quotable

it's not the pale moon that excites me
that thrills and delights me
oh no
it's just the nearness of you
it isn't your sweet conversation
that brings this sensation
oh no
it's just the nearness of you

when you're in my arms and i feel you so close to me
all my wildest dreams came true
i need no soft lights to enchant me
if you would only grant me the right
to hold you ever so tight
and to feel in the night
the nearness of you

the lightness of being

a young woman with whom i work and don't hate has given her notice. i hadn't seen her all week, but the change in her spirit was enormous. she looked rested, even though it was her 10th day straight, and was smiling and laughing in a genuine way. she's just out of school and comes from money, so feels no pressure to have a fall-back. her dad's dough is her default, lol. she was packing up her things while i was fielding a complaint over a plate of thoroughly consumed crab legs. bah.

i am happy for her she has latitude and isn't forced to continue to do something she hates. clean slate, "what will i be when i grow up?" ahem. being a grown-up can suck.

on the flip side, my favorite story in quite awhile is the brazilian priest who has floated into oblivion under 1000 helium balloons. his stunt was to raise money for a spiritual rest stop for truckers. he was experienced in jungle survival and in excellent health, had 5-days worth of water and lots of power bars, was in appropriate gear and had done a similar bit with 600 balloons not long ago. he had gps, a satellite phone and a floating chair. this wasn't some idiot hiking mt. washington in flip-flops being stranded in an april white-out.

a cluster of his balloons has been found at sea, with no sign of him. his parishioners say it's a test of faith. i say it's a very clever escape plan from penury, celibacy and old latin widows. how much does a helium tank go for these days?

jackboots and krazy kids

couple years ago, i remember reading about flash mobs. bunch of kids get a text or an e-mail, "show up at this place at this time," and they do. (yeah, remember spontaneity?) it took a few years before the creator outed himself in harper's. basically performance art ridiculing hipsters and their faux-non-conformity, placing them squarely in the center of a conformed and rigid demographic. these were astonishingly fast bits. 15-30 seconds and everybody went poof.

didn't take long for this to morph into silent raves. (which, if their point is their pointlessness, i'm all for the full-circle irony, but i digress.) same organizational idea -- get an untraceable text and show up someplace public. this time, everybody is plugged into their i-pod and they dance around awhile in outer silence, then skee-daddle. last week, over 1000 kids showed up in nyc's union square, and by all reports there was no trouble. cops and on-lookers were amused, and some perhaps puzzled. then poof, it was like it never happened because the modern merry pranksters were outta there.

this weekend about 20 baby libertarians decided to honor thomas jefferson and silently rave in front of his washington d.c. memorial, an area that is open to the public 24/7. groups larger than 25 do not need a permit to gather.

it was scant minutes before park rangers told them they had to stop and leave. when asked, "why?" f-bombs were dropped and handcuffs snapped shut. a few got threatened and one girl was arrested. was it so outside these officers' orbit to simply ask, "what the heck are you guys doing?" instead of instantly going fascist? times are tense in the nation's capitol (and elsewhere) thanks to our chief-in-paranoia and his subversive snarling henchmen, and i have never known too many cops who think outside the box. but this was a very small group, not making any noise.

the arrested girl has since been released and charged with the laughable offense of "interfering with an agency function." they couldn't even muster disorderly conduct or resisting arrest.

much like last year's adult swim lite-brite fiasco here in boston, i fear law enforcement has lost all sense of proportion and balance.

one night in college, we had an lsd-fueled impulse to get in the reflecting pool at the christian science center. (if i'd known then it was full of freon as part of their complex's cooling apparatus, i doubt i would have been first in, ok?) it was 2 or 3 in the morning and only a few blocks away. it never occured to us the place had cameras everywhere, but we were just splashing around. guys with severe suits and earphones appeared out of the dark. very politely they asked us to leave the pool. "the water isn't safe for swimming and it's very late. you kids should go home." that simple. so we left, sopping wet, laughing our asses off and to this day i think of those guards as such good sports. i mean, i know they're all about clean living, but we could not have been the first and only group of toasted students who went for a dip, ya know?

i'm no hippy, but i can only see this as a corner that cannot be unturned. warrant-less wiretaps, payrolled media flacks touting the progress of all of our wars (except that pesky war on drugs -- that's so passe these days) so as to purposely mislead the public, and an administration that blatantly disregards the constitution every moment of every day.

after 9/11 so many sheeple were happy to sacrifice personal liberties for that nebulous tenet of national security. careful what you wish for, folks.

local colah

a little over 2 years ago, i googled hardware stores in my neighborhood. once cited, it wasn't far away. i poked my head in to find a very fat goombah, sitting in near dark, watching a tiny tv, in a filthy place.

"excuse me, i'm looking for this kind of light bulb." without a glance, he said, "we don't sell light bulbs." lol, ok, so you probably don't really sell anything, but it sucks that i have to take the "t" to buy a paintbrush.

determined to paint today, i went to visit on a lark, thinking maybe they have old tubs of spackle. i just didn't want to travel.

hola!!! viva la brazil!!!!!

the store was still matchbox sized, but all lit up, bursting with inventory and a smiley guy behind the counter. i was happy to pay too much for a paintbrush. yes, he's an owner. yes, his english is terrible. i can't wait to go back.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

same trip today, i needed gym socks. there is a store here, even more ghetto than marshall's and tello's. (we have the latter, btw). its windows are so messy, when i first saw it, i thought it was a craft store, not a department store. hellacious mess.

i smelled a smell. awful. "don't be a snob, noodle." but as i neared the sock wall i was nearly choking. i kept hearing the incantation of "mommy, mommy, mommy.... mama... mama..." and the smell got worse. it was unmistakable, and i've never had a kid, ok?

