It's Friday and my eyes are open.

This is the first of the day. The legal pad ramblings do not count for much.

Tremble like a leaf
What used to be forty proof
is now a latte

Xander knows what a latte is. One day he'll know what a forty proof something is, and everything we've taught him will be questioned. Maybe. He might be a teetotalling hiker snowboarder who gets enough kicks in the mountains and streams. I hope we're able to teach him that as well.

So much on this big blue ball of rock and liquid holds so much fascination for me. The only way to tame it, to ask all of the art and music and birch trees to take a number is to write.

I can be everything I've dreamed when I write. I've been Icelandic. I've been a child again.

I've been another sex all together (which ruffles feathers in places that rarely get ruffled during the waterboard stretch from 8 to 5). Thom Yorke holds magic in his eye. I want to touch it.

I'm slurring my words and I haven't drank in almost nine years.

And I know I've mentioned that he's really funny. He's also quite moody like his father, and he also cracks some good wise just like his mama. He's my mad haired Little Prince and I wish I could see the star that he flew down from.

what gallopped around my brain today

(taken directly from a notepad document - hence the patchy formatting)

Hang upside down on an elevated log, fall into a creek. Nevermind it's full of leaches and copperheads. And the ticks that burrow into your olive skin can be burned out
with one of those matches that you slipped into your jeans pocket from the fireplace basket. You don't play with fire at all (yet), but you want to remove ticks
from you and your little white dog before anyone gets home. Hide any scrapes with long pants and band aids. You have an hour before your mother gets home
every day. Some days you lock yourself out, little guilty heart, so some days you must either go to the crawlspace and fight the cave crickets and hornets or go
to the old lady next door for iced animal crackers until she gets home. This is how you learned how to be independant and sneaky. She would feel bad knowing
this, even now, even 21 years later (!). We didn't have much so there wasn't anything to distract me from learning the muddy bottomed creek than ran through the
back yard.

I will never commenate. Since I don't know how to knit, or crochet, or weave, or sew that well, or bake that well, or garden that well, I will make something
beautiful out of nothing. I can paint a little. I can try and take you somewhere else. There was a willow tree and its branches positively dripped onto the soft
crabgrass below. I would sit cross-legged and ignore the chiggers crawling up my legs and write in a little book. If I wasn't writing in my little yellow
book there was a pre-written one in my hands. Probably Nancy Drew. Or Trixie Belden. Or the Babysitter's Club. Or (don't tell) Sweet Valley High. It was
always quite hot but every now and then a breeze would pick up and blow across the creek (that was probably filled with storm water runoff). I wore a lot of
pastel madras and I was happy.

motion picture soundtrack and the smell of scotch tape

Twin in Icelandic is garn
breakdown is bilun