Niyas Place

Sometimes You Just Have to Sleep in The Toilet!

I've noticed that when people turn 50, they say, "Oh my god, I can't believe I'm going to be 50 years old this month." When they turn 60 they say nothing. Something happens after 50 when birthdays become a non obviating event--something that occurs like food and weather. 

Dakota turned 50 in rabbit years a couple of months ago. Suddenly he's taken to sleeping in his toilet. His bathroom blurs into all of the other comforts in life. Rabbits are super clean and picky about clean bathrooms. Now, as he approaches geriatric, he's less concerned--his litter box is now his bed and the rest of the room his litter box.

I only bring this up because I wonder if in these boisterous times we could take some wisdom from Dakota. As he ages, he seeks comfort. As things change, his passion for his loved ones is super enthused. The slightest sound of distress from his wife Caila and his ears go straight up and he's over by her side, licking her back and ears as if a good cleaning will cure any physical or emotional turbulence. 

Since Dakota is taking more center stage at Niyas Place (soon to be Scrappy Rabbit) we had a little happy hour talk -- he had his freshly squeezed carrot juice that makes him embarrassingly goofy, and I had a little hot Sake. I told him about how uncertain things are in the world right now. How, as we think things can't get worse, they do. And how afraid the world is right now. And yet like in any uncertainty and change there are still surprising things that happen. I knew he would have something to say to you. He's not a shy rabbit. And he puffs up with pride when I ask his opinion on matters of the human heart. 

Dakota's advice for 09:

• Sometimes you just have to sleep in the toilet, if for no other reason than to have a 'pocket of place' in the world--a room of your own. This will comfort you greatly I promise. Unless you have cold cement a toilet like Niya, then I recommend you re-design it to be like mine, otherwise it could hurt.   

• Don't worry too much about change. You will still get older and need the same things, no matter what. A warm pillow to sleep on, a warm coat to keep you warm, a warm bunny to cuddle with. Focus on those things. Don't worry about anything extra. Extra's come, extra's go. 

• Make sure people know you, the things you like. They will give you more of it. 

• Don't worry about being perfect or even hitting your litter box just right. Your people will forgive you and you simply can't be stressed over minor things like that. Life is to be loved and litter boxes often don't act right.  

• In fact, don't be perfect at all. To be perfect is be alone. Life is messy! 

• Keep both eyes wide open, trust everyone you can, and those you can't, run fast. If they are trustworthy they will make it known over time with consistent action. But still keep both eyes open. IF you can get eyes on the side of your head, you should, it's more effective.  

• Have fun at night. Nap in the day. You won't need therapy at all if you do it this way.

• Make sure you keep lots of carrot juice/happy juice in the house. That way everything can go wrong but you are still alright.  

• Love is the thing. Love is the thing. And carrot juice. And that's about all I have to say.   

• • •

Well, I have nothing to add to this except, thank you Mr. Dakota. And, will you at least TRY to use the litter box properly?  

Flouncing About in Uncommon Paradoxes

Here's what I learned today:

You can have the gentlest dentist in the world and the best sedatives and still feel like a toilet bowl is being flushed on your head when the action begins. 

You can forgive your dentist for 8 shots of novocaine because you know there's an evil part of your brain willing the whole experience be done, gone and out of your life. And this can have an effect on the ever so ambitious numbing agent. It's sensitive after all and can get performance anxiety. 

You can forgive your dentist for everything really--because he's fixing things, he's patient, and he's the dearest sweetest man...but there's just this one thing...this one thing that's a challenge to forgive, his teeth look better than yours and he's almost 70. And yes, they are his real teeth!

I also learned that jaccuzi's will eat hair when hair is long and left unattended. The paradox of relaxing--finally, after a long day in the dentist and then suddenly you are in a horror flick, the suction in the jaccuzi jet has your hair and is pulling you in. Ouch!

Gravity can drown you while a long swim can make you feel light as air no matter how much water you took in.

Freckles multiply in Ca. 

