This Probably Makes Little Sense

I look at my life, sometimes, and it really strikes me as just this amazing succession of beautiful moments, punctuated with love and joy and peace and serenity. Not that all of the beautiful moments are easy or pleasurable - some of them are difficult and painful - and they're all beautiful.

Last night, Wand I headed into the city to meet up with some people that we're just starting to get to know - friends of friends, really - and we all met up at this little sidewalk cafe/bar, then hoofed it over to a tiny little alcove in the Mission for a poetry slam. Now, for the most part, slams are over my head - either the group last night was horrendously out of it, or I'm simply not intelligent enough to understand it - and at the same time, the night was amazing.

The location was beautiful, eclectic - a bright red bathtub, filled with animal fur throws and a photograph of Jimi Hendrix sat immediately inside the door. Unbelievably gorgeous hardwood flooring, ancient typewriters, glass cases and deep green walls; a downstairs staging area with dim lights and an informal speak-easy bar... it sounds like such a mish-mash arrangement that it couldn't possibly work, and yet it did, and it flowed, and it was warm and cozy and everything that I think of when I hear the term "Beat".

The basement smelled like smoke, but not that suffocating, painful kind - just the waft, every once in a while, of bitter smell, doused by some unknown and nearly unnoticed incense - heady, but not heavy or hanging around (much like a few of my favorite people), and I found myself sitting on a bar stool - green and sparkling and just comfortable enough that you wouldn't notice how much your back had started to ache after the third hour of no support - with W next to me in his Kangol hat and black, beaded jacket, the fringe swishing every time he moved. We sat and listened to Jazz, and poetry that went way beyond my ability to reach, and some lady that threw out seemingly aberrant, random words while hitting herself on the head with a tambourine to (presumably) make a point. It was an intense, though not unsettling, four hours - hunger pangs and unusual surroundings, historical names and the love of my life, the muted surprise that there would be people smoking indoors.

We (W and I) put our arms across each other and closed our eyes and listened, and in the middle of it all, something pulled me out of myself as he wrote "I love you" on my knee with his fingertip, so that I could simultaneously observe and be present to the incredible life that I have.

RIP - King

I am tired of being sad.

Correction, I am tired of grieving.

I am not most usually sad.

I am not particularly 'sad' right now.

I am full of grief.

King - I am sorry that I never showed up to go horseback riding with you.

Thank you for always being there.

The footprints you left are deep, and I know that they were cast in stone.

I love you, and I'll see you on the other side.

For Griff, In Memoriam

W mentioned, the other day, that the store he works in had received in its shipment a hatchling Savannah Monitor - a creature that I have felt connected to since I was a child. I, of course, insisted on stopping by and paying the little darling a visit; as it curled its tiny tail around my thumb and gripped against my nail with its claws, the pebbly scales and flicking black tongue brought back a whirlwind of memories.

...

When I was ten, my parents bought me a little lizard for my birthday; I'd been keeping reptiles for a few years by that point - a gecko here, a tree frog there - and what I had wanted more than anything that year appeared in my bedroom that night with a bow on the corner of the four foot tank. A brown little scaly thing - no more than six inches long from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, as puffy and hissy and cantankerous as only a baby Savannah can be. Gryphon, or Griff, as I would come to call it, if he had survived, would have quickly become a four-foot phenomenon full of teeth and claws and the permanent scowl characteristic of most 'intelligent' lizards; as fate would have it, he passed away of unknown causes less than a year after I'd got him, leaving me to look back years later and admire (incredulously) my parents faith in me to have placed such a challenging creature under my charge. Thirteen years and a career in herpetology later, I can finally see what they knew all along.


Photo courtesy of: http://musicalpeace.org/vyoma/Photos/FIRS/savannah_monitor_02_092802.jpg