Wonder Drug:



I know I'm aways yakkin on about Minnesota and Minneapolis, but here's some more. So I'm walking out of the Arco Tower downtown tonight (that's where the Y is) and the sky is deep gray blue and cloudy, it's humid and warm and the air smells like warm toast. I prolly never told you this but Minneapolis smells like warm toast a lot of the time--and like Vitamin E oil. It's something to do with the farming/cereal thing, I think. They have like 25 cereal companies there, like Pillsbury and General Mills and Betty Crocker and all this. So then I am driving home and big fat wet plops of rain start hitting the windshield. A summer rainstorm in L.A.? That shit never happpens. Real rain, too, not that misty shit. Then lightning and thunder to boot! Not the impressive scary kind you get in you-know-where, but still and nonetheless, a real storm.



It made me happy because I am going to Minneapolis in two weeks, so I didn't have to get missy and nostalgic. It's still drizzling now, tapping the leaves on the pepper trees and the path outside my door. I live with my front door wide open because I live in a little hideaway with pepper trees. I don't want to brag but I have my perfect home now.



It's rainy and quiet tonight, and I have a friend who's snoozing away in his bed in his little place, and that thought makes me happy. It's nice to snooze when there's a gentle rain outside.



Like I said I don't want to brag, but it so cool to have my own place. I have a basket next to the toilet with Archie's comics, and anytime I go to the bathroom, which is like 10 times a day, I can read a comic.



I have my own kitchen with my own things everywhere, painted lavender, just like I like it.



I have flowers all over from the wedding, and fairy lights, and a front porch light, and a fragrant lavender rose bush outside my door. I'm also growing lavender and bouganvilla, and i just started some morning glory seedlings to grow on the trellis outside my door.



My dog never pees or poops inside anymore, because he has a doggy door and he's a genius.



My living room is pale minty green, like an easter egg. And I have a plush baby-blue armchair/rocking chair from 1971 that I got for ten bucks at St. Vinnie's.



I wish my bedroom were finished, but I've been waiting till the front area was under control. I hope that my bedroom will end up being the jewel in the little tiara. My plan is to paint the walls a lavender-tinged baby blue, and to use deep rose as the accent color.



Now that my stuff's unpacked, it doesn't really seem like I have so goddamn much junk. A lot of the knickknacks that seemed like bullshit to move are now in their new places, and making the place pretty and real. If you like an object, stick to your guns, and don't let anyone tell you you're a no-good packrat. If you like anything, or anyone, don't let anyone else tell you you're fucked-up. When they find their proper place, it'll all make sense on the outside, and people will see what you had in your heart. A lot of people thought I was weird for getting Sloopy because he was so sick and oozy and skinny and smelly and tired. But now he's dry and warm and fleshy and happy, and he doesn't smell at all and he goes potty outside. He fits in here. He thrives here. He even fits in with the decor, soft white fur lying on a little rug, or nosing around the garden stealing strawberries.



I'm not saying my life is perfect, or that it all might not fall apart tomorrow. That's kind of a given. Chaos, entropy, and all. I'm just saying I'm enjoying the act of trying to keep it all together, spinning around some gravitational center I can't see but can feel inside. It's inspiring to make things grow, to pull up weeds and make a space for flowers and tomatoes. I was in Emmanuelle's garden the other day and she has done so much work to make things grow, I felt all inspired. She's built a real office for herself, for her work, and she's decorated her house and made it a proper place to make some life happen. In order to make magical things happen, and to make things, and create and make art and express love, you have to do a lot of concrete, hands-on work. In order to bring the unmanifest mystery into the time-space plane, you have to do some pushing. If you want to write a novel that expresses the divine, you need a desk, and a kitchen, and a bathroom; you need to make food and get sleep. I like hanging out in that threshhold between this world and the infinite. That's what V. Woolf was all about, and in the movie The Hours, the poet character moans that his poetry can never capture the infinity within--in the process of becoming real, poetry loses all its poetry. He saw this as tragic, as cause for suicide. But I think it's just a given. It's the cross everyone bears, it's the common denominator. I know that no art is ever as beautiful as the vision that inspired it. But I take that as an exciting thing. I mean, if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is merely an echo of how it sounded in his head, well, just imagine the celestial miracle he must have witnessed!



yar,

Pirate Pete

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