Canned Indian food is awesome.

White chocolate whipped, cold coffee drinks are great after intense dental work.

Non fiction doesn't exist. This is what I believe. Memory has a forceful imagination.

NEANDERTHALS HAD RED HAIR. This was just recently discovered. But what kills me is that while we both share that gene--the red hair--the women required over 4k calories--while I'm considered a porker if I eat over 2k. Why did they get all the fun? Okay, well, my skin tone may be just slightly better.

•••

One more thing, Dakota thinks my having so many teeth, compared to his 2 makes me sort of glutenous and a bit of a drama queen. 

He's never been one for easy flattery.

Who Are You? Consult a Rabbit!

Dakota had a near miss with death recently. Upper respiratory disease and his little stomach shut down. He's okay now but somehow his struggle (our struggle for his life) made me think of the who and what we are.

I thought about the lady who runs the bar in the village of Carces, FR. Her pink hair, brown skin, swimming pool water eyes that appeared pressed in vat of charcoal—lots of eyeliner, and a very large smile. She talked constantly in French to the drunks and the caffeine charged patrons, whether it was 7 a.m. or 11 p.m. Espresso in much of France is delivered in bars. You don't know when you walk in who’s on uppers and who’s on downers. I thought she’d be scared to have that job. Just like I thought Dakota would have developed a personality disorder by now, given his chronic upper respiratory issues.

Neither was the case. Which made me wonder about other things I thought I was right about, yet was dead wrong.

For instance, I don't really think we choose what suit we wear before we are born. I don't think we walk into pre-life store and say, that one! I want to be a rabbit or I want to be red head with more freckles on my face than I can count. But if it were true, I wish I’d chosen to be a light bulb in a hot New York restaurant with super powers to download all the stories I saw from my light bulb point of view to a writer.

I diverge.

Still I was curious. So, for the heck of it, I asked Dakota. Why Rabbit?

I figured if he could tell me this I might find myself in his answers. Given that I’m going through a career transition which seems to be taking as long as a sex change operation would.

It went like this:

Me: Dakota, why are you a rabbit?

Dakota: Because rabbits are smart, clean and they don’t make a fuss. They are self contained unlike dogs.

Me: You sound British to me. But maybe that’s because of the week I’ve been having with British Airways. Still, why not a cat?

Dakota: They can’t control their moods and they eat meat.

Me: You sound pretty clear that rabbits are the superior race in the animal world.

Dakota: No comment.

Me: Okay, let’s take another angle, especially since today I have all this oozing admiration for you. Here’s something I need your advice on. I get compliments on my hair a lot more when I don’t wash it for at least 3 days. I’m thinking I should make a shampoo (with the help of the Science community of course) and call it ‘Dirty Hair Shampoo for Women with Thick Hair (that Looks Ravishing-- Dirty.)’

Dakota: You mean you don’t have someone from your species who grooms you everyday?

Me: Sigh…cringe, wriggling in my seat—'I think the doctor is ready for you Dakota.'

•••

Me: Who am I Dakota?

Dakota: Not a rabbit. And, you should work on that!

The Upside of Procrastination

Recently, I cleared the decks in my design bizz for a few weeks of uninterrupted screenwriting.
It's amazing how animated and compelling the world looks when there is a meaningful goal to avoid in life.
I never knew how much pleasure procrastination could yield until I created the time and space to do what I most love, write and paint.

The sounds of the birds outside are so loud I imagine myself in a jungle drinking a Mai Tai out of a coconut in some exotic part of world. There are massage therapists instead of monkey's hanging out in the trees, anxious to serve. And the taste of food is so good when avoiding meaningful goals, that suddenly all those cookbooks I never read spill out onto the living room floor. How to make something out of beets that doesn't taste like dirt becomes the new goal of the day. As I'm doing that, Dakota runs by (no I'm not thinking rabbit stew. Jeez, get your minds out of the gutter!) and I wonder if I'm patient enough if I can pull all the fleas out of his fur. So the next hour is all about finding them. I never do, which is no surprise since he lives indoors.