she was on the phone, i'm sure deploying costa rican troops. he was screaming. the smell made my eyes water. in seconds, he pulled off his pants and his diaper. the shit smelled so bad i could only assume he'd eaten another toddler. if he was mature enough for that, um, shouldn't he be toilet-trained?

ok, yeah, yeah. i have no idea. all i know is that he dumped his shitty diaper on the floor and ran away. and i left the store gagging. i still need socks.

the benjamin moore here smells very clean and nice. :)

damn my mother

and her mother before her.

tomorrow will be in the 70s and patriots' day is next week. for all my wishful thinking that spring has sprung come evacuation day (st. patrick's to those not in massachusetts or our sacrificed annex of maine) the thermometer doesn't begin to agree til about now. today was a beauty too -- fluffy postcard clouds, crews on the charles and only the faintest wisp of a breeze, even in the wind tunnel of copley square.

boots and scarves go in boxes and we start peeling back and going lighter. men don't get this, but it means different shoes and bags. (flip-flops do not count. they are pool wear, ok? not shoes.) my trusty coach wool satchel needs to take a nap. however, last fall i threw away the all-purpose summer sack because it was frayed and beat to hell. i threw it out to prevent using it again this year in its disrepair. i threw it out assuming 6-1/2 months later i could easily afford to replace it.

anybody paying attention knows i'm fretting over the cost of butter, so no new mortgage purse is in the budget.

marshall's is next to one of my restaurants. i know, i know. it's ghetto. but sometimes i've scored decently there. (although never once on a purse... hmmph -- did i remember that earlier today?) they had LOTS of bags, all arranged by color. sheesh, looks like brights are the new black. so many screaming yellow patent leather bags -- what the hell is the gorton's fishermen fleet wearing in gloucester? like a discerning bee who only likes the pollen from the rarest of orchids, i drifted over to a camel-colored vision. ack. $285. at MARSHALL'S.

ok. exhale. rethink. scope some more. in the cross-hairs -- $195. wtf? a couple more lookies and i was out the revolving door. my eyes were like the scope on a smart bomb. through the sea of off-kilter colors and just too much shoddy detailing, every bag that called me was supple italian leather, with only the subtlest of adornments. spare me the fringe and the damn faux bling. yuk. if miuccia prada puts buckles on a bag, by the time it filters down to the rack dreck at marshall's it's bad so many ways there ought to be a law. gaah.

if i was really a masochist, i could have tormented myself looking at the michael kors shoes that had just arrived. but i had only snuck away for a moment and my desire to remain employed outweighed my desire to self-flagellate over buttery leather soles.

maybe i'll just carry to-go bags all summer. yeah. that's it.

my mother and grandmother could shop from open to close. while they both enjoyed finding a steal, it was the hunt for the italian leathers, the irish wools, the 3-ply cashmeres that was the point. they taught me to look inside the garment, at the finishing you couldn't see, to determine how well the piece was built, affecting both its fit and how long it would last. my grandmother wasn't so long away from hand-me-downs and boiled potatoes for dinner to waste money on shoddy clothes.

so things like those bags sing to me in a store. even when moths fly out of my wallet cuz they are going hungry in there. i'm stuck not wanting to waste even a small amount of money on a piece of crap that i'll hate and not being able to afford anything nice. grr.if only women left purses all about public places like they do umbrellas. unfortunately, tod's bags do NOT belong to the universe like parapluie.

doesn't she want more?

as extroverted as i may seem, i have a fierce sense of privacy. every side of my family had lots of secrets, so sealed lips were the family shield.

my father's mother was the queen of silence. when her parents died and left she and her sister the house upstate, neither could agree on an amicable division. rather than figure out how to share the sprawling manse, they stopped speaking and had a wall built right up the middle. each pretended the other was never there -- like there was no *other* side of the house. cool for us kids, the attic wasn't divided and was full of creepy trunks, papers, mannequins and ghosts. they never spoke again for the rest of their lives.

an uncle who smoked lucky strikes from age 14 and basically hacked himself to death, died of *a cold*. my aunt who died of a brain tumor had a *very bad headache*. fascinating as victoriana, except claire was born here well after the queen's death and *had* to marry my grandfather.

previous posts have addressed the adultery and the duplicity in my family. frankly, i no longer care if it's shame or pride that drives my discretion. i can't change the past and it's just nobody's damn business, ya know? the cruel flip of this is the owner's dedication to eviscerating any sense of privacy i might have.

it's a wiggly line, because our lives, love, passion and dynamic are so intertwined. he approaches other women openly, with the fact of, " i have this woman who is devoted to me..." i don't know when, how, what he actually says otherwise, but i do know it's followed up with, "but i have her and still will and want to fuck other women." from my exposure to women, i imagine most run screaming from whatever virtual room they hear this. a few may may feel wooly and wild, but the recent control freak who manifested her insecurity and disrespect with her profound tardiness said what i suppose most think: "doesn't she want more?"

which brings the owner back around to what would i have done all those years ago, if presented with this same equation. we'll start with, "i can't say," and that it's a pretty useless exercise. i do know i was profoundly attracted to his open sexuality, his quiet dominance and his determination. the best i can guess, is that i would have erected the usual emotional force-field that had served me so well in the past, preventing the eventual emotional hypnosis and dependence. however, there were chinks in both of our armors. plan aborted. both ends.

"doesn't she want more?" more is more. it's more flesh, more sex, more partners, more engagement, more pain, more denial. it's more, in the real sense, not less.

"doesn't she want more?" likely i'll have *more* than most will ever know.