Check this out. Makes it sound easy sometimes and boy, it isn't.
["There are no mistakes in relationships" ... whoops ... thanks for numerous readers pointing out all the mistakes and typos in this text. ]
All about texture. I hate uniform texture in food. I like something slippery with something crunchy with something sticky with something bubbly -- none of these all-one-texture-foods for me please. Maybe I could mix ice cream and M&M's and crumbled up graham crackers and red licorice ... hmm, I'll have to try that. Oh, shit, now I'm thinking of chocolate covered cherries -- the crunchy shell of the chocolate, the runny inside of the cherries. Ahhhh!
Simply getting to church takes a bit of work to get faces washed, shirts tucked in, kids out the door and then when you finally get there ... you sit with the other people and you hear the music and you say the words and you start to think of your week and if your heart was kind enough or if you could have done more and then you remember why you are there. And you're so glad you bothered.
Especially nice is to send quiet prayers down the pew, across the aisle, out the door, around town, off to the state capital, out to Logan and get them winging far and wide. Did you feel it this morning, guys? Did you feel me praying for you? Like little carrier pigeons headed your way.
We trust our senses -- sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste -- for no good reason. We see curves we want. We touch hair sometimes surreptiously, if we get the thrilling chance. We ask for a dance and know we want not to see the artful steps of a partner, but rather languish in the close perfume of him or her. Just to hear that divine word on our lover's lips -- one's name -- we crave. And at last, to kiss and know this ripe fruit in all it's fullness -- few can resist. By then, we are lost, only to learn how lost much later. And is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? Depends on the day, depends on the day.
This is a serious September state -- kids back to school at Harvard, MIT and all the other fine schools ... those rowboats on the Charles, the river bluer than the bluest eye of any sweaty sweatered coxswain hunk boy you might spot as you linger in Memorial Drive morning traffic ... apple picking farms out past 495 ... Beacon Hill bricky wet in a good autumn rain shower, you can almost hear the carriage wheels and horse hoofs in Louisburg Square of a few centuries ago. This is a fine town for falling into Fall.
I used to look at these morning exercise freaks and think ... "Shit, these people are just too too much," and go hunt up another Scooter Pie for breakfast and a Diet Coke to wash it down. But then something happened ... I'm not even sure what. Actually that's not true. I know exactly what happened. Some people went and died on me.
Five years ago I watched my mom slowly die of lung cancer which is no party and this spring saw my dad succumb to congestive heart failure -- but even worse, they tend to put these sick people together with lots of other sick people and you get to visit these extremely unpleasant places called hospitals or nursing homes or hospices and you can't MISS that we are all heading for ... well, call it some serious entropy. And you also notice that these exercise freaks might have something worth considering -- they are dying a little more slowly than the rest of us.
And some of them are holier-than-thou, I admit and I hate that. But don't think for a minute they aren't drug addicts like the rest of the unhealthy people in the world -- they aren't addicted to nicotine or alcohol or caffeine (some are) or name any other drug like most people, but they are getting gobs and gobs of endorphins which is just plain old home grown morphine (body-grown, that is).
So I'm one of those people now, a morphine (endorphine) addict and a somnambulant aerobic dancer and groggly weight lifter. Believe me it works. There's a zen to removing exercise obstacles and potential resistance. First, start fully asleep, then you think you are DREAMING the whole nightmarish experience of working out. Also, being asleep tends to stop your mind from coming up with 25 great reasons NOT to exercise. I leave my workout clothes on the floor by the bed the night before, looks like some crime scene, but keeps me from thinking of anything else when I wake at dawn. I put them on in the half dark, without thinking. I go downstairs to an already queued-up videotape. I push a few buttons and I start stretching and squatting and stepping and supine French pressing. I do Rodney Yee's AM Yoga and also some seriously rough workout tapes by The Firm. I do it every day even if I feel like hell. I tell myself it's okay to do it really really badly. If the happy girls on the tape are doing ten push-ups, I swear at them and say really nasty things, sometimes throw couch pillows at the snotty little bitches and I then let myself do one push-up ... who cares ... at least I'm doing it and nobody's watching. Just Do It ... Asleep.
