See the problem is when potential energy is created, it gets stored somewhere. I now have ounces and ounces of intimacy and tenderness just floating around in my bloodstream. All kinds of molecules of passion and admiration are just milling about in my bones. When energy like this is made, it throws me into a flow state. Everything in life becomes all-absorbing and wondrous. That’s the thing about infatuation/love. It’s amazing when I’m in it, to even a small degree, because it causes a zen-like state of focus in my day and a joyous celebration of all that is in my life. I do realize that this is a state I can create myself, without there being an object for my affection and I have been in a similar state at certain times, entirely without love. But this time it’s so bizarre due to the fact that such a large amount of intensity and energy was stirred up and now I have to find places to direct it, places that are not the person who did the stirring. I have just never experienced that much fervor without completion. I have never felt such passion without culmination. So I feel a bit misguided.

The nature of the touch that I experienced is part of what got me. I had not, in many, many years, felt someone touch me and know that they were truly feeling what it was that their fingers were exploring. I had not felt someone’s body really respond to mine as if we were dancing. It felt like home, it felt authentic and to be blatantly honest, it smelled and tasted “right”. I am not sure that it was right, in fact it probably wasn’t, but it was just that experience of honest, open, responsive physical intimacy that caused this internal chaotic energy. Additionally, what I realize is that all of the things that intrigued me about that type sensuality are things that I need to give to myself. I need to really feel and listen to myself. I need to respond to my body’s communications and needs and I need to give myself this sense of openness, honesty and home-ness. I know that I can, it’s just a matter of where to put all of this energy.

“I encourage you to fantasize abundantly about improbable combinations and seemingly unnatural juxtapositions, Aquarius. For instance, imagine that through the magic of genetic engineering, a mad scientist crosses a giraffe and a hippopotamus to produce a giraffopotamus. Or imagine reading an essay that brilliantly compares apples and oranges. Or watch the musical comedy film West Bank Story, which portrays the love affair between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian cashier, whose parents operate competing falafel restaurants on the West Bank. Doing things like this will put you in the right mood to respond creatively to the unusual syntheses that fate will soon make available to you.”
–Rob Brezny

For those of you who know me and my predisposition to think, talk, and obsess about combination animals, this is AMAZING.

I get it. I take things too fast, find an idea and run with it. I wrap my hands and heart around someone all too quickly and make them feel pushed and skittish. I find some idea, some lover, some dream and I wrap it into knots so tight that even I can’t untangle them to decipher their meaning. I latch onto ideas like a gecko bonds with walls; my molecules intermingle with my chosen surface so that I am actually, literally, stuck to it.
This way of being is habitual. I don’t know how else to be, or much less if I would really want to be another way. This quality is what makes me feel impassioned with life and all it’s possibilities. But it’s a two way street. It provides wonder and awe, as well as the ability to always see the highest and best side of others. It makes me constantly aware that I really can do anything (but not always everything). On the other side, these lofty expectations and exuberant feelings and affirmations of life come crashing down pretty hard at times. Elevation’s antonym is depression and that is often the result of elation. I fully feel and embody the exultation and also fully feel it’s opposing misery.
My lips are chapped from hours upon hours of blissful kissing that felt innocent and chaste enough to be from a time in my life before sex seemed like an option. The kind of kissing that literally takes your breath away, makes you swoon and wonder if you are, in fact, going to pass out due to sheer visceral bliss. The aforementioned state of my lips was a cause for delight yesterday. It made me feel alive and whole…made me feel like I am a delight to someone else. Now it is a source of sadness because it reminds me that that is something I should not continue exploring with that person, that I need to give them space, step back, let go of ideas and adorations.
I came home from Oakland tonight, and went raging over to the Pie Shop. The Pie Shop is what I equate with complete salvation. I am raging about several things, the most mild of which is this most recent love affair. The other things are too complex for me to want to go into at the moment. But I came here sure that I had nearly a novel’s-worth of rantings, musings, and fears. I am sure that somewhere I do but as I write this I realize what all of this boils down to.
My passion for life and the elements of life I am enamored with makes me always yearn to share that passion with others. I automatically want to make music with anyone who is remotely musical, dance with anyone who’s willing to even give it a shot, sing at the top of my lungs at every opportunity and make any art or adventures with anyone who’s available When I have the inkling that someone who I already adore and respect as a friend indicates that they want to involve themselves in any of these shenanigans, my heart leaps and I always assume that they will actually do these things with me.
Now, I have been through many phases of my life in which I was largely unresponsive to the external stimuli of friendship and passion so I am not really judging the human penchant for laziness. Most of us have it and often have a hard time getting around it long enough to actually go out and enjoy doing the things we think and speak about with passion. The things is, when I become romantically involved with someone, that involvement serves to amplify my lust for life and also causes me to REALLY want to share my passions with my lover. Something about a physically-romantic-sexual involvement also makes me feel like sharing these things is more possible and so if it doesn’t work out (either romantically or productively) I feel downright dejected.

