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It's cold in my cube. Doods. I lost my famously ugly winter hat. Yeah, the one I got at Salvation Army in Kalamazoo, hand-knit by somebody's granny. The one John saved for me when I lost it at the pool hall. The one I expected to signal my existence if the creepy clown wants to find me . This hat. I've been having a hard time working without it. I hit all the thrift stores in a 5-mile radius and went home disheartened. I tried eBay, struggling with keywords that would find me the ugly bucket of my dreams: double thickness reversible hand knit winter hat eBay was unable to help me at all. So I went to our favorite search engine which starts with a  colorful letter G , and I was helpfully redirected to Etsy . I should have known. But these hats were cute, and expensive (read: more than $5.00; more than $10.00.) And I wasn't finding any that were two-sided....oh.  I forgot to search "reversible." Boom. Michell of CrochetAndThingsCo is my Kni...

It sat up there on my car's moon roof the entire 5 miles to my office carpark. It wasn't stuck, unless there was a bit of resin on the stem; I don't know.  I thought it had blown off at one point, but as I stopped at a red light it popped back into view, just over the edge of the glass. That's when I took this picture.  Like it's looking in at me. Hey, leaf-brother. I see you, too. Friends are like that; they ride along on the periphery, and oftentimes you lose sight of them. Suddenly, there they are!  There's nothing else that needs to be said today.  Biscuits and gravy (with lumps) to you.

I'm about to give away secrets I don't usually discuss. This is a gift in return for your friendship - thank you. Today's topic is mechanical but also organic. "Mechanical" implies rigidity, doesn't it? Flowers aren't rigid, and neither is paint. However, there's some formality and structure in the process of capturing the feel - fluid rigidity. So that moment I've been waiting for has finally arrived, and visual art is erupting from my psyche. I am SO HAPPERY. I've started with the picture you see here, which was taken in Seattle on an August day. The sunflowers present to me as utter sexiness in various life stages. That's the process I want to portray:  how reproduction is beautiful, attractive, and present in all things throughout our universe, reduced even to the cellular or paint-stroke level. I'm also going to equate sunflower seeds with Slavic mythology, and name it The Zorya . If your painting is wonky, it's beca...

The story of Pete and Linda in Canyon,TX , has been trickling out of me for weeks now. I'm struggling with these frays, looking for a common thread that runs from beginning to end. The problem is that I can only tell my story, not theirs.  There are so many solar systems in the cosmos tha... ...there isn't enough space in this margin, but I have seen the proof. They've always been a part of me - I call Linda my Poetry Coach because she could work magic with my words when she saw something in them. Peter is my Guru. He is thousands of years older than I am and gives away all the secrets for free. Somewhere during my travels, when I was away from the ether, they found they couldn't exist apart from each other. When Pete leans in to hear what his girl just said to him, he grabs her ass. Texas women are matriarchal by necessity, he says. I get that. Linda's been in the role of coach, friend, sister, mother to me over the years, giving out biscuits of wisdom th...

Here's a thing I want you to swallow Wrapped in a gummy: You need this To make you whole To fill your longing your acceptance makes me fatter This is not just for me, see Gift-wrapped, dangled A carrot in costume dressed as what used to fill your belly Best cede your energy to me You don't know what to do with it Just have a taste - This is what you've been craving all along.

The Oracle is something of an inside joke: sometimes I pop off with a message for someone without being able to say exactly how I came to it. My several brains are always working, never at the same speed. This morning I oracled myself in my waking-dream:  I told *me I need to stop interjecting myself into other people's lives. Interesting, because I thought I'd already stoppited. I'm still not sure what the dream was trying to show me. These things don't come with instruction manuals. The message gave me reason to consider the differences between interjection and establishing connections. Connection is a normal and healthy concept, both in business and interpersonal relationships. Interjection sounds pushy, invasive. Where's that boundary? Interjection is possibly not the right word. The thing I mean finds its roots when a person is accustomed to being accepted for what they can offer rather than for their authentic self; in other words they're used...

Hello. My Name is Owen. Please pet me, please. The first day of Big Texas Road Trip was all about Mazzy's family: her baby sister, Asmath; her sister's dogs, Sophie the Crazy-Eyed and Owen; and her mom, Saba. Maz picked me up at the airport in a Volvo SUV that had no CD player, so the hours we'd spent planning, buying, and burning Arabic, hip-hop, and banjo music were wasted. She'd booked the car online, but the location literally did not exist when she went to pick up her rental Friday night. She found a location that did exist, but which didn't have a vehicle for her to rent until the next morning. Maz is incredibly genuine as well as adorable - I'm sure her badassery worked in her favor as the morning rental agent gave her the best SUV on the lot for regular price. We swung past the hotel long enough for me to check in at Hotel Indigo and then we hied to Arlington, looking for a restaurant with a patio so the dogs could join us. We found La Madelein...

at Macaroni Grill, Terminal 2 at ORD Today I found myself wishing I was married, or otherwise had someone I could call to come over and make me some tea. I want to stay in bed, reading. It's nice that I have time and space to do nothing but read in bed but my brain's running the list of things I should be working on, asking whether staying in bed is really appropriate. Wondering if I might be depressed.  No, brain; shut up. That's societal expectation talking. That's over-analysing. You can check, brain, but then stop checking. The answer will be the same in 2 minutes. You can't be on the hustle 24-7. Every spare minute is not an opportunity to push your agenda. Downtime is necessary and should be scheduled as part of the hustle. I really dislike the trend in self-help these days: everyone has a recipe, if a genuine sense of goodwill, and they'd like you to give them a dollar, please. I get it; just it's boring. People are boring, because they act...

