Tangerine: A Book of Hours

5:10 PM, Monday evening, baby. "Monday evening baby", heh, I like that.

So it’s like some slow golden god grabbed a huge bucket of light and heaved it over everything. Splashed brightness. Springshine. It’s cool here -- but shiny. You can almost taste the slow heated thump of Summer moving closer. Like a tide.

Yeah...Summer. I should be exercising right now. Sheesh, it’s after 5 p.m. -- I should be eating. Instead I’m goofing with my webpage, typing this, and getting rhythmic with the Luna album, "Pup Tent". Groovy tunes to be sure: sinuous and smoothly trippy.

I like it.

Been thinking. Yeah, I do that (too much/not enough), I know. I’ve been thinking about online diaries. Some of the things that I’ve been thinking about online diaries I have also (on occasion) thought about short stories.

Sometimes, I wonder, if only other short story writers read short stories, buy the magazines that publish them, et cetera. Today, I have wondered if only other online diarists read online diaries. A whole Ouroboros thing: an audience that generates it’s own entertainment, chugging along like some perpetual motion machine while the rest of the world goes on, oblivious.

‘Course, I know that’s not true. In either case. It’s just an angsty little musing that pops into my head from time-to-time. (Usually this happens when I feel like I’m not being creative or original enough in my own efforts.) Interior discontent reflected outward.

La dee dah, eh?

So...

Monday evening baby, what are you up to? Are you eating dinner, thinking, working in, working out? Are you creating something new? Are you coming in underneath the radar?

Or are you grooving, mellow and vaguely happy, to smoothly curling music?

That’s cool.

Me too.

--- JWR, 4/27/98

Posted by The Allurium at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

4:45 PM, Thursday afternoon. Minutia.

Toss up a handful of confetti. Pretty much a bunch of scrap paper: colorful but meaningless. In a cloud it looks nice though. Butterflies. Drifting flower petals. A group of bright and tiny fish schooling through the air.

So take a breath of these Spring-time breezes. Fling that arm up, fingers opening. Here goes:

Doing laundry. Doing dishes. Thinking of a letter and some email I want to write. Adjusting the re-structured version of my online journal (and bemoaning the lack of display standards for such things as font sizes). Got Frank Black (former Pixie) on my computer’s CD-ROM drive. The music sounds surprisingly good through the Polk Audio speakers.

Thinking of the weekend.

Thinking of getting my hair cut short for the Summer.

(Noting that I frequently miss the Shift key when typing on this keyboard.) I’d like to completely over-haul my website. Re-do the whole thing, perhaps using dynamic-HTML. The prospect feels sort of intimidating, though. Don’t know if I could do it all in Notepad.

(Ah, what the heck: sure I could.)

Earlier this week I flirted with growing a mustache and then decided not to. Writing that last sentence made me laugh out-loud. Guess it’s one of those days: A whole lot of mental confetti tumbling through my mind.

I really made myself a great sandwich for breakfast: spicy jack cheese, tomato, broccoli sprouts, green and red pepper slices and mushrooms on Italian bread. Yummy.

Wanting to be swallowed-up by my writing for a while. That’d be cool.

And I’d still like to do some RealAudio stuff on this site.

I’m working on a weird HTML thing that I’ll start putting up once it is more defined. I think it’s pretty neat even now, though.

But I’m easy, though.

Bunch of confetti, eh? What do you think? Not a lot of meaning. Not a lot of structure. Flittering impressions -- all true. Bits of me and my day today. Not exactly the finale of a big fireworks display. Just scraps of colored paper.

Over quickly and easy to sweep up.

--- JWR, 4/23/98

Posted by The Allurium at 6:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

3:31 PM, Friday afternoon. Glide path.

I feel like I’m on a smooth glide path to Summer. Things are bright here -- accentuated by dashes of lemon, new green, and white. The air is warming and now carries the subtle perfumes of Spring. I’m calm, expectant, and just a bit lazy at the moment. But it all feels good.

Tomorrow, a bunch of friends and I are going to see Dick Dale (the king of surf guitar -- don’t ya know). This will be the third year in a row that we’ve seen him. It’s sort of funny digging surf guitar in Pittsburgh (we’re not exactly noted for our beaches here) but Dick Dale always puts on a great show. I just may do a shot of tequila -- I have a hankering.

Spring of course brings to mind spring cleaning -- and I’ve been, well, thinking about that at least. There are quite a few things I’d like to fix up with this journal and with my website in general. Moving from the cyber world to the real finds a number of projects waiting for me there, as well. I will get around to all of them eventually.

But, like I said, I’m feeling smooth and Spring-lazy at the moment.

I got another one of Edward Gorey’s books last week. This is one of his earlier collections called Amphigorey. Great stuff! His intricate and macabre drawings never fail to amaze, amuse, and captivate me. One of these days I am going to get a framed drawing of his.

Right outside my window the birds are chirping and I can see blooming daffodils and tulips. God, the air smells so good.

I think I’ve sat inside here long enough...

--- JWR, 4/10/98

Posted by The Allurium at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

11:29 p.m. I am a sun dial that only counts the hours that are serene.

The frantic hours of panic and distraction do not reach me. The frustrations of life in the city, in the suburbs, in the corporate world, I glide through as smoothly as diamond skates on black glass. Those hours are but a few minutes of my day.

But for the hours of serenity, the hours of introspection, the hours of meditation, the hours of digestion, conversation, study, I extend and distend, I lengthen both ends. I slow to appreciate and savor the unfolding wonders. The deeper you look, the greater the mystery. The mountains of a coastline become the cliffs of a fjord, become the crags of a wall, become the weathered cracks of a cave entrance, become ripples in the sand on the cave floor. And on, until the crystalline structure unfolds into its own infinity.

The very slowness can bring its own excitement: one has to move slow to see the orange sun setting impossibly huge with a pale thumbnail moon directly above it; then turning around to see your shadow impossibly long and thin behind; you wave your arms and move your legs in a bandy dance, almost seeing the limbs of the shadow move backwards. The feeling suddenly comes over you that you are on an alien and mysterious planet, Urth, just next door to your own. Looking up into the sky again, you see the eye of god.

These are the hours I most value. The editors and inhibitions are dropped in a moment of wonder and being.

--- LM, 4/1/98

[April Fools 1998 Journal Swap entry courtesy of Luke McGuff]

Posted by The Allurium at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)