Today I went for a wander down a street that I have not walked before. Out of the apartment, and left onto 22nd. It is a lovely street and is a very sunny day. I encountered two intriguing smells. One was the white-blossomed trees that seem to be somehow related to Oranges. Their smell reminds me of the way the ais in Seville was heavy with perfume from all of the Orange trees. Perhaps these are some kind of decorative orange. At any rate, they are lovely and have a very welcoming, happy smell that is florifically innocent. Those trees are everywhere in the Mission so consequently it smells quite nice most of the time. I walked past Harrison, Alabama and turned right onto Bryant. Up Bryant to 23rd I went, and a few blocks later found the second smell.
It was the smell of some kind of laundery detergent and dryer sheets wafting from the vent of someones dryer. This is the kind of chokingly awful perfumed detergent that would normally be disgusting to my nose but this one I associate with a friend I once has and when I smell it is gives me a nice little wave of nostalgia. I don’t know what type of detergent it is but it is nice.

How do I weave all of the rapidly-firing-thought-threads into something meaningful? Place the thoughts onto paper and construct something articulate…perhaps metaphors are wonderful but are also used in laziness when we lack a more specific and accurate word to describe the concept on which we are trying to expound. I must be on endorphin overload for it’s not everyday that this many ideas are continuously welling up indise of me to the point that I wish for a scribe inside my head recording every vigorous leap of thought, graceful transition of concept and abrupt intrusion of synthesis. Those things occur in my head like movement. I don’t have words to describe what movement is like but I wish that I did. Maybe it’s like our use of metaphors to represent concepts too ephemeral for us to grasp entirely. We dance, and then want to talk about it, but it is too fleeting and inexplainable to explain.
But I wish that I had words for it. A word to describe the buttery, pliable feeling of using all of my moveable parts in space and feeling how each part affects the rest but doesn’t prevent isolation of the pieces of me. I can’t quite aptly describe how it feels when my limbs and torso seem to be hollow although each cell of my body tends to feel imbued with explicit and holistic information. All of that information allows my movable parts to coordinate and allows me to really see and feel the space which I feel I am (when I dance) able to mold around me.
The foot moves in a circle and the weight of the leg causes the torso to swing and weight the waiting leg which allows the shoulder and arm to follow through into a brief held shape, shoulder slung over clavicle. That momentary cohesion gives way to an arm swing in the coronal plane which then gives the necessary momentum to the first arm which takes the body into a turn. The front arm pierces the space and abruptly stops the turn as the weight of the pelvis softens into a deep fold with femur, hence absorbing the force of the turn. The body then turns 1/2 way around as the legs and arms swing overhead for an upside-down moment moving circularly through the coronal plane. Left leg lands, right leg leands with all joints folded underneath torso-weight, taking you to the floor but not stopping the momentum. That force is navigated into throwing the torso away from the legs and then suctioning the pelvis towards the elbow which is now supporting your weight. Pause.
You see, all of that movement is but the scant beginnings of a longer dance. When the whole 2-minutes of movement is written out like this beginning, it fills 3 hand-written 81/2 by 11 pages. It took me an hour to write (the long version) and it does little justice to the movement. Description is interesting but doesn’t even come close to reproducing the kinesthetic or visual experinces of doing or watching the movement. Those movements look, and very much feel like moving blobs of mercury that ocassionally, briefly stop for moments of stillness.
Movement to me causes things to make sense but the sense that comes also makes that sensability seem trivial. I guess that is the paradox of deeply caring yet letting go (of expectation).