I listen to the Roaches. I sympathize with her asking for her job back. I'm a little envious. My bosses are many (clients) and sometimes they take me back and sometimes they don't want to reward bad behavior (taking time out to write) and just call when they damn well feel like it.

I come back to the computer. I decide computers are boring and instead cut out photos of my cast. My wish list for the film I'm writing. Suddenly they start having conversations. Many that have nothing to do with the original material I'm adapting. But now the computer is interesting--It's fast. I can get all this dialogue on the page. Then the doorbell rings. It's FedEx delivering books, music and cosmetics that are part of a scam. Okay, so for a minute I thought I'd get the laptop. My gardener laughed at me. Nobody ever gets the laptop dummy! I fired him. For 30 seconds. I need him. I know nothing about the variety of plants in this new land that I live. Anyway, I spend the next 2 hours unraveling the hairball of the scam. I loose my business email because I'm now getting 60+ emails a day. Normally, I'm smarter than this. But it was so much fun doing that instead of learning something new like screenwriting and feeling dumb in (now that I think of it much higher quality way) another way.

Anyway, you get the picture. I think I've found a new drug of choice: Procrastination. Even washing dishes takes on a whole new dimension. So much better than struggling with the page, getting more intimate with my characters issues and, yes, there it is, confronting those issues while holding it together to tell the damn story. Writing can get a bit... uh, messy.

But what a great feeling at the end of day, a day of not being seduced by procrastination. When instead of aiming for results I find myself in new places that I never could have planned.

That first layer of a story is so much like the first layer of an oil painting, shaky and completely unknown. But ecstatic because you never know where it will take you. And believe me art has its way with me never the other way around.

I often think the real upside of procrastination is that it provides that contrast to deep artistic satisfication.

Some days, there's this feeling that by sheer virtue of not giving up, it's so much more satisfying than I ever thought procrastination was. So there it is, the choice of hours of wasted time trying to find fleas in rabbits that have none, or battling it out with internets scams, or learning how to cook beets better when I know I'll never like them anyway. OR to throw myself into my work and see what surprises there may be at the end of the day? Procrastination makes the choice that much more clear. Perhaps that's its real upside.

Dakota's staring at me right now, and I know what he's thinking. To him, what's the big deal? Life is a large bed of procrastination pleasure because there is no goal. Easy for him to say as Caila licks his ears now and I feed him strawberry treats and indulge him in many rabbit purring sessions a day.

Maybe we create animals lives as we feel life should be...I dunno. He's the thinker; I'm just the messenger.

Shhh...Quiet, The Ocean Is Talking

I am at Sea Ranch, a ranch of houses on the coast of California near Gualala.

So far nothing I've seen about the animals here is normal. They are fat for one thing. And they don't scare. Yesterday, a herd of deer in the yard. I opened the sliding glass door expecting them to dart off into the Madrones. But they only looked at me, un-startled and kept chewing their grass. The babies were very curious and lost most interest in the grass and stared at me unflinching as I ran a roll of film on them.
And then there are the geese that live at the water tower in the town of Mendocino. Lets just say that when it comes to them getting what they want they pull out all the stops. They waddle and talk and overtly hint for food by sticking their long necks out and turning their head up in a curious, yet forceful way.

I'm sure these are British geese. They have all the social mastery of the Brits. Food is a sort of social passport, so if you don't feed them within the first 3 minutes of the visit they waddle away, heads down, butts only halfway wagging in obvious disappointment. They don't look back (stiff upper beak) they just mutter on in their own language--deeply wounded. I asked the street artist if they ever get fed. He said, "they get fed all day long, and they talk way too much. And they're fat too." He did drawings of the town and sold them to tourists. He called me 'Sistah'.