The big cantaloupe slice of California was slipped in place this week when I left a message for Doc as he drove from Santa Barbara to San Diego. I put Colorado into the four corners Northeast quadrant a while back when I got chatting with Chris Locke. Things are peachy in the Peachtree State connecting with Jeneane, Jenna and now George. Illinois, shaped like a cluster of grapes, is in place with AKMA rarely home but often zipping off to lots of other states on a regular basis. And Shelley ... yikes, I just realized ... I have no idea where you are ... is it Missouri? Wherever ... meanwhile, don't miss her post.
That summer I was 14 there were a number of sailboats in a shed that needed sanding and fiberglassing and fixing up. That's what I had been drafted to do. We rented a cottage, that we called the Marina House, next to the boat sheds in the Marina that summer and the landlord -- the father of this boy I longed for -- came around one morning in early June to see if any of us wanted to help sand boats for the summer. We were three sisters in flip flops, a babyish one in pink flipflops (my little sister just 9 then), a 14 year old skinny tough one in blue don't-mess-with-me, like-I-care, flipflops (that was me) and a slightly plump 16-year-old sneaking-cigarettes-behind-the-shed yellow flip-flopped older sister. Of course we said, yes, we wanted to sand boats.
Did you ever notice you are doing certain activities that in name only seem reasonable, but they are, in fact, a ruse, that you are doing something completely apart from this surface activity and if pressed you would admit it, but rarely do we press each other to the wall in this way. So of course, I thought I was sanding boats, but I was watching this tall boy's butt in blue jeans, and especially his back which was tan and strong and pretty much impossible to tear my eyes away from, and even sometimes when he turned around, I brazenly looked at his chest, his ribs, his hard abs which descended into the waistband of his jeans and noticed the way ... well, let me just say I was learning how to sand boats that summer, so I was watching him closely since he was very good at sanding boats.
Free labor is always a tricky workforce, but we got more accomplished than one would expect. The boy put a really lousy AM radio in the rafters of the boat house and it was on a all-hits-all-the-time station but for some reason I remember it playing only three songs ad infinitum. It played "In The Year 2525" followed by "Positively 4th Street" and "I Think We're Alone Now." I would blush as that song cried out, "Children Behave! That's what they say when we're together ..."
Truth be told I had absolutely no traction on this boy, so to speak. He didn't notice me for shit. He didn't even know my name. He was 17 and he was checking out my older sister of 16 and I hated her guts for that. And he was also ducking behind the shed to smoke, and since she did that too they had a special bond and I hated them both for that and I hated smoking and I hated the way my sister was using smoking to walk some path into being a grownup and being sexy and doing it with some sort of relative ease and I was this gawky geeky hopeless knee-knocking school girl madly in love with this unreachable boy. He might as well have been in another universe, hell, he could have been living in the year 2525 for how close he was to me. But then devastatingly, he might come over to give me a new piece of sandpaper and rub his arm against mine and I was in complete meltdown.
But one night, I got an unlikely chance. Life works that way. My sister had gone into the local town to the movies with some girlfriends of hers -- and a gang of kids were coming to our house for dinner, a barbeque I think, and there were some fairly older trustworthy college girls who used to be nannies for us there, so my parents were off at another couple's rented house down the road for cocktails and lobster. I was scuffing past the boathouse in my flipflops and saw him there at sunset still sanding and actually had the wherewithal to invite him over for a hot dog, god knows how I summoned the words, much less that idea of inviting him and he smiled at me with those dimples and said, "Sure," he'd come by. That was the first smile I ever saw from him that might mean something, I was in ecstacy.
We all ate and had fun. I even spoke to him once or twice, again, it looked as if he had noticed I existed. This was more than I could ask for. It was dark, but there was an amazing full moon brimming outside the window, when someone got a deck of cards out and we all sat on the faded carpet in the livingroom of the Marina House to play cards I somehow ended up seated next to him.