The travelling part of 2006 was great. My nephew was difinitely a highlight of 2006 but it was also sad not to get to see him every day.

Overall 2006 was a gigantic fluke…or something. I’m not sure I actually have the verbal capability to succinctly describe what exactly 2006 was….it was somethin’ else. Now it is over and gone and sometime I will be able to look upon it with heart-felt nostalgia. I still miss David but it gets easier all the time. I still wonder about what happened and how I could have tried to treasure and protect our friendship with every fiber of my being and end up losing it anyway. Now there are other aspects of chaos, of a much more interesting and beautiful kind, that are causing me to feel like I am waking up and propelling myself forward once again.

You sit and bask in the romance of it all
The perfection
mystery
beauty.
All of these romances are untold horror
when you are somehow inexplicably
stuck in the middle of it in ways you can’t even fathom.
Obviously you don’t understand or you may have been
more delicate with any part of me.
You may have noticed that you abandoned me
or made me seem like less of a person.
Less of a happy, well-adjusted intelligent being
beacuse I have to shut down when any of the myriads of items
that are contained in these topics are brought up.
If you (any of you)
had been sensitive to the fact that a lack of sensitivity
and propriety could damage someone so throughly
you may have thought better.
Thought better of your flaunghting
thought better of my heart.

Well, I finally made the move into the big city. Michael and I got a lovely 1 bedroom apartment and moved in on thanksgiving day. It has been 2 weeks of non-stop fun in the city. Layne was here when we first moved and he was a great help with the move, shopping for furnitiure and household items and generally just being a smelly nuisance!
I still work in Oakland but only 3 days per week. I go to work early and come home late on those days so I miss all traffic and the communte takes 20 minutes each way. The apartment is on 22nd and S Van Ness, in the heart of the mission. The best thing for me is the proximity to both of the SF dance studios that I frequent. i used to spend the morning walking Nita, and then having to rush out of the house by 9am to get to dance class by 10. Now, Nita and I have a leisurely morning of walking to Ritual coffee (their logo is a hammer and sickle, so obviously a good place to patronize), and then to Dolores park or Bernal hill, both large off-leash parks. Both parks offer amazing views of the city and on the earlier mornings I get to watch the sun rise of San Francisco. After park time, I have to restrain myself from going to Tartine, which offers the best pastries I have eaten in this country. Some mornings I go there and indulge in a Frangipane croissant (croissant filled with marzipan and sliced almonds), gougere (a pop over-like pastry with fresh thyme, black pepper and gruyere) quiche (which often is made with clever ingridients such as ham and fresh nettles) or brioche bread pudding (aka “french toast in a cup”).
After park and Tartine (or some other breakfast) I either go to work or make the 7-minute-pedestrian trek to dance class. It is a beautiful thing. I go to dance class almost every day now. My work schedule is such that I only really have to miss class on one day per week.
Other than dance class the city holds many pleasures: the beach is a 10 minute drive away; there are countless parks and green spaces; my favorite herb store and food co-op are each easily walkable; there are so many affordable/downright cheap yet good mexican, salvadorean and thai food places it blows my mind; there are always things going on, example: I met my friend/co-worker and now neighbor Paige for a beer on a sunday and there was a string quartet playing at the cafe where we sat at 9pm on a sunday!
Our apartment is really great and is coming together more and more all of the time. It is so nice to again have a place to settle after nearly a year and to have a real bedroom where I can try and sleep more, as sleep has been a real issue for me this past year. We have big windows with nice views, a closet as big as some of my previous dwelling spaces and a kitchen that even has a dishwasher. Life is grand.