This kind of stuff may seem day to day to most, but I feel like a spectator at Carn-i-val. Watching the kites and gulls, my eyes can't get enough, the contrasts of colors, how the mist of the ocean lays a blanket of saturation, illuminating the reds in the woods, the purples in the rock, the greens of the ocean and cyan of the hot tub. Oh and the wine label wall paper in restaurants I've seen in Sonoma and how the restaurant owners do make a point of not condoning arrogance. A vigil for the humble.

My hands look younger here. Well, I was younger here--perhaps a mirage?
I grew up in Willits the town of the Skunk Train--which I only rode when I wanted an office space apart from my family to write in. Willits was also the town rednecks and marijuana but I hear its evolved into skateboarding and a horses' paradise. But yes, when I was 13 I faked my age to get a work ID so I could wear rollerskates and a mini-skirt and hook meal trays onto car windows. And I saw the police ask black families to leave town. My whole purpose in life, when I lived there was to leave. Now, a few decades forward, here I am a mere 50 miles southwest and I'm swooning over the smell of the damp bark, the shape of the Moronne trees swirling into the sea charged sky. I'm enamored by the mustard weeds, and taking photos of the yellow fire hydrants because I haven't seen any like them anywhere else. But the ocean, that wild winded heartbeat out there; the womb of this world. Its got me hooked. And at times like this I would swear I'm visiting the hospital of my birth, its motion is constant.

People are rather 'huggie' in coastal areas I've noticed. My friend Simone noticed the same. "What is it with all the hugs? she said. They better know Me before they go hugging me." I was glad I hadn't hugged her when I first met her, probably would have woken up on the other side of the room.

In the cafe 'Hello Beautiful" is a normal greeting from men. One woman sitting in her pajamas and clearly just out of bed was joined by a man looking who said "hey beautiful, can I join you?" Hair straight up, jean jacket, glasses, and pale in that way that says, "I haven't been vertical long enough for the blood to visit my outer layers, like my skin"--later his girlfriend came in a bit after pj woman left and they hugged and held hands a lot.

What is it about the sea that makes people so, well...you know...schmooshy...and touchy feely? I was told 3 times in an hour how beautiful my hair is. A sailor asked if he could sit with me and the waitress asked where I shopped for clothes.

But how can one help it when you're near the ocean, the elements turn on a dime. From pouring rain, like last night, to torrential winds and gorgeous blue skies like now, to hot and calm to cold and foggy. One's defenses could be torn up here and the comfort of holding hands or someone noticing your beauty -- because beauty is in every pore here..the houses, the vegetation, the food, and then of course the people--well, this is not so bad really. Not at all.

I live in Boulder Co. now. Rock. Big slated rock. And the people? Definitely not talking the latest in how to wear mini-skirts at mid life or what color they should buy for their faux contact lenses. But wow, can those Boulder folks belt out an argument about the headlines of the day. I was in Safeway before I left to get munchies and heard an argument all the way to the door from employees in the meat department.

Today, I fly back to Colorado. I really wish the rabbits would hop into my hair and do some real damage because they are so excited to see me.
But, sigh...no. It will be a good 4 days before they forgive me for leaving. They'll huddle in their corners and look at me like; who the hell are you? We've moved on. They'll put their long ears over their eyes when I try to make eye contact. "You left us, you get to suffer." they'll say in their clever bunny ways.

But I'm not going to think about that. I'm instead going to go eat some great food and have a nice glass of Ca. Chard. and some sourdough bread. Why does everything taste so good here? I was this close to paradise as a rebel teen and thought this was the worst place in the world. That Ca. was so boring. What an idiot! Dakota agrees. He's dreaming of green; a sea of greens for rabbits. His version of a sane government.

When Forced into Scrambled Lines We Make One Line Anyway

I spent my life at sea level.

Now I'm at above 5000 feet and the climate adjustment has scrambled my brain. I'm a regular anagram of humanity's imperfection these days. Today, it's gray outside. After several years of writing fiction in gray weather I think to write today. I scramble in current daily interactions to summon up familiar reference points from other places that help shape my relationship to Boulder. And in doing so, I might as well have put salt in my coffee instead of sugar.

