journeys of a restless mind

daffodils make me happy

I want

I am growing tired of the city.   I want to live in the woods near the ocean.  I want to buy a yurt, and put it up under some tall fir trees.  Down a little stone path, I will have a bath house with a wood fired ofuro.  In a clearing in the woods there will be fruit trees, and I will keep bees.  I will roast my own coffee, maybe sell it in the little tourist down down the road a few miles.  I will be able to see the stars.

not blocked

Since I can't seem to come up with much of anything worthwhile these days, let me direct you to someone who can.  Go read this post of Kimberly's. 

blocked

I am so blocked.  All I want to do is post fotos.

unmoored

I feel unmoored.  I'm being tossed around by the waves and whipped in the wind, when all I really want is to be the anchor.  I want to sink down below the surface and lodge in the soft muck at the bottom, let the tempest rage above me while I feel the gentle tug of the anchor chain.  It won't dislodge me.  I want to be solid and heavy, quiet and still, not like a stray feather that gets carried away on every puff of air.  How do you become brave enough to dive under?

the persistence of memory

I have been to the land of mouse ears and open wallets and standing in line, and I have lived to tell the tale.  This ain't your childhood-memory Disneyland, let's get that straight right now.  Sure, the Pirates of the Caribbean is still there, but it won't be as cool as you remember it.  In fact, it will look a bit dowdy and in need of repair, and the downhill splashes aren't nearly as downy or as hilly as you are quite certain they used to be.  All the fakeitude is depressing rather than fun, especially the let's pretend New Orleans.  The Matterhorn, though, made it all OK.  A mountain on the horizon, even a fake one, always makes my heart sing.

I know the one on the left isn't the greatest of fotos, but what you must notice about it is this:  check that expression on the dear face of the kidlet.  Note his right hand clutching the armrest (his left hand is clutching the photographer).  This is a child that does not like to have his body hurtled through space.  So of course, we took him to Disneyland.

where I've been

dos fotos de dos cafecitos

a meme by any other name

Cyn from Life in the Pink tagged me for a meme earlier this month, and in my usual derelict way about these things, I am only getting around to it now.  If you look at my sidebar, you will see that Life in the Pink is way down at the very bottom of the "detours" list.  What that means is that I've been reading her blog longer than I've been reading anybody else's.  Certain blogs that I once loved and read regularly have lost their appeal to me, and fallen right off the blogroll, but not Life in the Pink.  Cyn continues to impress me (for one thing she's in grad school studying computer science), and as often as not, makes me laugh out loud.  One day, a couple of years ago, while reading her at work, I noticed that she'd linked to nina turns 40.  I did my now patented "jumping and squealing" right there in my cubie.  It was the first time that someone who I read and admired had blogrolled me, and it was quite a thrill.  If I could go back and re-live my twenties again, I'd want to be like Cyn.

Oh yeah, the meme.  I'm to list seven songs that I am into right now.

Pineola~Lucinda Willams
I'm working my way backwards through the Lucinda Williams catalogue, so I finally got ahold of "Sweet Old World".  This song is about someone's suicide, so it is admittedly weird that I'm so into it now.  Who but Lucinda can make you want to listen to stories of heartbreak over and over?  I think it's the violin that gets me. 

Which Will~Lucinda Williams
This is such a sweet, sad song.  More heartbreak and loss made beautiful by the master.

Dance This Mess Around~B-52's
I used to bop around to this in high school, when I had the album on vinyl.  This song's got dancing, and cheese, and heartbreak, which apparently turns me on these days. A young lad in my office knows and loves this song, so we tend to annoy our co-workers by frequently asking each other, "Fred, doesn't that make you feel a lot better?" I'm just askin'.

The Crunge~Joshua Redman Elastic Band
Riverwide~Joshua Redman Elastic Band
These songs play back-to-back on the "Momentum" album.  The Crunge is funky smooth groovy, with a sax riff that gets stuck in your head in the best of ways.  It's hard to sit still listening to it.  It's short and swinging and bam, it's done. Then Riverwide slowly rises up out of the silence and washes over you, and you feel baptized and whole.  I love the contrast of these two songs.

Mulence~Cubanismo
I never get tired of this song. Ever.  And there's no heartbreak in there anywhere.

I Just Want to Celebrate~Rare Earth
Thanks to Paul, I got turned on to the Motown Remixed Album, and if you downloaded it from iTunes, you got all the original tracks, too.  This is one of them.  I remember listening to it on AM radio as a kid.  Further proof that I'm not only about teh sad.

~special bonus track~
But Beautiful~Shirley Horn
This song has to be the loveliest of the jazz vocal standards, and nobody can boil a song down to its essence quite like Shirley Horn. "Beautiful to take a chance, and if you fall, you fall."

If you wish to meme, please do so.  No tagging from me.

 

 

my heart