Tangerine: A Book of Hours

2:24 PM, Wednesday afternoon. Let’s get a bit prosaic.

It’s another day of milky, directionless illumination here. The air is cool. The ground is wet. I’ve been cleaning a bathroom.

Often, I make elaborate plans on the exact way I’m going to do something -- so that things work out just right. Then I end up cutting corners, skipping steps, and doing something that approximates my original intention but doesn’t quite fulfill my initial idea.

However, with the spring cleaning of my bathroom I am determined to do it right. I have to tell you upfront: I’m not unduly squeamish but I don’t exactly get a huge buzz out of cleaning toilets. Then again, I doubt many people do.

I’ve been cleaning out the cabinet under the sink, scrubbing the tub, washing and trying to fix the shower doors and, yes indeedy, swabbing down the toilet. It’s not what I’d call fun -- but in the end (no pun intended) this is going to be one neat and clean bathroom, baby!

I found a pair of miss-matched rubber gloves (one day-glo yellow and the other sky blue) that I wore for the toilet extravaganza. The yellow glove fit fine but the blue one was like made for elves or something. I mean, I have small hands but I really had to cram my left hand into this sucker. So I’m scrubbing and sloshing and generally making that toilet shine -- and then I’m done and have to take the gloves off.

I try pulling off the blue glove: no such luck. I get half of it turned inside-out over my left hand. So I figure I’ll take off the yellow one. I grab the tips of the fingers and pull...and the yellow glove’s fingertips rip right off. So I’m standing there in my cut-off scrubs, with a yellow rubber glove (missing a few fingertips) on my right hand, a super-tight sky blue rubber glove hanging half inside-out on my left hand, my hair tangled in my face, with a shiny happy toilet gleaming beside me.

Well, I don’t know, I thought it was funny. Maybe it was the fumes from where I sprayed down the entire bathtub/shower with tile cleaner (a mistake -- I should have done a little bit at a time). I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, today I’m going to re-paint the inside of the medicine cabinet -- and maybe wash the floor and walls. After everything is done I should put a lounge chair in the bathroom and just sit there for a while admiring my handiwork.

Then again, maybe not...

(Oh yeah, I did eventually get the rubber gloves off.)

--- JWR, 3/18/98

Posted by The Allurium at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1:34 AM, Wednesday morning. I’m listening to a U2 song right now and buzzing on some blackberry wine. Hey, do you feel loved?

I should be sleeping. I want to get myself back into a "daylight" cycle instead of all this nighttime writing and such. Still...I’ve got some sort of groove going at the moment and I just feel like tapping it out...

There was an evening when I was in high school; it seems like years ago because, well, it was. Deep into July, we’d had a heavy summer rainstorm. At around 5 PM the water stopped dropping out of the sky. The transition between rain and stillness was as sharp as the click of a switch. It was warm. Before, the sun’s still shining light had been cloaked by potent heaps of dark clouds; now those mountains of air had shifted, letting the heavy rays through.

Did you ever see one of those old sepia-toned photographs? Can you imagine being in one of them -- everything around you tinted in shades of thin brownish yellow? The moment the sun’s light poured back in after the rain was like that.

Only everything turned luminous greenish gold.

The color was surreal and saturating. It was metallic and at the same time as organic as the iris of a lion’s eye. Pouring in through our windows, it changed everything about the house.

I went outside and just looked at it all. The trees were thick with water, their sheened leaves glimmering with thousands of incandescent droplets. The grass of my backyard looked like someone had spilled a trillion diamonds on it. Breathing the air was like sucking the ozone off of a lightning bolt. You could smell the wet earth. And everywhere was that unreal color. It was a tint that you could almost feel. It added weight to everything, picked out the details in razor-sharp clarity.

And everything was so quiet.

There was a feeling of imminence to the scene, like something unheard of, new, and at the same time profoundly old was going to happen with your next breath. It was so strange and so common, so...expectant.

I watched and breathed it for a series of long moments.

Then those colors slowly started fading down to normalcy -- I stayed and watched it all. Eventually it was just the aftermath of a summer rainstorm.

Now it’s 2:22 AM and I am tired.

"Do you feel loved?"

--- JWR, 3/11/98

Posted by The Allurium at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

5:36 PM, Monday evening. Ever hear the expression, "the clothes make the man"? I’ve been thinking about the You Suit...

It’s a gloomy, gun-metal gray day where 10 AM is indistinguishable from 5 PM. Joan Osborne is singing "Crazy Baby" on my CD player. Bluesy. Real -- like the soft rasp that whiskey gives your voice in a smoky club. It’s a slow low burn day.

I got a new computer at the end of February. Over the intervening time, I have been moving into the new machine and exploring many of it’s neat toys. I’m more in the mood to talk about fashion today, though.

Sometimes I wonder just how much of your personality is generated by how you dress or present yourself. I wonder how much changing your appearance changes who you are. I suppose that it is true of most people (but I expect it is especially so with artists and such): there is a need to periodically re-invent yourself.

And, personally, I have been looking to re-charge my creative batteries for some time now.

It seems to me that physically changing little things about yourself can make you think about life a bit differently. For instance, I’ve had very short hair and very long hair -- and in each case my relationship with the world at large has been just a wee bit different. It’s sort of amazing that such a simple thing as the length of your hair can tint your day-to-day experiences. But it does.

It’s true with clothes, too.

What you wear affects how others react to you. Believe me, there is a difference in how folks treat me when I’m wearing my leather motorcycle jacket as opposed to how they treat me when I wear my nice new single-breasted suit (deep navy blue, of course).

None of that is any big surprise, I suppose. The interesting thing (to me at least) is not really how others react to my various fashion choices -- but how I think of myself depending on how I look. Differences there are there too, young Skywalker. At the moment, I’d very much like to get out of my own status quo.

I’m in the mood for new clothes, baby.

I want to play this game a bit differently; so I think I need a slightly different costume for the event. How silly and superficial is that?

What I’d love to do is to find the perfect look for me. The fashion and manner that opens the "real" me to the world and to myself. I’d like to find the You Suit.

"Man, that look is so you, baby!"

Hah. Stylin’ and profiling.

--- JWR, 3/4/98

Posted by The Allurium at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)