Fairs are to the country as subway trains are to the city. They are great places to observe a whole lot of human beings.
Leitmotif at the country fair: fat mamas and skinny daddies. Being a mama myself I can recognize what happens after a man and a woman turn into parents.
We are now off on our new adventure. Anchors in storage in California, we are living in a little lakeside cabin in Maine. We’re playing everything by instinct and whim. We are not attempting to go around the world in 80 days. We are nomads looking for home.
Here is a list of places I am interested in visiting:
Still looking for a home… my birthday is coming up and the birthday blues are creeping up on me.
I dreamed about Edwin. He was just there, being his beautiful boring old Christian self. But there was something about him that was calm and comforting. I wonder if he’s thinking about me, all the way in the Netherlands. At first I thought, nah, he doesn’t know my birthday is coming up. Then I remembered that on my 18th birthday he came over unannounced (after we had already broken up), brought me a pink and blue plush toy elephant (his nickname for me) and we spent the day together.
In my dream, Edwin said something about how he can see through false prophets and that nothing is what it seems. I was thinking about that before I fell asleep last night. How my friends who have chosen “evil” as the image to represent themselves are the sweetest, truest, most positive people I know. I’m a very lucky devil girl!
Devil Girl photo by SatanNYC
In my dream, I was looking in the mirror at an old woman. I touched my dry wrinkled face and began peeling my skin off, frantically trying to find the smooth young skin underneath. I kept peeling until my skin was raw and bloody. It was terrifying.
When I woke up, I wondered if I was a young woman dreaming of being old, or an old woman dreaming of being young.
I’m still trying to recover from sleep deprivation this weekend. We drove out to Danville for a dear friend’s wedding, then Stockton for a double birthday picnic.
I was wondering what all the heat wave hype was all about. We’re spoiled here in the SF bay Area, weather between the 60’s and low 90’s, mist in the morning, fog in between the really hot sunny days. Inland, we were frying!
Both events we attended involved jumping in the swimming pool, something our little baby got very excited about. I began lessons of “kick the water.”
I catch as many naps as I can, some of them involuntarily. In one of them, I dreamed that my baby and I were at the beach. I turn around and find the little one far away from me, in the ocean and facing a giant oncoming wave. I am running, screaming, my legs are tangled in the water, not fast enough.
Nowadays my nightmares involve losing my baby. There is nothing else more terrifying.
I dreamed I had a son, a beautiful blonde boy, kissing me all over my face. J said, “Tell your father, Pete, that I owe him $10.” I scolded J for making such a statement to our son.
When I woke up I told J about this dream, and he laughed, saying it was a statement he was likely to say. Later on, he kept using that phrase on our baby, “Your father, Pete…,” knowing it would get a rise out of me.
Pete is this guy we knew, who had a problem. He would get blindly drunk and piss on people. One time he was working on a boat, fishing for clams. Of course, he got drunk with the men one night and pissed on the captain. The next day he found himself stranded on an island with no way of getting back home.
self-portrait taken sometime in 2003
This morning I woke up from a dream in which my old cat was looking down on me, J and our baby. Then I remembered my cat died on this day last year. She was really old and scraggly and I loved her very much. While J dug a hole in our backyard, I bent over her dead body and whispered, “Come back to me!” I was six months pregnant and hoping her kitty soul would reincarnate in my baby so we could still be together. I wonder if several souls can reincarnate into one new life. Kind of like in Being John Malkovich. If it’s possible, I imagine my old cat (for her mischief), J’s grandmother (for her beauty and intelligence) and Freddie Mercury (for his amazing talent) reborn in my little monkey.
In my dream you straddle three young women, breasts gleaming, eyes transfixed at the green gourd dangling from your waist. You feed them this gourd, as I watch from the shadow, aroused by the tip of the vegetable entering each juicy pair of lips.
I was hiding because I did not want you to be distracted by my presence. Too many times I’ve been selfish and stupid.
I woke and fingered the jade gourd pendant around my neck. Everybody needs forgiveness.