It seems when one decides to change, one decides to let the layers of chaos reign; for awhile anyway. New scenes, new events, new people with one point of focus--new organizational structures for living.

Mountain biking in Boulder under big skies where each quadrant holds a completely new landscape is very different than Mountain biking in Forest Park, Portland under gray skies and many, many trees. I had more than enough oxygen and pleasant visions of people, dogs, florescent greens everywhere. And yet something inside was panicked without the sky I have now. But where's that oxygen? My mileage on the bike has gone from 10 miles per day to 2. But the mileage of the spirit is another thing altogether. Even in thin air and scrambled it's easy to see that the land here in Colorado is story filled, empathetic, and gently expressive through the animals and people.

I think about the web.
How are we organizing our relationship to something so episodic and random?
The web is lateral not linear, it doesn't establish time in a hierarchical fashion. We create that hierarchy when we take control of our relationship to it--the context of it's meaning in our lives. I think the same is true for the big changes. The big moves, the new babies, the losses, the new ideas becoming concrete in the world.

Change is a whole world within itself. It's necessary, and it's just this thing that calls you out and says, "So everything's messy and wonderful and frightening, you started this, so whatyagonnado 'bout it?"

My answer today is to let the single line live amongst the scrambled. That is, adventure into the things that are different, random and some that are the same -- the foods that I've never eaten before, the thin air that feels like it's choking out old thoughts and forcing new. Something tells me that amongst all the unfamiliar something else is taking shape. I am just the little flutist in the corner with messy red hair cheering it on.

Dakota on the other hand, on November 7 just held up a simple sign: "I Vote No on Change." That's a rabbit for ya!

Whack On The Side Of The Head

The other night while languidly sipping some exotic wine in a local wine bar, a 15 lb. speaker fell from the ceiling onto my head.

Now I do realize that 'Whack On The Side Of The Head' is a book about change; about whacking you out of habitual thought patterns. But isn't also languidly having a glass of wine? Choose your poison I guess. My poison ended in a bloody bump on my head as large as a baseball, and a day in ER to be diagnosed with a concussion and whiplash.

When I told my mother, she didn't ask if I have brain damage. She probably figures not much would change if I did. But instead she broke out into hysterical laughter. My jaw dropped. "So, all that latent hostility gets to come out now eh?" She only laughed harder and said, "But you were in a wine bar, a wine bar? and a speaker from the ceiling fell on your head? I mean what kind of 'off the wall'...no pun intended..." more laughter. Oy vey. She was just having too much fun with this.

"Alrighty then... moving right along." I said, as I waited for her to get through her parental poetic justice. I just ate my Cornflakes and mushy bananas and fantaized about being there at her house in Reno Nevada, picking up all 110 lbs of her, shaking her, setting her hard into her chair and demanding the pity I deserved.
Instead, it was too hard not to laugh a little myself.

For most, an incident like this would bring mothers to near hysterics in fear. And friends, quips of laughter from the absurdity of it. In my case, just the opposite.

The poor restaurant owner...in tears. Which broke me open in front of my psuedo-date. Not one of my finer moments.

This is one of those things that is both a freak accident and yet uncomfortably intimate if your a person who pays attention to patterns.
A year ago, a half of a block from this wine bar I was hit on the drivers side of my car by an uninsured driver who ran a stop sign. I was where I am now. Searching for home outside of Oregon. The accident drained my time and savings for a year. So, here I am in round 2, skipping all over the country side, adding up the pros and cons, staging the future and giving it all that percentage of margin of what I just can't know. Whew! How do any of us ever manage to make a decision? But I wonder if the decision making process is as close to truth as we get; more than it's result?

Back to this question of patterns, how much personal? How much freak accident? Well, I have no idea. Except that I'm still moving out of Oregon and I won't be hanging out in that neighborhood anymore!
Uncanny still is the same neighborhood, same side of the head, (left) and same life circumstances.

