060104 There’s Well Street, the hotel with pins and needles, the bare spot on the floor where you can actually get a good night’s sleep even though it doesn’t seem as though you should be able to.... There’s Good Street, and the offices at the corner of Good and Well.... Place of the Way.... There’s downtown, with its dusky rubine light.... There’s the amusement park, itself somewhat dilapidated and abandoned, with the massive, sprawling junkyard of chaos on the way there.... There’s the zoo, with its tangled network of underground caverns.... There’s the Cracked Glass Express, that leads to the Farm, the latter with its wan thread of coherence, the interHighway.... Of course there’s Esriel’s Cafe.... There’s the Loom in the Attic.... There’s the Aviary, down by the big water.... There’s the slow, lurking River that leads to the big water, and the boat docks along the way.... There’s that place with the tawny wood floors and space to pace and breathe, I think it was on Well Street, where I spoke with my dream folks about all this, about how it was like a map but not in the strictest sense, how intersections could be expressed fractally, and if you need to visit someplace or see something, you just add it to the map and it becomes a part of the whole organism.... Yesterday’s dream really did point to First-Day, after all. “This is it,” I said to them, my ghost dad and my phantom step-mom. Then I hugged them each in turn, sincerely yet distractedly because I was already thinking about how not to jinx myself. Usually if I say “this is it,” I jinx myself. But not this time—I think. I hope. We’ll see. I don’t think “this is it” necessarily meant I was going to figure it all out today, this morning. I do think it meant the seed is planted in fertile ground. “It” is simply what I have to work on in the mornings, in the basement, here at home, every day before I go to “work.” “It” is what is mine to nurture. And of course, I can’t tell anybody else about it yet. Only the phantoms, only the ghosts and dream people can know, for now. Secrecy is not vanity, but merely how not to jinx myself. *French ‘fractale,’ from Latin ‘fractus’ broken, uneven (past participle of ‘frangere’ to break) + French ‘-ale’ ‘-al--’ more at BREAK : any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes that repeat themselves at any scale on which they are examined and that are assigned fractional dimensions And what isn’t it? I think it’s important to remember, it’s not a collection of metaphors or allegories. It is what it is. The junkyard is the junkyard. The Cafe, with its myriad salt-and-pepper shakers, reaching beyond the ken of any mortal blessed enough to eat breakfast and fall in love, is simply the Cafe, nothing more, and nothing less. Welcome to it. Enjoy your stay. Love one another-- beyond these simple imperatives, “it” is also definitely not a set of commandments. Okay, so now that I know all this, I still don’t get how to actually do it. Maybe that’ll be tomorrow’s homework. No worries. 011/20604 Tampons are for pussies! 060404 Doo da doo doot dooo, dooo, do doo da doo doot doooo....! 061604 make the music pretty 061704 Even if (I may have said this already) Cholula made up all the dreams, I still love her for them. 061704.2 Only the Strong: be open-minded and respectful; don’t give up; don’t let a crushing, humiliating defeat stop you; have some balls; act braver than you think you are; be loyal to your true group; even if you can’t totally kick the wildcat’s ass (because you are a kitten), try anyway; do what you can do, don’t worry about what you can’t do; practice hard; speak your mind even if your voice shakes; sing! All that good stuff. Capoeira’s not going away until I face my childhood fears. Finally. 062304 Oh four oh four oh four oh four. What four? Oh. Four. As you can see, I’m not really ready to come back from my zabbatical yet. Obviously, nothing to say have I except the bricks, and the bricks can say it better *drenched with sun* the well is so empty, so empty. the first sign of a trickle tickles my madbone. but it is not yet time. GO DO SOMETHING ELSE! Like what? Take a piss, take a shower, play some capoeira, and then of course the constant other thing. The constant other thing that claims 83% of your imagined existence. You thing. You lost, grizzly, tired, clueless thing. Let’s have something happen. Let’s have a jogo de dentro on a little table top in a brick cafe. Let’s have the sun coming in all crazy. Let’s have someone draw a knife. Let’s have neither one back down. Let’s have the singing and the clapping. Let’s have the steel drone of the berimbau. Let’s have you taste the sweat. Let’s really face death, I mean really, for the first time. There’s no going back. Every human secretly knows: death is god. 062904 Amen hugged me before we left LA. Gume sez Jorge, the guy whose notice I thought I was completely beneath, said I need to release my hips more, stretch out, stop holding back. Sapo fell out, but he’s okay. Compreyu is a sullen, self-absorbed teen, but he’s okay. Gume is a real guy who needs me as much as I need him. We walked on the beach. Maybe next year I’ll actually jump in the roda.