After a day filled with upsetting communications that seemed to be beamed straight to my office from the planet of Mercury Retrograde, I eagerly anticipated coming home with carryout food, putting on my pajamas and watching what had been touted as the best ever opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Why did I get sucked in again? Yes, it was bigger than ever, as Matt Lauer promised, but the very size of it, the Bigness, the technology was numbing. Is a bloated over-the-top paean to it’s-a-small-world–after-all globalism inevitable? The camera even caught George and Laura Bush checking their watches. For once, I felt his pain. The smoke and mirrors spectacle made me hungry for something clean and simple, like a green banana leaf in the rain. Like a haiku by Basho. Like the first star in a mysterious unfathomable night sky.

This photo reminds me of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, and it makes me remember how much I enjoy late-night conversation over bottles of wine, being convinced that you are changing the world or at the very least, changing your life, as you volley ideas and just-plain- gossip back and forth. A night when you overcome the distance between being human. The kind of evening when you decide to go to Paris for the first time even though you should be putting that money in  your 401k or when you vow to go home and start a novel or quit your job or learn to knit. A night when all the elements click together like the solution to a Rubik’s Cube and in retrospect you say, “remember when we played scrabble in the  bar on Halloween and the guy was hitting his girlfriend and we called the cops but they let them go home together,” or “remember when we decided to go skinny dipping instead of going home and there was phosphorescence in the ocean and it was clinging to our arms?” It’s nothing you can plan and everything you want a night out to be. It’s an after-hours miracle.

This is a photo of me a couple of years ago. I think I looked damn good considering how damn old I am. But now I just look old. And why? Mainly it’s because I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in about 3 years. Added to that is when I watch The Today Show, all I hear is how women need to sleep more. Always said in an accusatory tone, as if we don’t want to sleep. As if it’s a choice. As if we are naughty children who just need to put our jammies on and say night-night. When I hear that, I want jump in the tv and grab whatever expert is currently talking through his or her ass and beat the living shit out of them all around Studio 1A in full view of the carney crowd outside that is braying like a big overfed donkey (am I the only person in America who wishes they could mute The Today Show screamers and sign makers?). Like, what am I supposed to do? Put lavender under my pillow? Think happy thoughts? Meditate? Drink a glass of warm milk at bedtime? Don’t read in bed? Up my thread count? Lower my caffeine/alcohol/fat intake? The big advice, of course, is to HAVE LESS STRESS IN MY LIFE. Do these freaks watch the news? There’s a war in the Middle East. All toys come from China and they’re full of lead. Even Whole Foods frozen edamame comes from China, and if the toys are full of lead, why is there any reason to think the edamame is safe? Planes are late, cancelled, uninspected and overpriced–plus there are never enough overhead bins. There are killer germs everywhere (especially in airport toilets) but we shouldn’t use antibacterial soap. And that roll around my waist? It’s full of cortisol secret agents and dementia time bombs. I had lunch with a friend I haven’t seen in a long time last week. We both discovered that we’ve come to regard our bedrooms as war zones–us against insomnia. When I couldn’t sleep, I used to trail out to my couch in the middle of the night dragging a blanket, a book and a pillow. I made a nest, read, or watched a b/w Bette Davis movie. But then I got rid of my old sagging discount-store overstuffed couch and bought an anorexic showdog. All tobacco-brown linen and lowslung frame and uptown attitude. A bony greyhound of a couch that’s like sleeping on a box of rocks. So now the only place left in my house to seduce sleep is the yard sale chair in my office. It reminds me of the weeks after my lung surgery in 1996 when the only place I could sleep was sitting up on an old wicker chaise lounge I’d found on the street when I was trash picking. It was the best sleep I’ve ever had…because I knew I was recovering, I was going to live, I was in between the stress I used to have and the stress I’d have sometime in the future. I was in a life limbo. And oh yeah, the oxycontine helped too.

My kitchen is still torn apart, no stove, paint daubs all over the walls where I’ve been testing colors, lighting still not installed. But I have a vase of daffodils on the counter. Every time I walk by there is a faint green scent of earth and leaves coming from their direction. Like a song you’ve heard before but whose title eludes you, just out of reach. I’ve been using a new shampoo for a few weeks and every morning, the perfume of the suds has been reminding me of something happy/sad. Is it peonies, I wondered? No. Lilies of the valley? No. What, what, what? When I unwrapped the daffodils, though, I realized I finally had the name. It was spring.

“When the moon is full, the seas rise up to reach it, sending wild waves of enthusiastic welcome. Oyters spread their shells wide, stretching to swallow it whole in the same way that they one day may slide down someone’s slippery throat. Wolves howl at it, ears pricked, eyes glued adoringly on the object of their attention. Heads thrown back in ecstasy, they sit up very straight like any good dog and sing to it songs of atavistic refrain.” (The Moon Watcher’s Companion)

That paragraph is so sensual, so immediate, so physical that it makes me sick I didn’t write it. I am a moon worshipper. I love to drive to the beach when there’s a full moon and watch the lighted path it throws on the water, dreaming that it must lead toward some other, better world. When I look at the full moon, I can believe in all kinds of things in and out of nature. I don’t see a dead planet littered with space-man trash, a pockmarked planet that could have an abandoned Walmart over the next dune. I only see poetry, magic and mystery. Lucky me, to be born too early to have it all sanitized and scientized and temporarily colonized by flags and footprints.

I’ve been immersed in the music of the Beatles lately, especially George Harrison. Tonight on the way home from work, I listened to The Concert for Bangladesh, and the air in the car was thickened with music, like memory gravy. “Wah Wah,” “My Sweet Lord,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” … a long slow slide guitar back to 1971 and yet outside of time. I love to drive with the music blasting, with creative ions pulsing into the atmosphere, with the rhythm of movement, the wheels turning over, the road winding up behind me in tune with the music of the spheres and George Harrison or Bruce Springsteen or Wilco. iPods and dvds don’t do the job for me. I want a live concert or music pouring into the street, not going straight from the machine to my eardrums. I need a big screen and other beings nearby willing to be moved, bored, awed, teared, cheered in the dark. I want my music to be technicolored and too hot to handle, not contained in sleek too-cool-for-school chrome gadgets. I’m so old school I’m obsolete.