spoils, lettuce and other delicacies fed through crossing wires of the fence by eager hands. When I passed, Peter Gabriel going boom boom boom from my car speakers, ten heads with ten spiky hats turned in unison, their velvet earphones perking.
And then it was the shoreline. The sun was just setting, turning everything into pastels. The trees haven’t budded yet, still lining the road with ancient twig basket weaves and wardrobes of bramble. As the car zipped along the curvy rolly ziggy road, the Monte became a white bunny, scurrying through thicket, impaired occasionally by larger, slower SUV and Minivan farm rabbits hobbling along the run to the warren.
The water was open and clear. A few gulls played Battleship on the sand bar while the Canada Geese tried to convince them to play Stratego. The clouds were girls in pastel prom dresses twirling to Alphaville with awkward boys in white tuxedos. Finally the SUV rabbits hobbled off to their domestic pots of hasenpfeffer and left the single liquid lane to anyone with a twitchy nose and fast feet that felt up to the challenge. I scampered around the curves, between million dollar houses and tiny but noble Depression-era cabins, cowering in the shadow of yuppie vultures waiting to snatch up their plots for thousands per shore linear foot. Further up the peninsula, the clear water gave way to icebergs and finally one big glacial sheet floating three hundred feet off land, covered with mysterious mounds of white, where waves of ice crashed upon itself. Burial mounds upon hills upon snow upon ice upon cold clear perfect good water. And for a moment, just for a moment, my best most perfect wish would be to be a mermaid, to have ice water in my veins and a strong tail for swimming and I would simply flip myself out to the frigid rim and then slip underneath with barely a whisper and simply follow that sheet of frosted glass below the surface and the soft diffused light and frozen dits and dithers of icy Braille would show me the way up through the Lakes, backwards through the St. Lawrence and out to sea. This bunny would swim. Out where the world was waiting for me. The world was waiting. The world.
Instead, I motored up the escarpment, where there are tiny prehistoric trees the size of saplings growing on the rocky ledges and cave paintings near site of an enormous native massacre so bloody the site became known as Red Banks. Back through the trees so perfect for hasty escapes. The clouds were changing then, even then, as the sun sunk beneath Point Au Sable, three new jet contrails lit up in three parallel lines. The mathematical sign for The Same As. But then a fourth jet swam through the pastel scratches in the sky, making it not The Same As. Not The Same As. Not the Same. Someone was writing runes in the sky. The DJ announced the last dance by playing The Cure’s ‘One More Time’ and the clouds all clung to each other helplessly and tried to get a good feel over the layers of crinoline and tulle, finally dispersing in their parent’s station wagons as the chaperones turned down the lights. The road was liquid no longer, now a smokey slate and it was time for all smart bunnies to disappear into their holes. But it was a nice ride. Nice. Nice.
Nice.
Online Diaries has posted an interview with me here.
