Bicylce Love

The slow (and sometimes stalled) process of fixing up my once rust-bucket bike has come to a triumphant end.

It is ridable; I am riding. I am learning how to balance thin road tires, I am hunched over ram horn handlebars; I am ecstatic and may be in love with this bike. I've brought it inside and will hang it from my ceiling. In the meantime, my ass is sore.

It has snowed for three days straight. Today I stopped waiting for it to clear and layered on thick socks, thermal base clothes, water resistant pull-overs, woolly hat, gloves. I peddled willingly through the wet and slushy streets, contentedly shwish-shwish-swishing.

Half-rain, half-snow spattered and clouded my glasses, blurring the finer details of my neighborhood. I huffed up the hills and beamed as I flew back down them. My nose was numb, my cheeks stung with wind, my fingers stiffed around the bars. My legs, however, were delightfully warm.

I <3 this bike.

Quiet, Please, I'm Studying

Apparently impending English paper deadlines is prime time for my brain to abandon all matter of meaningful, intelligent, constructive writing and frolic instead in the sandbox of the blog. Ooo! I think as I stare at outlines, prompts and notes, I have ideas for posts! Of course. Why wouldn't this be a good time?

I get plenty of writing done, just not of the Critical Theory Response Essay kind. What I need is to stay enrolled in Jason’s classes for the rest of my career so that I can write with a false sense of urgency under the pretense of his deadlines.

And, as expected, Jonesy is now a distracted squirrel leaping between shiny thoughts. Which is the segue I’ll use to excuse this somewhat non-sequitur of a comic:

(I may, or may not, also peruse xkcd while evading English paper deadlines.)

Hey! I think I just had an idea for a paper.

Sun Valley

Where do you, where do you go? My lovely…

I’m a little sunburned, I’m a little bruised. The little muscles on the sides of my ankles protest in the mornings. Such are my colorful reminders of an overexposed weekend.

It’s taken me a week to land. The plane may have touched down in a matter of minutes, but it has taken me seven days and, just last night, twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep to land back into my Life. I return to find the ground here is too soft…

Tissue-thin images float around my day and settle, like dust, on my mind. You are an evanescent presence- in my thoughts, on my phone, in my dreams, but nowhere to be seen. I keep with the most immediate of memories, nursing them like sour beer: your brilliant blues haloed in fluorescent blonde. Forgive me if I stared.

Your punchy, lilting giggle hits me in the gut, arrests my attention and pulls out my own smile- I cannot help but laugh.

***

Birdcall trilled beyond the window and shouting voices bounced between the towers. Sunlight fell against the wall in a single wide, brilliant streak. Overhead the ceiling fan swirled tinktinktink-pink. I studied the ink inches from my nose and breathed deep- filling my lungs of you. My frontal lobes of consciousness lay heavy in contentment, my grasp of reality delightfully fuzzy. Deliciously pinned under your sleeping weight I lay awake inside a dream. I studied the room with watchful eyes (trappings and trimmings of a half-way stranger) while your steady breathe kept alternate-time with the fan.

Iron & Wine

Boy with a coin he found in the weeds,

with bullets and pages of trade magazines.

Close to a car that flipped on the turn,

when God left the ground to circle the world.