Art is all about emotion - people crave emotional rides. I have more feelings than I need, but bottling them for sale challenges me.  I have to translate the emotions first, and then package them in some identifiable format, which is the part that's hardest for me to understand. I understand soup. Soup is an art form. Quality comes at base from the raw ingredients. The recipe documents the chef's labor-intensive process of finding balance between individual flavors and textures (yes, there is work in soup.) Like any other art, the ultimate reward is finding something that's good for the artist and also for the audience. Those lucky few in the chef's inner circle get to taste the soup and get excited: OMG. This is the best soup ever. You could sell this.  My taste is pretty eclectic; I try to create more of what I love so I can love more of it. If I find someone who loves what I do enough to pay for it, that shared love is more reward than money. Having m...

Iqbal was born into his 33rd life as a cat. This would have surprised him had he retained more memories, because his 32nd life had been spent as a Muslim who believed no such thing could occur. Iqbal the Muslim had in fact spent delightful hours over tea with a Hindu neighbor discussing the possibilities, or lack thereof, of reincarnation. Iqbal the cat dutifully washed his paws in the drinking-bowl after visiting the litter-box.  Then, catlike, he would be distracted by the trail of water splashed out. He would follow it with his nose and return again to the bowl to splash out more water, never able to solve the mystery of gravity. Iqbal peered out from behind the door of the barn where he spent his sleeping hours.  He took his naps in the straw-pile, which was much like the bed of straw his momma made him as a young boy growing up in the Swat Valley.  Iqbal the cat didn't so much remember his  human childhood as he felt a natural comfort in the smell of stra...

I get how the internet is evil. People can feel confident in spewing their ill-formed ideals and even have them validated by other idiots. A movement begins. Face-time is important. TOUCH is important. Knowing real people is important. But then there's me. Some of us are unicorns, hiding in plain sight. We've been burned by popular society since we were old enough to form opinions, and we've been advised to fit in. Just be normal . Make do with what you got is the Girl Scout motto; I learned that very well. But I see beautiful things in the world and in my own mind; when I try to share them I get deer-in-the-headlights stares at best, called crazy at worst. Normal people seem to have no imagination, or they eschew it for their own reasons. At this point in my life I realise that every thing I believed when I was 7 years old contained a kernel of truth. All my fruitless efforts to fit in (which only resulted in further bullying) brought me to now: I am what I ...

Austin, TX, can be a bit Tippi. After Canyon, we headed south toward San Antonio. Maz's sister lives there and said we could stay at her house while she was away. North of Sweetwater, a little before sunset, Maz made a video (which we thought was hilarious) of an Oil Crane Pump Well (which looked like a grasshopper). We didn't make it to my family's ancestral graveyard but stopped at the Ballinger intersection where we could have turned left toward Brownwood. There I picked up a rock that may have touched either foot or hoof belonging to my old settler Ewings. As we passed Paint Rock, I thought about how Southwestern petroglyphs really freak me out. Like cold to the bones and feeling nauseous freak me out. I swept slabs on construction sites in San Antonio during 1983 instead of graduating from high school. My daughter's father's father lived in Universal City, and we landed at his place for a few days before finding a trailer and getting jobs in the booming...

I came home from this road-trip to find my cat Noori hiding, crying, in the closet.  She was so well-entrenched that I couldn't even find her in the closet at first. Finally she came out and hid under the bed, still complaining. By morning she was walking on me and  yelling for breakfast as usual. She went out briefly earlier to eat some trumpet vine, and then I made her come back in.  She's sitting at the front door now, telling me to open it. I want more , she says. "You can't go out there. You're getting too brave. I need you to not be brave," I tell her, and then immediately I re-frame those words as if she were a human-child, and I feel a tinge of something akin to regret. I don't care , she says. "There are things out there that will EAT YOU." Again I flinch; but this time I know I'm telling the truth, not setting up unknown dangers to bind the child's spirit. "There are owls and foxes and stuff." There really...

Life Coach Roxanne Jackson asked:  "Why don't women have healthy relationships with one another? Hmmmm." My before-coffee response was this: Yeah, I think we have unhealthy emotional relationships with women for the same reason we get into unhealthy emotional relationships with men, but in different ways. I am guessing it originates with a need to connect that turns into a demand to connect that ultimately will accept any connection it can get, which can turn into drama addiction among other things. Whoa. I need to go think about this. So I got myself a coffee and thought about this. As you may expect by now, what came out isn't obviously tangential to what went in, but it is. I struggle these days with lack of connection, choosing to rein in the beast rather than go out and try on new persons. Clothing is a pretty good metaphor. I know exactly what I want when it comes to clothes; it's useless to experiment because I'll end up shoving the new adv...