it don't rain under the water, it don't rain inside my heart...

Too beautiful to make art tonight, taking care of unfinished business at the library, having gone down by the water once and feeling its call again. A lack of power cord means no shots from today, but this place of rocks and vegetation and water has been traversed before on days with calmer waves and the encroaching golden glow of sunset from the year past.

If I wasn't so pragmatic, so thriving on interaction with other likeminded souls, if I wasn't so provincial and so rooted, I would have left long ago for a coast next to ocean long ago.

It's been a year since everything felt like it unraveled, and I'm glad I came through a little wiser and less dependent, and I don't wish things stayed the way they were, but the way that lives get woven together and then ripped out like none of it ever happened is unnerving. I guess it's part of the process, and others have been through worse. I just wish I could wash the lingerings away.

these are a few of my favorite things

The cure for the summer blues is the blue of the water, be it communing with the Divine in solitude beneath a willow tree or out adventuring down the stairs to the hidden beach. The proximity of waves and wind, the undulations on the sand and the sunsets, the way the most familiar is always new. I could watch the water for hours and if I was into the whole personal ad thing I could say in all honesty that I dig long walks on the beach, which is not a romantic thing at all, really, just something I enjoy.



When we had no money, we'd come down there, to run barefoot, to roll up our jeans and let the crushed zebra mussels chip away toenail polish, drinking sangria in the pavilion and orange crush on the beach, laying on the rocks under the setting sun, writing messages in the sand to be washed away. So close, and yet such an escape to be in the elements rather than shut in by walls of concrete. I come down here and feel alive again.



There are prettier beaches, and cleaner ones, and we have a lake, no ocean here. The
only ocean I've ever swam in was New Jersey ocean for what it's worth. Maybe I'm not spoiled because I've never seen water so blue and clear that you can see all the way down and I don't know what I'm missing. My connection here is emotional if anything.



I feel most at home when I'm near rust and water, old things that are familiar. I thought the desert was beautiful but I had a strange anxiety looking at the newness and artificiality imposed on a hostile land that blisters in the heat. "It's because rust runs through your veins, it's a part of you" says a friend of mine who knows me well.

The summer is when we come back to life, resurrected by long days and the sun that keeps us alive and eventually kills us. I made dinner the past few nights with the harvest of my garden, the front porch smells of lavender and citronella, the tangle of the seeds scattered has manifested itself.



The creativity has returned to the scarred walls, fresh paint and creative souls, vines growing through the concrete.







Despite all restlessness and grieving the messed-up-ness of the world, there is still joy here and beauty in the strangest places. I can never be bored even if I tried.

to the lonely sea and the sky

The chemistry of color turned out beautiful and went awry, the millefiori textures of mint green, teal, and orange-red flaked off the clay into shards of intricate beauty. I saved them because I want to use that color scheme again for something.

We took a walk afterwards down by the water. I love the way it feels like a beach town, with the tattered carnival decor, the condos on the shore, the old doubles with pinwheels and petunias and chipped plaster saints in the flower beds. She used to work down there at an Irish pub with a stone patio, bocce ball courts, and
lovely metalwork all around.



She knows most of the neighbors and we stopped often, having conversations about hookers in the alleys, graffiti writers and art we've been loving, and hostas in our gardens, as the neighbor's radio played "Kashmir," the clematis coiled around trellises and along stone walls next to lush ferns and plants that look so otherworldly green and tropical one wonders how they grow in this land of rust and snow.

(these photos are stolen from a housing thread and look like they were taken in the fall and do not do this justice)






The red sun dropped further in the sky toward the waiting lake. If I could ever live down here in an old shotgun house with a scrap metal frame to grow grapes on I would, to be able to sit out on a porch and see the water, drink tea and scrawl in notebooks would be a dream come true.

pink haze and silver water

I left my car at home and walked the neighborhood, stopping by the corner store to get coffee, walking the dog, going back and forth past the smoke of charcoal grills and running kids and someone playing Rihanna's entire back catalog all afternoon, called up my art partner and neighbor to walk down to the beach.

Everyone was out in various states of undress, swimming out to where it's deeper, showing off tattoos and tanlines, playing chess at the tables, eating ice cream and carving sandcastles and turtles named Ronnie in the sand. We stepped over washed up sticks and cracked red plastic cups, halves of tampons and broken toys and I took off my flip-flops to walk where the waves break.

If it wasn't so big and I had a car that wasn't small, I would have dragged home the pair of trees that grew together, uprooted, and washed upon the shore, stripped clean of bark and bleached bone white. The intricate corona of roots not turned around and made visible and the twisting of trunks kissed by aquamarine waves and resting on the crushed mosaic of countless zebra mussels still stays with me.