Oracular Observation (or "Obfuscating Via Octahedron")

This gray, paralytic restlessness has fallen on me and my neighborhood. Spending whole days beneath the fluorescent lights of a stark and joyless conference room is not helping. If I had to do this job seven days a week…well, I’d quit, is what I’d do.

I just really want to do summery things and this weather is SO not cooperating.

Let’s go to the beach. Have an elaborate picnic. The kind where everyone dresses in their finest and lightest summer clothes. Let someone absently strum a guitar. Let’s just sit in the sun and be quietly reverent of how breath-taking-ly beautiful it all is.

Sometimes I fantasize about spending a whole paycheck on an old Volvo station wagon and just disappearing into America for a week. See if I could eat and sleep on our United friendliness. Maybe see if churches would take us in, introduce us to their hospitable deacons and elders and such. I’d fill my camera with pictures. I’d get an e-mail address or a phone number in every county. Make instant travel friends.

Or take the bus to New York and spend the whole day bouncing from diner to diner, drinking coffee and eating French fries and chatting with waitresses and regulars. Writing down their stories. Watching them watch me watch them. Looking at place-mat doodles and olympic rings of coffee stains.

Or we crowd around a living room and open the windows to the hot night air and recline in conversation. The room careens with laughter. Or pulls taught with argument. Or glows with admiration and praise. I won’t drink the wine, but I’ll ask if its any good.

Instead, I’ll hope for the just-right latte. And the motivation to push on through the pages of this book. And a moment where I’m sure that being unsure doesn’t do any good. I’ll hunch my shoulders against the gray. I’ll smile an almost-smile. And I’ll say my prayers.

“Everyone crawls in quicksand the same.”

“Are you still a mess?”

The new Mars Volta album is almost…relaxing? Go buy it.

Also, if you’ve never received a hand-written letter from Mari, you really haven’t lived.