I wonder if my 'Whack' had any parallels with the famous book:
A WHACK ON THE SIDE OF THE HEAD --- HOW TO UNLOCK YOUR MIND FOR INNOVATION
by Roger von Oech

So I made some notes:

HOW TO UNLOCK YOUR MIND FOR INNOVATION
* I've been waiting for the pleasant high of unlearning and unlocking repetitive thoughts and patterns before the speaker fell on my head. I've been resting like a lizard on a warm Brazilian rock; patiently waiting for innovative thought. And they do come. But I can't remember them because they came in a Vicodan Haze.

CREATIVE WHACKS--Jolt you out of your box into creative thinking.
* I'm on the site now www.creativethink.com. I'm hitting the button that says 'give me another creative whack.'
So, I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment. But after 5 sleepless nights from flashbacks of the 'boom' I'm hoping to discover a little extra benefit, some feature from the experience besides the fact that I get to see my beloved chiropractor a lot now. So, here goes:

CREATIVE Whack: Use your shield. New ideas can be threatening, and they often provoke a negative reaction.
*Given that I didn't hear the speaker coming, I just couldn't get to my 14th century bronze shield on time. Life's a learning experience though. I'll do better next time.

CREATIVE Whack: Exaggerate. Imagine a joke so funny that you can't stop laughing for a month.
* Well, my mother already did that. "I" was the joke. But payback's a mother&&^((0. No pun intended.

There's more 'Whacks in the pack'. However, I guess I could look at this whole thing as some cosmic hit that according to von Oech has the potential to stir my brain trails into changing direction, forging new paths of thinking and doing.
But sadly, I feel more like my brain has been relocated to another part of the world and the road map went out of print.

I hope to find that road map in a used bookstore. Or put my laughing Mother on 'walk about' to find it--let's see who's laughing then. : )

---------
Postscript: I really am okay. Just a little jangled. Dakota is a bit more set in his ways and doesn't take much interest in change the way I do. He doesn't see what all the fuss is all about.

And Then a Man Named Ducky Offered Me a Hug

I try not to go to The Mac Store that often.
When I do it's usually to purchase a machine the first week it's released. I have an iBook and iMac. So that means that in 7 years, I've made 2 trips and some change to the store. This time it was to purchase an external HD as a symbol of my commitment to change my habits.

Yes, my iMac crashed because I gave it the impression that when I changed the name of my HD from Xtyne to Niya that I was a criminal breaking in to steal things. Like photos of bunnies--like fiction about neighbors who come door to door for money for their gambling problem (well that was more non-fiction), and like my obsessive car research on the Beetle convertible that I so badly want. Yeah, those things are worth quite a bit I'm sure and Niya was claiming them all in the eyes of my over protective computer!

Back to Ducky.
He looked like a Spanish Hottie from behind. And he was cute in that Mac Store kind of way, I guess. I was so mentally exhausted from the 4 hours of phone calls and tears the day before when I realized the only digital copy of my novel was on the iMac, not the iBook. 2 years of grad school, crappy landlords, riding a bike around town to avoid car payments for a year or 2. And all those revisions. My mentor told me the average writer revises a work at least 18 times. But the notes, ah the notes. After seeing a film the napkin scribbles I would rush home write out and put in the NOVEL FOLDER that was now DEAD on the other side of some authentication rule.

I couldn't talk. So Ducky made it easy. "Just buy this. It will take care of your problems and it's the least expensive one. But have you heard of mac savers?"

"Yes, when I called yesterday they told me about them. It's minimum 2k."
"Well, how important is your novel to you?"
"Not very. I just didn't want to loose it this way you know. Setting it on fire would do it more honor than being lost in zero's and one's. An artificially intelligent chip as small as a cube of butter. It's not how it should have gone."
Ducky was sympathetic. We walked to the register.
"Did you bring it in for our guys to look at?"
"I called to talk to a service person and your front person didn't like that much. We went a couple rounds. And when I did talk to them, they didn't want to talk, they just wanted me to bring it in. The last time I did that, they quoted me 600.00 for a cable receptor issue. I had a consultant come in to look at it. He fixed it in 10 minutes and charged me 25.00. So I just wanted to run this by them, you know....first."

