Tangerine: A Book of Hours

I love the memory of slightly distorted electric guitar playing low from a boombox -- carrying across beach sand. The way it mixed with the liquid static sound of the thumping waves. And the heat that pulled sweat from mostly bare skin. The golden wash-out of pouring sunlight through closed eyes.

"Today is the greatest..."

I remember the smell of the ocean, the way it felt to push my hands into the hot dry sand.

Coffee, a blend of music on the stereo, and sunlight shining through the window trigger ocean memories, now. The day's heat is hidden behind a silky wall of air conditioning.

"She walks in the sun, to me..."

So, I'm thinking about being out in the lush air, under a powder blue sky. I'm thinking about how the light looks in Summertime. Looking forward (ahead of time) to the weekend.

I hope that it is a great glowing mountian of Summer hours.

"Let's go away for a while..."

Can you guess the source of the three quotes featured in this entry? Take a shot in the "Comments" section below...

Posted by The Allurium at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be."
-- Coraline, by Neil Gaiman

I must have awoken in a different bed today, because I feel vaguely unlike myself. Oddly tethered. Somewhat faded, like an old photograph. It is cool in here -- outside, however, is all velvet heat and high bright detail.

My stereo is looping the Counting Crows song, "Miami".

My mind is full of elegantly machined prismatic dragonflies and colorful paper butterflies. They flutter near the ceiling of my imagination in a rainbow tumble that slowly spells out a story...or something.

Either way, it's a pretty image.

I need some sunshine and warm air. I think that I'll get loose and scrubbed and grab some outside time...with paper notebook and pen. My thoughts keep bouncing against the ceiling in here.

They need some tall sky to fly in.

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Words like, "microburst" or "tornado" -- and Edison's shine is blown away. At least for a while. Now it's all battery power and candle glow.

And the milky green of that silken-sharp fairy, in her soft curved glass.

Anise...and quiet, darker than ever. No house lights or street lamps. Just rain drizzling down -- and the pale non-blue glow of the nearly full moon.

The air is heavy and moist. Things are very still, feeling later than it is. Mag-lite and Indiglo. It's hard to write by candlelight (but don't the words seem more charged in that glow, the paper revealing deeper mysteries?)

Telephones and computers are down.

But my cellphone still works. I talked with Kelli, Grams, and Bob. The power of devices.

I am sprawled here, wearing only my underwear and watch. (Like I said, it's sticky-hot.)

Stretching out, laying down. Tree limbs cracked and fell earlier. And rain. The wind surged like a vast seething engine, spinning debris in frantic whirls and blurs. And after that: the sad colors of flower petals scattered over the mud.

Looking into the clouded depths of a glass lit from below by a pencil-thin flashlight. Absinthe with a halo.

Outside, another shower shifts through...and then it's quiet again. And the lights are still out.

Posted by The Allurium at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"The trick involves very precise flight control and positional sensing..." (1)

One Summer, dragonflies hovered and swooped in the heated air like jeweled machines. More than I had ever seen before. They were ancient and high-tech seeming at the same time. Beautiful. Vaguely symbolic in my imagery array, dragonflies fascinate like fireflies. One ephemeral...the other washed with immortality.

Two things I learned yesterday: that dragonflies are the world's oldest airborne predators -- and that the males can make their prey think that they are standing still, while they are actually moving. Apparently, they do this by adjusting their flight so that their image always appears in the same spot on the retinas of their prey.

How marvelously cool.

Sounds a lot like time, to me. When you're in it, focused on it, it doesn't seem to move. The hours have their own active motion camouflage. Time, like a dragonfly, is perfectly focused. So often invisible, or seemingly motionless. You only realize, later, that it has been zooming right along.

"From the outside of everything. To the inside of you." (2)

(1) © 2003 Reuters Limited.

(2) "New Frontier", Counting Crows.

Posted by The Allurium at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Hi there.

All day Tuesday is watercolors. Soft washes and blurs, ghost lines, shiny greens and damp browns, rain-gleamed streets. She's a dreaming day, perky but pale, top-framed by a black umbrella, her feet in puddles.

Counting Crows in the background.

A Tuesday like this probably dances when no one is looking -- or spins and sways free, regardless of an audience. Bare white feet splashing ground-fallen rain.

"American girls, all weather and noise..."

A Tuesday timeless. No ambient shift to mark her hours or age. She's always been here, stepping out now and then to look with dark eyes -- and lips that hold a smile, just verging. Always just emerging.

Her wet hair is a Rorshach; the tangles: arcane glyphs.

"Time expands and then contracts
When you are spinning in the grip of someone
Who is not an ordinary girl."

Pretty wet Tuesday, so gloomy and sweet.

Quotes from: Counting Crows, Hard Candy.
Specifically, the songs: "American Girls" and "Hard Candy".

Posted by The Allurium at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)