Furred with Frost

The recent cold mornings left the most unbelievable pattern of ice crystals on my car. It made it look like it had a pelt.

Golden States

Driving down to Venice Beach is such a wonderful experience. You spend a long time on Hwy 5, one of the ugliest, boringest stretches of highway on God's earth. It's dirty, cloudy, trucks everywhere. But by the time you start to reach Orange County, the hills start rising and the sun starts shining. Around San Fernando the anticipation starts to build. And when you finally hit LA proper you feel like the coolest person alive. If you've timed it right the sun will be about to set but you can still roll down your window, tooling around Hollywood Blvd. And then the next day you can stand on that great big pier and watch the surfers bobbing around, acres of sand, the whole thing is one big art-walk... It took me a while to switch my head around, but now there's something about LA that I love. I like the feeling that everyone in the city is contributing to the vibe, that there's a certain energy that everyone is aware of and is tapping into and feeding back on. I guess you could call it affected or pretentious, but to me it's like an enormous art project, which happens to be a city. I like it.

balance?

At a certain point, words begin to falter and break. Beyond that, they fail completely. Poetry is the riding of that ragged edge where they begin to break down.

Anyway, apothegms aside, let's talk about strength for a moment. Somatically speaking I am aware of a certain feeling that has nothing to do with picking up heavy things-- it's more a kind of tensile strength... I can't put it logically:

Strong in the way that a lizard is. Or a braid of rope, a length of wire filament. Something twisted on itself, then again, then again and hammered into place. It isn't pretty. Strong in the way that we say "a strong chemical" or "a strong acid". Or "a strong poison". Half poison, half panacea.

Another way that this occurred to me is to think of the way trees grow. If you want your branches to reach upward, the roots must reach downward. For each growth upward, it takes a corresponding stabilization down, in the earth. If your roots are shallow, so must be your branches. And we see people who grow up tall and say, "Wow, look how tall!" and it occurs to us obliquely, if at all, that the line of earth is a fulcrum point, a mirror. Going up means going down. We see an expression but we see poorly what is behind the expression.