"What I use" Wednesday

Proximity

And Jack came knocking at my window...

Color...

“A very beautiful woman hardly ever leaves a clear-cut impression of features and shape in the memory: usually there remains only an aura of living color” - William Bolitho

If I were a dog...

I spend more time with dogs than I do people (20 + hours a week). If I *were* a dog, this is the one I would marry. All Disney-like, replete with a reception and slurpy spaghetti a la Lady and the Tramp. I have loved a few dogs like this. My other dog love was Otis, a Rodesian Ridgeback owned by my friend, Jenny. He passed away a while ago, to be replaced with Rudy, a mutt who is gaining my affection, albeit slowly. I rather like it when he sticks his nose in my crotch and sniffs deeply. I tell him frequently that he gives me more action than I have seen in months and months. It gets annoying after a while, though. I push him away.

I like people. I even love some people. But, give me a dog and an endless span of woods and I am a happy camper. My dog friends love to see me. They greet me with fraptious joy every blessed time, as if I were covered in liver and bacon. People, not so much. Sometimes, but not with the regularity of Les Chiens.

This is why I have an oval bumper sticker on my car that says, simply:

"WOOF"

Iconoclastic Fantastic Plastic...

Man, I love working with Natural Light...

Cold, Calm and Colorful...

Tell No One...

I am reading this novel "Tell No One", with brightly colored cover, hazmat orange, flimsy paper, flitting plot, not much to hold onto, but words to caress me to sleep at night. The premise is based around a man who lost his wife years ago, lost to murder. And then he gets an odd email from her, and a link to an online webcam where he sees her, or someone he thinks is her,waving at him, after eight years, and the flood of love and tears opens him up again like a ripe fig. The story goes on, with multiple zig zags of plot twists, but the image burns into me, a splinter inside me, I return to it again and again, picking.

Funny, I feel this way about my past self. Sometimes I see her, through my periphreal vision. I see the Me I was once, in love, steeping in the belief that I was firmly planted in, the myth that I so heartily took into myself with the sweet Disney coating. It slid down my throat and it changed me, my trajectory, my youth flung over the cliff, my adulthood too passive yet to reach out and pull it back to safe ground.

I fell into love. I fell into the thought of it, the feel of it, the brush of it against my skin. Some heat born of longing, quenched only by the reflection of Beloved, began to burn. I followed that heat, like a scent, a hound paid handsomely in the endorphine rush of "belonging", never sated, I grasped. Follow the scent.

I lost that link to gravity. It no longer pushes me to the ground, and I no longer fight the pull to the fall. I don't look for love anymore.

But, sometimes, when I turn my head "just so" I see her, that girl in love, steeping in desire and happiness, just before the brink of disaster. I miss that girl sometimes, the rapture and joy, the naive belief.

I wave at that mirage.

I won't tell her about the truck that is bearing down on her.

That's my dirty little secret.

Path...

There is no liberty except the liberty of some one making his way towards something. Such a man can be set free if you will teach him the meaning of thirst, and how to trace a path to a well. Only then will he embark upon a course of action that will not be without significance. You could not liberate a stone if there were no law of gravity - for where will the stone go, once it is quarried?
Antoine de Saint-Exupery