My fire

List

oil pastels

striped apples

new leaves that are wings taking first flight

the world keeps shapeshifting beyond these beige walls and fluorescent lights

a tiny bird with a song like 100 pebbles dropping all at once into 100 magic ponds

thoughts that unfurl completely

phone calls from my sister

nightswimming, rem

a finished story

overhauled overalls

a perfect meeting of talent and need

her problem is she's problematic

a daring move

there is no right decision, only one that reflects priorities

a summer picnic

satisfaction

friends singing harmonies on dreams

friends spontaneously showing up in town

rocksitting

orange salamander

this is grace, this is bliss

This is what happens when I'm given creative control

The only gold

Today's love entry in preparation for Valentine's Day is going to be FULL of good words on love (and lyrics if you're ambitious enough to look them up), because last night I made VALENTINES!

I have not managed to do this since 2001, so yes it absolutely warrants all caps.

Having succeeded at last, I've decided to share with you a one-time-only very special offer of

The This Blue Singer Valentine-Making Tutorial!

Life intention, Part I

I was quite fresh out of college. I was sitting on a city bus in Madison, Wisconsin, on my way to my $11 an hour temp job processing mortgages at the credit union. The country was in its early economic reeling from 9/11 and mortgage interest rates were plummeting, so everyone was refinancing. Outside it was gray. The bus floor was slimy with grit. My co-riders always seemed to include someone in an inexpensive suit with a worn leather briefcase, someone large and gray-headed in a lopsided stocking cap, someone in a thin insulated plaid shirt looking tired, someone around my age with shinier shoes and tamer hair than mine. On this November day, I took out my journal and, in jagged script from the jolting of the bus ride, I wrote this:

Harboring the moon

My fat orange cat is even more howly and velociraptory than usual.  Meanwhile, I am feeling that particular electric mix of melancholy, rebellion, and creativity.

Must be a full moon.

Here are some things that sound like good ideas to me today:

1.  Playing hooky and wandering the city taking photographs of graffiti, stopping only for ice cream, hot chocolate or Italian pastries.

2.  Standing in the middle of the river of Sox fans heading into Fenway tonight and handing out cards with typed definitions of such awesome words as ataraxia, formication, and defenestration.

3.  Fingerpainting 25 portraits of my fat orange cat, hanging them to dry on the clothesline on the back porch, and forgetting about them until July.

4.  Calling up random receptionist/customer service type people in the south (banks, grocery stores, biology departments) and asking random but easy questions and thanking them profusely for helping me out in the hopes of eliciting some genuinely friendly "honeys" or "you have a wonderful day now ma'ams."

5.  Illustrating The Boarderchildren with pastels on black paper (in honor of Nick) while listening to Radiohead's In Rainbows on repeat.

6.  Renting a Plymouth Prowler and driving up the north shore in my stocking cap and pink sunglasses and the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz! blasting from the stereo.

7.  Getting all my best good friends on conference call (since they're scattered across more states than I care to count) and letting them find out what they all have in common besides me (grand laughs, sweet hearts, busy minds and probably at least a certain tolerance for 8th grade humor).

8.  Flying my three sisters to Tuscany and sitting around drinking and eating until we forget all the miles we've ever had between us and never remember them again.

9.  Writing that story about the man who feels he misses something or someone but can't quite see or say what it is.  With, hopefully, my fat orange velociraptor asleep on my lap.

10.  Joining an indie pop rock band, co-writing an amazing song about slow dancing, and performing it for people across the world who will be moved to slow dance with each other and love each other a little more sweetly and preciously than before.

Impractical questions

My friend Nick is a painter who paints on black canvases instead of white.  He does this because when he dreams, the background of his dreams is black.  

Sometimes I get so bewildered that the world is like neither art nor dreams.  In fact, the theme of my life this year seems to be reckoning with the question of whether that's so necessary.  What would my life look like if I lived it the way I imagine I might?  Quite possibly I'd be homeless and stinky in New York, giggling on the sidewalk at green balloons and passersby with inexplicable pillows.  Or else homeless and stinky in a VW bus on the side of a desert road under the stars, writing songs on an acoustic guitar, a fisher price xylophone, a vitamin water bottle.  

Would I be happier?  Would I be so scared to lose it all?  Would I be free?