"Oh, I see. May I see your license? You're hair was redder then." He said.
"You're right."
"The Duck doesn't lie. Do you need a hug? I think you need a hug. A hug from Ducky from the Mac store."
"Oh...really?" I laughed.
"Well, uh...you know I really got that hug vicariously. You have a very forceful hug vibe."
And then...as usual when put on the spot I say something stupid.
"Well, I know a guy who wrote a novel called Duckworth about a lawyer who made a ton of money because he was so...you know...memorable."

Ducky gave me his card and a big smile and said 'call me' for anything!

***

Dakota said he would have stomped on my head a few times if I'd named him Ducky. And then even a few more should I DATE Ducky.

PS: I was able to retrieve my novel. A very nice man in my series of calls reminded me of Firewire. Apple was ready to have me erase the whole HD. I guess they forgot about Firewire. When I asked how I could repay his heroic help, he said just let me know when you publish that novel. It sounds interesting. Some people are just GOLD aren't they?

The Search for Wasabi Peas and Normalcy

When I came to Portland I had a secret plan; to become a normal person-- maybe even a married person with a house, a dog, a garden and a regular bedtime. My life in the Bay Area was a zealous spin to somewhere famous and fabulous that never really happened. I wanted respite. Oh yeah, I came here to get that MFA and write the novel but that was kind of, sort of to impress my literary boyfriend at the time who treated me badly. So it doesn’t count. No, it counts. I have no regrets.

But today I found myself hunting for Wasabi Peas for my daily salad. I have this addiction to salads at lunch. Pastaworks said, ‘no, we’re out and don’t know when they’ll come again’. Zupan’s said the same thing. In search of the peas I thought about how regular I’d become. I swim almost daily, I work a regular job, I live in a stable household, I have a fish and two rabbits I tend to daily. I’m bored out of my mind!

Then I remembered my dreams (as I do often these days). To renovate a barn in rural Ca. or Vermont and have art events, fund raisers for children’s hospitals and animal cruelty, and reel in some gentle cowboy or carpenter who just happens to be a chef and masseur. When did I tell that wild girl to get off the bus? I was the one people tried shut down at parties because I read my bad poetry out loud, wore suspenders, short skirts and red rubber boots and shmooshed chocolate pudding all over men’s faces that I liked. Not the best technique by the way. Where did she go?

Today I thought of all the amazing people in my life, including my mother that are changing in ways that they’ve always wanted. One is getting married for the first time at 47 years old. And, another, is working on getting pregnant to have a baby on her own. My mother has separated from an unhappy marriage of 25 years, moved to Nevada to be near her grandchildren and is dating a man with whom she regularly attends ballroom dance classes. She laughs a lot more.

That plan, that I never said out loud, to become normal is a crock of shit!

And it’s boring.

I may have been judged, mocked, harassed, hated, loved, admired and many other things when I was ‘wild girl,’ and life was whipping me around and spanking me regularly, (and I had to take a lot of vitamins)…but it was simply who I was.

Today I saw a man in the hot tub at the swimming pool who’s right arm is longer than his left, and his left leg is skinnier than his right; his left foot turns inward. How incredibly grateful I felt to have the opportunity to stare this life experiment of normalcy down and admit it didn’t work. That this plan that on some deep seated (now this is embarrassing to admit) level I thought I had embody to move into the life so many of us do; partnership, home ownership, dogship, SUV-ship, you get my point. And family. Family is important, but isn’t true family gained when we’re really ourselves; our wild, unique, messy selves?

So, if any of you know any barns out there that could use the touch of red haired artist with 2 rabbits and a fish, let me know. In the meantime, I’m sending myself there in my imagination until it becomes true.

Dakota won't listen to these woes right now. His girlfriend just got spayed, he knows she's to be his soon, I don't exist right now. As long as the barn keeps coyotes out, he doesn't care about the details.