peach couch
When your brain’s all topsy-turvy, maybe try saying an atheist prayer to Maira Kalman for principles of uncertainty, elements of style. Her tonic always puts my bleh mood to rights again. Just one page in her books unwrapping layer upon layer of pastels that would make Key West turn lime-green with envy. Alternate worlds a synesthesiac could love. The jumbliest, grittiest New York street scene or claustrophobic prewar apartment refracted into sweetly-tilted planes of color. Slightly tart like a clever friend in conversation, the artist’s hand. It imprints on your heart a cheery feeling. How oddly-shaped and yearning our human lives are! Stretched out on the peach couch with one of her books smoothing out my jaded eye Just as nice, I think, as meditating or going to yoga. Hello to dourest old dowager, absurdist but apropos pronouncements, hoarder-neurotic’s humor, we meet again. Everything so like life on this island and couch. Except a just-mixed zest of tenderness like the most beautiful pistachio ice cream, rose-water macaroon.
a list for love
At the end of 2010 I went on a string of first/second/third dates. While getting dressed for these encounters, I slipped into an altered state that the Pintupi might call being “in the Dreaming.” My visions of that evening’s love interest were so specific they seemed preverbal, preconscious, arising from within or beyond. On slips of paper, I started to record what I was seeing, as the Pintupi do. From within the Dreaming, their Seers annotate the spirit realm thru dashes and dots radiating over entire canvases—these paintings become symbolic maps that guide them in waking life, when extrasensory vision is dormant. Instead of channelling my date-night juju into dot-paintings, I made a list for love. Later, I realized the list I wrote “in the Dreaming” was not hocus pocus or ESP, rather an exercise in introspection. My visions encoded values and desires about love, duh, cause I projected onto near-strangers qualities I’d most want in a mate! Clarifying what I want has been oh-so-helpful already, and so I tack up one item at a time like a booster-shot to keep myself focused; the path to my heart, clear. 
item the first: you see both darkness and light, but project more of the latter.
houseguests are fun, even when they’re walruses being extreeeeemely serious hardatwork.
the church on the corner. It’s the loveliest foreground for a sunset.
