i'm going to take you to see the dead.

If you listen closely, you can hear the needle punching through the cloth. The waves are stirring the sand around the beaches on Fire Island, waiting for us.

wonderful, by annie lennox.

I normally don't understand dance, but I saw this routine (off So You Think You Can Dance) randomly on television a couple nights ago, and it's magnificent. Absolutely stunning. There's a buttery smoothness to their movements (if you watch nothing else, fast forward to 0:40 when she dives through his arms and he catches and lifts her). It starts out in a regretfully bittersweet tone, and crescendos into sheer, skin-bursting happy. Their faces, as they wind up the routine, are burning with pure glee, and it fades to a stagger-footed finish seeded with perfection. And in the story of the dance, the end is a beginning of something better. Because the story is that he's leaving her, and she has second thoughts about letting him go, and they rediscover how perfect they are together. It's wonderful. I love happy endings.  

i haven't seen a flower child in so long.

lift the shadows from the forest

The trees look distinctly ruffled from the wind earlier. I watch them as we drive, looking for ones that have snapped and I am scared of everything. The highways in Connecticut are beautiful. 

our decadent innocence.

The point is that you enjoy yourself. That you trip through early morning puddles on your way home, and they steady you with warm arms. And everyone tells you they like your shoes. 

avocado salad in the morning.

The windows are still steamed from the downpour earlier, my nails are pie-in-the-sky blue, and there are three ripe avocados sitting in the kitchen downstairs for lunch. Heavy magazines with glossy spreads, who's pages I can't read, and chance encounters in the bookstore to exchange stories about Jedi and camera angles. The sun is peeking back out, and the leaves on the trees above our house are sparkling green. I'm playing four universal chords on the ukulele, over and over again. C, G, F, Am....

it takes a life to learn how to live

I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.

Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.

"... An adventure unlike anything on your planet. STAR WARS. A story of a boy, a girl, and a universe. It's a big, sprawling space saga of rebellion and romance. It's a spectacle, light years ahead of its time. It's an epic of heroes, villains, and aliens from a thousand worlds. A billion years in the making... STAR WARS." 

This is the original 1977 trailer for Episode IV. It doesn't do the film justice but I still love it. The classic Star Wars films are almost better in their original videocassette form. All scratchy and sort of bleached out, the colours of the lightsabers going to white. It changed people's lives when it first came out. From that first shot, when the Star Destroyer filled the screen... what a wonderful thing. 

please try to remember that you are wearing a skirt.

Split-second power outages. New friends in book form. Fresh asparagus from the Farmer's Market and whole wheat pasta that tastes like wood before I cook it. Rain on the skylights. Dad's camping lantern in my fingers, just in case. Work makes my hands smell like used dustjackets. Making believe from my bed. Turning dangerous, dizzying thoughts in my mind. I am tired of waiting. 

the girl from atlantis

A delicate underwater dance in otherworldly frocks. I keep trying to imagine how they cinched the model into these outfits - that stunning Alexander McQueen piece, the Prada dress constructed of missing pieces from a chandelier... and then let her fall back into the water, her toes pointing delicately towards the surface while the photographer took his shots. The fact that she looks like she is dead and has fallen into the water to spin loosely beneath the waves is the best part. It's a disastrous dance that they captured, and it's perfect. 

[vogue nippon]

my brother has malaria.

In the children's hospital, they have Scrabble, and clowns that tell jokes to make the children laugh. There is an arts and crafts table, and he remembered the jokes the clown told to tell me when he comes home. It rained here tonight, and I made instant chocolate pudding for dessert and ate it with my hands from the bowl. I sat on my bed reading feverishly, and left the door open. 

extraordinary in every sense of the word.

The electric buzz of not looking like anyone else. 

dancing & fighting

Kicking midsummer gloom straight in the face. Late nights at the beach. Music shimmying its way out of the rolled-down windows of our car. Sleeves that are too long for our arms. Lighting incense for everyone we ever knew. Lying on the rug and spinning stories. Taking advantage of the weightlessness that comes with plunging straight into the water. 

a man who appreciated details

Listening to the tribute album to Gram Parsons (Return of the Grievous Angel). 

like butter scraped over too much bread.

My heart hurts from missing people and places I can't have. Pretending that my room is on a submarine and that I can see fishes from the window. Eating beans on toast and skipping breakfast (my own lazy fault). I created a mermaid prototype at work, and recalled childhood. Listening to women singing in big, throaty voices. Trying to organize my spaces.