I spent all weekend chasing my three year-old nephew around so I’m just taking a second to write this while the nurse changes my IV drip. I’m sure I will be up and around in a couple of days. We played pirates the entire visit like a non-stop LARP session of Dungeons and Dragons. There was only one good pirate and I was not that pirate.
No bikes, just pirates, alligators, manatees, art shows, play dates, and digging holes.
Treasure is an elusive thing-
Juancho
I didn’t listen to any of the squawking going on around the internet yesterday. I have decided to trade in politics for something productive- reading Infinite Jest
. My thought is that it will take at least two years and every brain cell left in my head just to have a chance at finishing at all. That’s just the project I need.
My time spent on the yoga mat has been enlightening, just as people have been saying for 5,000 years- imagine that. I am so focused on my left foot’s off-the-mat-ness in relation to my right foot’s on-the-mat-ness that I don’t have time to project days or years down the road, which is my previous state of being. In yoga I have learned breathing is something I can do, not just something that happens. Yes, I am all about my breathing-ness, my focus-ed-ness.
It has only been one month and already gravity is losing her grip on me as I bob upward like a soap bubble in the Juanchosphere*.
Juancho
*homage to Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem.
I was driving up SOMO yesterday when I got this deep nasty whiff of Lysol. It wasn’t coming from inside my van, but from across the street where the carnies were unpacking the North Florida Fair. A person can choose to be disgusted, reassured, or both, but it is a fact. Windows up, 45 mph, Lysol. I imagine that’s what jail smells like.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the fair. I suppose it started as a way to celebrate the harvest before winter and then slowly but inexorably– like all social institutions– it sank to the lowest common denominator. Why do the cattle ranchers get a booth, but not the chicken farmers and so on all the way down to the Sleestak who guesses your weight or sits in the dunk tank.
Poor people love the fair. They save for it. They make special arrangements to attend and to have enough cash to enjoy it. Check Craigslist right now and I bet you can find all sorts of marginally working power tools and Barcaloungers for sale, somewhat stained but not easy to see. I haven’t been in many years, but I expect it is the same. The middle class may take a swing through the fair on a Friday evening in search of some romantic pastiche, but the real fair money comes from the outlying edges of the county, and the subsidized housing complexes. Poor people have it hard, they need a reason to celebrate and the fair is a reason.
I do like the lights, and that a field can be transformed overnight into a place with customs all its own and a culture unfamiliar. The carnies? That’s where they live, it doesn’t matter what town they are in. When you go to the fair you go to their town. Fairtown.
I never liked carnival rides. I can confidently say I have never, nor will I ever ride a roller coaster. More so, I can’t imagine why anyone would,especially at the fair. Stinking, greasy rattletrap jalopy Ferris wheels and Yo-Yo’s? I think not.
And yet, to walk the midway and win your girl a goldfish or a Def Leppard mirror is a sweet thing. I might not touch anything, but I still kind of want to go.
Juancho
Last night capped off a three day ride bender. I joined up with the Munson Monday crew quite by accident, and I had two distinct rides rolled into one. I started off with the “rabbits” and we rabbits rolled along merrily, enjoying another gorgeous Munson sunset and taking turns at the front. Somewhere near the old trailhead we were caught by the chasing group- the foxes, who were all waterbug types like stick figures on bikes. I took off after them and hung in there for a minute before my legs started smoking and the button popped on my turkey.
Stuck between the rabbits and the foxes I could only conclude I was the dog.
-Juancho