Drop the Chase, Accept the Calm
The Universe has its ending, too, and doom looms over the petals and pheromones, but who cares in this moment, on the river, sweaty and sprayed? Not me, and my friends with me are grinning between their shots. It's lovely to be alive, and I forget forever and massage the moments, always passing, always pleasing if I can only take the time to notice.
Wing Time: Ingo Juliusson Flies Away
His Facebook page is still up, showered with remembrances and pictures he will never read or reply. I go to the Message link, as if I am going to write him a note as I do almost daily, asking for a contact or proposing an idea or simply to poke the bear into an outrage over bankers or the Pope or the Dalai Lama, and link onto our full conversation so I can copy over 2,500 chat entries between us, now doomed to a one-way edit. He will not read me and he will not reply. His 40th birthday would have been in ten days and two daughters on the cusp of teenagehood will spend his birthday without the one guy who knows how to celebrate birthdays.
The Poison Mead Necklace
The Real People, or the First People, the Principals, kicked her out long ago for getting laid and skinny-dipping. She came from a long line of medicine people. She went to Vegas and became a barista, and then toyed with the idea of working the glamour trades until the Real People came looking for her again; some kind of bird virus was in the hills, and her aunt and a chief were coughing blood. She went back, the aunt and chief died and so did over 30 others in the caves, but still they insisted she be the doctor. She was 23, uneducated, dying to fall in love, and that's when I met her. She was catching scorpions, I was snapping mountains. "I've got the poison in my blood," she said, as a warning, "And I drip it on this necklace when the fever gets bad and I start spitting it up. The necklace keeps the drunks and the bastards away." Fine with me, I said, smells like roses.
Chasing the Borealis: Near the Arctic Circle
I am suspended on ice. My fingers cannot find purchase on the smooth surface. My right foot is solidly on rock, while my left searches for another hold. It is beginning to snow, and the sun is gone; purple midnight is falling at five p.m. The worst is I am panicking. If I slip, I might not die, but my bones will break, and I am at the end of civilization, five hours away from a hospital. I do not look down at the hotel below the frozen waterfall I have climbed; I do not think of the hot cocoa waiting for me there.
Lines Drawn in the Sky by a Failed Pilot
He was going to be a jet pilot. Not a jet pilot in the gamer sense, blowing other jets up. No, Frank Gehry while he swept up the trash at a small airfield in Southern California dreamed of being the guy you heard piloting your 757 from LAX to JFK: "Hello, this is your captain Frank Gehry, wishing you a pleasant flight at 33,000 feet," etc. Would he have pointed out the lines of the terminal at Dulles Airport? "On your left is a building designed by Eero Saarinen, a guy from Finland who designs some very comfortable chairs," for example. But he never became a pilot. He fell into architecture by accident, and look what has happened.
Accidental Artist, a letter of sympathy
The singer writes me from Hollywood and is worried about her identity. She has wasted her time and her finances and also feels as if she is aging. But still she presses forward. She wants a sign that the looming depression in her mind might be worthy of becoming its own work of art. She wants a sign from me. Who else has so wasted his time and money while getting uselessly (and dangerously) older, than me?