Cards turned into Spin-The-Bottle suddenly, and I felt a little dizzy, I was in over my head. The kids seemed older, the night darker, my inexperience poking into my ribs like a sharp knife. I hadn't kissed any boys and I wasn't sure I could and should or whatever.
Weirdly, the bottle kept pointing to him -- and he was cool, kissing some girls quickly, girls that were older and giggly and I could look slanty sideways at him when the bottle stopped at his place and watch him kiss these girls adroitly and wonder if he might pick me. Once, he caught me looking and smiled at me that way again. The bottle spun and stopped here and there, not at this boy's place for a few turns. But I could feel it coming back my way.
I jumped up to .... go somewhere ... to run away ... to go to the bathroom I said, but it was to go hide out. The bottle was spinning, and again, it landed in front of him. I was on the other side of the room, almost to the bathroom, I heard him say my name, it was like a bullet zinging across the room and nearly took me down. I flew into the bathroom shyly, locking the door quickly but our gang would have none of it. They erupted in shrieks and laughter, yelling "Kiss him, kiss him, kiss him!" I was at the far wall of the bathroom, grabbing my face in both hands. They were banging on the door now. I threw open the window that looked out on the back yard, the moon large and welcoming. The kids were yelling and banging on the door. In a flash I climbed up on the toilet and jumped out the window, no small feat as I realized halfway through that a metal bug screen was on the window and I tore it loose as I tumbled through and onto the ground.
I ran. I ran away from the house, the noise, the laughter, the boy. I ran crying big splashy tears. I kept running. I ran to the moon, to the rye fields where I fell into the soft summer crop, catching my breath, trying to stop sobbing. I walked a long time. Finally I walked back to the very edge of the Marina where I could spy on the house to see if they had gone home. I crouched down under a boat shed, sat on the bow of a sailboat that bobbed in the water, I could watch the moon's reflection in the water form and reform. I saw the kids leave, I saw my sister come home from the movies, I saw a college girl walk out look around, look worried at where I was. I did not see the boy. He was gone. I saw my parents coming from the end of the road so I dashed into the house. The college girl had a few words with me, but covered for me. I hid in my bunk bed, heard her reassuring my parents that all was well. Heard her leaving.
In the morning, we were sanding boats and the radio was playing and he gave me a sideways glance that was just right, and we both laughed a little but pretended it was coughing.
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“Never put a period where God has put a comma.”
Anyway, we need all the excellent women bloggers we can get and we really need you Shelley. I'm at the gym now and I'm supposed to go swimming -- my goggles and bathing suit are looking up at me questioningly -- why are you at the computer in the lobby of the health club, why no splashing, they ask. Because Shelly's going dark and I don't want her to. There must be something I can say ... and I feel like a total jerk that I didn't tell her before how great her blog is and I also didn't tell her how brave she is and how courageous it is the way she's talking about divorce and I'm personally sucking up every word and she's my secret hero because ... okay, here goes, I haven't blogged about this because I'm a big coward, not a braveheart like you girlfriend, ... I'm getting divorced and I am a complete wreck and SHELLEY, please don't go dark! Make it a comma,
Your reading was great and I liked the discussion of AI and fat v. thin knowledge was very interesting and especially how you described the way blogs may fit into this paradigm. They are much fatter than simple data ... full of emotion and passion and opinion, and enquiring minds want to know!
For instance, you could dress up like Marie Antoinette -- sexy shepardess dress, push up decolletage, handy staff for beating the too-eager courtiers off -- spend the day chasing sheep. Don't forget some basic back-of-the-limo French kissing is always appropriate on le 14 juillet, unfortunately, like French Fries, it isn't actually French. I get the feeling it's an American Innovation .
Or if you're really in the mood for a little guillotine fun, you could read this or this or even this today, although this last one might be quite deadly.
