blessed saturday

Today I will paint. I will. I will choose turquoise and cobalt and rust, with a red door, and not for reasons of eastern belief, (or southern... isn't fung shui Californian?) but because I have red paint that needs to get used. I have many cans of paint that I will pour together to make a primer coat, but not the red or it will all become pink. My sweetie tells me I can stir some joint compound into it to create texture. But I don't think I want uniformity. I may just slap some on to create the ambience of war-torn Germany, my personal favorite. I do love shabby. Why then, when it is already so shabby, don't I just leave it alone.

MY GOD. Haven't you been listening? I am Martha fucking Stewart and I leave NOTHING alone. If YOU hold still I will decorate you.

I love this laptop.

Why is it the next shiny thing that always holds my attention. My life, as compared to my life say.... 12 years ago.... is perfect. I have a life I never would have dreamed possible. And of my life 10 years before that?? My life is unimaginably rich. I did not have the language to hope for my life as it is today. And yet it is that I am on a steady quest for improvement, for change. For the next shiny object within, or just beyond, my reach. I am on my sofa, married to the love of my life, the actual love of my whole life, and we are living where I've always wanted to live, in a house I love in a neighborhood I would choose over any, and I am typing on my laptop, wirelessly connected to the internet, on my blog, and I don't have to work until Tuesday. And still I want to make that fucking little upstairs room different. Stasis as death. I think that is it. If I stopped decorating, what would happen? My husband shakes his head and says, I thought you were going to use the room for storage. But there I am, online, looking for rugs and pillows and mexican vases and rusted wall hangings and more and more and more and I realize there is no end to it. More as a lifestyle.

I remember living in Jacksonville in a little house that was 60 dollars a month and we didn't pay it. And the landlord was Marcel Poudois, and he was letting the house, like he let everything, become one with the blackberries. If you don't know my position that blackberries will eventually take over the world, you do now. So there we were, me and my baby and his mean mean father, and when he threw me through the wall I just decorated the hole. It was shaped like me, like in a cartoon only not so funny. I exaggerate. I didn't go all the way through the wall, just the sheetrock. The studs stopped me. So I painted the wall baby blue. I was really all about blue for a long long time. And I thought blue was as good as it got for color. Blue, purple and black. Bruise colors. But if you know bruises like I know bruises, you'll agree that they are red at first, and at the end they fade to green and yellow. Full spectrum bruising.

Memories. I suppose it is poverty that drives my need to beautify my world. The memory of poverty that I will never really escape, never outrun. Or it is much more simple than that. I am American, thus, excessive.

Anyway, I wonder about that house. I could never get the grass to grow in the front yard and Marcel would never let me plow under the blackberries.

I am sad about Saddam Hussein. That guy never had a chance. We are so brutal. They are so brutal. It is so brutal here in this small world.