Quarters

This morning my mom called and said the surgeons treated him and he is fine now, and blessed with the orders not to drive a car for 30 days. Meghan and I made waffles with raspberries and shoplifted maple and listened to an oldies song with a simpatico harpsichord breakdown. Paolo came over and brought me my repaired bicycle. Bless him. A couple of months ago in San Francisco, we had drinks at the Phone Booth and suddenly a woman climbed gracelessly into his lap, broke all the glasses on our table, and started loudly making out with him. Paolo is very shy, but not when he's drunk and he accepted her kisses until he had a reddish moustache and she dismounted and stumbled off to the bathroom. When she left the bar, she had to be escorted by several friends who guided her extremities but she still managed to take out pint glasses with her hips.

My bike is in excellent shape so I rode up the mountain Tabor and saw a 2 year old girl try to ruin a lesbian wedding. I hid behind a tree trunk and watched the wedding and the little girl saw me and made a 10-minute commotion. I heard references to the Great Spirit and Celtic traditions in the ceremony. The wedding I attended at the commune was officiated by a financial planner who manages the porfolios of multi-millionaires and the Great Spirit was paraded in those vows about 20 times. I can appreciate the nod to native people's deities, but obviously it seems very cheap in these chunky-knit honky rituals. I thought more about the Great Spirit when I saw two native-looking people trying to cross 50th and almost getting pancaked by a Subaru that was impatient for their shopping carts and frying-panned faces to get out the way.

I was lapping around the mountain top on my bike when the brides kissed and drummers in African kitsch outfits thundered. At the top of the mountain Tabor I can smell an inkling of the frangrances in the wild Sierra foothills, where I spend my June, I could smell the pines but I could not detect the odor of doe fur or slug slime or snake molt or needle rot. At the wedding at the commune, when most of the guests had left, I was walking down a path barefoot to the sauna and I saw the queerest creature. It was long like a snake, but moved slow like a slug, its body was not undulating but moving in a slow line. It's complexion resembled a slug, but it had a flicker of a tounge that seemed to guide its decisions. This creature was about two feet long and thick. I knelt down and examined it, just astonished at yet another new sprout of life that is just unconceivable to a city human. What are you? Are there more like you? I spotted this drunk old floozy massage therapist woman up the trail and told her about the thing, but she claimed she never saw it, though I am suspicious that this woman was blind to nature's even glaring details when she drank too many wine coolers.

At the commune wedding, the guests were mostly Burning Man types with mysterious cash currents. They were trading stories about biking in Australia and fucking in Spain and having gourmet lunches in jungles. One of the women, who was a strange and flamboyantly inbred woman, greeted me by the post-ceremony campfire with a bottle of wine in her hand. "Hey booze bag," she said and I spit out my mouthful of wine because I was so surprised by her. I heard later that she is Austrian royalty and has never catered or call centered. Later that night, when they brought out bottles of Jameson and port and guacamole for tired ravers, I drunkenly tried to engage her on the topic of jobs, just for a thrill. "I really haven't worked before," she said, bored. I wore a Mexican blanket to the wedding, and shit-assed shoes from earlier in the day when I was shoveling gravel, and a huge piece of wood tied like a medallion around my neck, and necklaces around my head and paint all over my face. I looked like a real robber, but seemed to get the tchotcke treatment from the guests, who in the last year had probably seen Mongolian women breastfeed and tasted Alfredo sauce while watching tigers mate and spent $50,000 on some big glittery dildo that they incinerated in the desert, but it was such a rare treat for them to see somebody like me in their social scene. "What are you? Are there more like you?" they would ask me. "I love enviornmentalism but I like sex even more. Do you have a boyfriend?" another one asked me. FInally, I just settled down with a nerdy looking kid who turned out to be a comic book writer and we talked about "Metal Machine Music," which I still haven't even heard.

It's too cold. I cut my hair again. I bought a bouquet of roses from two 10 year old girls at Lincoln and 48th. With a limeade, my total was 75 cents. Then a laudromat machine ate my $5 bill.