fun laughs good time.

I often wonder how it is that I know so many beautiful people.

They seem uncommonly frequent in my image bank of friendly memoirs.

I also wonder quite frequently how it is that I know so many superbly impressive people. Impressive people that are also beautiful.

There's an exotic scientist, a dashing physician, a beautiful painter, a brazen physical trainer, a dapper illustrator, a gorgeous ballerina, a striking artisan, an attractive baker, a lovely metaphysical advisor, a supercute graphic designer, a handsome engineer/musician, a charming philosopher.. the list goes on.. and on as I meet more of these gemlike specimens. All the fixings for a hyper-diverse soap opera.

I've been thinking a lot about what love actually is and I think it might tie in with what beauty is. Love is everywhere when everything is beautiful, usually. Someone who sees beauty everywhere is perhaps much more likely to love many things, or one thing quite intensely. I'm thinking of the world here, snow on a branch, sun on a telephone pole, the clouds and stars at night. These are your typical inanimate stargazer wonders of the world-- the way the subway bricks blur by on the train, the folds of a carelessly placed blanket. It's possible to see god in there sometimes.

Then there are the people. These sentient moving shapes and colors that talk to each other and accomplish great deeds.

You know how there are sounds that you feel more than hear? I learned the other day that there are also things you feel more than see. I may have always known that, but have most recently come up with an accurate sentence to describe the idea.

I'm a bumpkin, really, lucky enough to be pleased by many simple things. I grew up in a place where the door of local mom & pops shop was rigged to a full 2 liter on a pulley in order to get it to close all the way. There was a small arcade in the back room, featuring hot titles like "Street Fighter 2" and "Final Fight" and probably "Pac-Man" or one other having the word "fight" in the title. I daydreamed once of asking my dad to go there and hang out with me. In my imagination it seemed like a good idea- we would play these games, you see. It would have been a wonderful bonding experience, rife with high fives and fist pumps. There would have been a music montage. What actually happened, I think, was he fell asleep reading a book and I probably walked the dog or made a castle out of cards.

I used to make a lot of castles out of cards. I recall making one of particular size and majesty which took me all morning- it had gates and a couple different levels. This particular morning, my mother had got up on my bed to change a lightbulb, and the action of her getting down from her perch caused just the right amount of floor disturbance to collapse the thing. She felt so bad. I felt bad that she felt so bad.

I still feel bad that she felt so bad.

Bad probably isn't the right word. One of those things.

Also on being a bumpkin: I went to New York to visit a friend a few years ago and couldn't help but look up at all the tall buildings. Peter Parker was awfully lucky to have lived in New York instead of say.. Portland. Swinging from the Key Bank to the Time and Temp building would have gotten old fast. So I do the thing where I look up while I'm walking, and turn around sometimes when I go to these kinds of places. Having a spidey sense of my own, I tend not to run into people, so I think it's a fine practice (being at the perfect height to be elbowed in the boob or handbagged in the face will develop these things). I find I do that even in places that don't have tall buildings- one of the advantages of being short I suppose, you always look up. Me and Kurosawa, we look at the sky.

"I realized I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them. One was my wife, the other a man I respected and greatly liked; but both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me-- the world of selves, of time, of moral judgements and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words and idolatrously worshipped notions. " - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception