Electric Blue Toes

I met Max for lunch at the Garden Court Restaurant at the Palace Hotel. I was in a particularly critical mood and took liberties to express my disapproval of his girlfriend. I wish I would have held my tongue. What Max and I have in common is his late wife. We both adored her. I shouldn’t tarnish our relationship with judgments like this. I think I just lost my way in conversation.

There was a family at the ferry building in Larkspur, overdressed, I’d thought, for a sojourn into the City. What’s really to dress up for – the concrete, the asphalt, the towering steel and glass? And there they were a few tables over, beneath the glass dome canopy of the Garden Court. It was I who is forever underdressed for the events of the day.

I stopped for a pedicure on the way home – some wild metallic electric blue/green toes – that would be good. I really don’t like getting a pedicure. It depresses me. As I rode my bicycle along the canal there were ladies lunching at the outdoor tables behind the Bon Air center. Some lounged on the grass with big brimmed hats. It’s like my lists – busying oneself so as not to notice how meaningless some days can be. Getting a pedicure is a decadent extravagance – paying someone to wash your feet and clean the toe jam from beneath your nails. Ew. It’s something I do when I’m trying to distract myself from the responsibility of my happiness. So I have fabulous electric toes, but am not once ounce happier. In fact, the very act of getting a pedicure seems to throw me into a mini existential crisis – life is meaningless, God is dead. Whoa.. I’m glad I got that out and over with…

Becoming a Familiar

Secret and I rose before the sun to trek in the mountain in the quiet early morning hours. It’s been over a week since I’ve been able to make this sojourn for all the business of convalescing. Yesterday and today we unfolded back into our routine. I was distracted by the effort it took. Whenever I stop something for even the shortest spell, it can’t be resumed with the same ease of habit. It takes a period of readjustment. But as difficult as restarting something is, stopping something is much harder – filled with that soulful longing, missing and grief. Oh how I missed my mountain.

On Friday I had my post-surgical consult. I’m healing slightly ahead of schedule with no untoward events, besides all the untoward events I experienced in the week following the surgery and of course all these peripheral complications seemingly not associated with the surgery – but associated with what, I do not know. On top of everything else, my hands are peeling. The skin is just shedding. What’s up with that? Perhaps it’s just a hallmark of eternal return. Yes, yes, that’s it – I’m becoming a familiar or some mythical creature.

Helena Handbasket

I pulled out the watercolors and did a first draft on a few star gazers. I haven’t had the paint out in forever and it felt homey and wonderful to splash around in colors. They look perfectly awful! There’s something so freeing about being able and willing to create really bad art on a whim, and something so titillating about feeling so happy about it.

Today was the first day back at work since the surgery. It was a little slow and grumbly for the knot in my belly and the way my body is screaming no, no, no!! I’ve gone off all my meds, including over-the-counter versions that are supposedly more benign, due to side effects. The beginning of the end, I tell you. The beginning of the end. Didn’t I just predict that the surgery was gonna kick off a string of events taking me straight to hell in a handbasket? Here we go… wheee!

I’m really not gonna worry about it. I’m really not gonna worry about anything anymore. Phew… that’s a relief. Off to bed.

Perfect Stranger

The phrase perfect stranger keeps crossing through my mind. In my head it’s said by Holly Golightly. And it got me wondering what exactly a perfect stranger is. As I was taking the laundry off the line, I thought a perfect stranger would pay off my mortgage… that would be terrifically perfect. A perfect stranger would be honest, kind, gracious, pay random compliments, and, of course, my mortgage. In essence, a perfect stranger would be an extremely generous friend – generous in heart, spirit and, well, capital. No wonder Holly Golightly was saying it. I’m in the market for a perfect stranger.

I Need A New Drug

In a hazy, sleepy, drug-induced state, on painkillers to take over while the anesthesia wore off, I had a dream. A memory of someone, who I loved, traced like lightening through my subconscious. I woke, feeling like there was lover I’d forgotten. A real, true love that I’d somehow misplaced. Oh yes, there it is.. ooops, no, it’s gone again. And I feel like this beloved is waiting on a street by a particular lamp post, or in a café and it’s killing me that I just can’t remember who and where. How can something, someone, so important just be forgotten?