Drinking dark earl grey from a purple teapot, I am reminded of oatmeal.

The man closest to me here in this cafe could perhaps be mistaken for your cousin, your brother even, but he could never double as you. I can't imagine he knows the proper way to eat applesauce...



_

The most enchantingly beautiful girl is sitting on a temporary fence on the sidewalk in downtown Madison. The wayward light brown hair around her face is strung with the bright blonde rivers of a winter away in South America or Australia or Madagascar. The sunshine bleeds through her white teeth and the honey in her smoothly tanned skin, dark amber around her toes and in the creases of her neck. Her shorts and her shirt are the green gray that I inexplicably associate with camping.

She has a foot tall pinata on her hand and smiles softly when she jiggles its bright colors at passers by.

Some of them are drunk and, bewildered, they crinkle their dull foreheads. Some wave. Some are uncaring and desensitized by the overstimulating world. She watches their ankles and the sway of their hips as they walk past.

Two dreadlock girls amble past with their dog, smile, wave, and talk to each other about her looks.
Frat boys antagonize her over it and try to apprehend the pinata for themselves.
A man on a bike stops to talk. He's tall and thin, with powerful, wiry limbs, and an easy smile. They know each other, so he sits with her while she continues to jiggle the pinata.

The cops don't wave.



_

I used to walk filthy into Dominick's and nibble the samples on the way to the bananas and bakery in the back. My legs, mostly nude, would begin to get cold in the hyper-conditioned supermarket air as I fingered the chocolate bars of the checkout line. I would read their nutrition facts, as if someday I expected them to involve less saturated fat.

Soon, outside again, I would lean my bag between my bike and calves and lie on my sweaty back on the Illinois Avenue park benches. Like the ribcage of a firm lover, their smooth hard slats would press into my spine as I squinted behind my sunglasses, smashed my banana inside an asiago cheese roll, and felt the sun bake my sweat into my tan.

Now my skin is pale and chlorinated... my legs sparkling clean, cold, and unsweating... and I'm hungry... for bananas... for cheesy bread... for summer.



_

At dawn, the stretchy crotch of my long underwear hangs low between my frigid thighs and the tips of my toes against the chilly floor go white as Greta's winter fingers. In my drowsy shower-steam fictions I wander the aisles of HPP carrying giardiniera peppers.

Though the steamy clouds of daybreak are nearly scalding to my toes, once they roll up to my face and away from me they instantaneously crystallise against the frosty windows of the bathroom. Still dreamy, I contemplate chocolate bars with names like Renew and wonder if today will be the first day I buy a black and white cookie in the checkout line.

Soon though, I'm awake and clean, and the little cashier has vanished along with his dark sparky eyes. Instead, in his place I am met with snow, miles of snow rolling out across the lake. It's dotted with tents and remnants of bonfires, but Lake Mendota is still too expansive in its winter garb, and I miss the summer.

My arms feel strangely as if they are full of bottles of peppers while I bike to work, and when the fluorescent whine of my office raises the roots of my body hair, I drown it in the deep, clean bass drums and broad swooping instrumentals of sunny sweaty summer music festivals long past. 

But my toes are still so cold.


_

Caramel apple pie is oppressive at the bottom of a stomach.
Craziness and alcoholism lie dormant in my genes.
I am allergic to Crest Cinnamon Rush toothpaste.
Wilderness hide-and-seek is for seafarers.
Forfeit is disgracefully neophytic.
Deer are frantically suicidal.
Hearts are tender.
Knees are feeble.
Home just is.

_

With leaky yellow gloves plunged deep into scalding, soapy dishwater mayhem, I explained the photon as the boson of electromagnetism to the levitating eyebrows of an all-too-skeletal bohemian man as he munched cookies in my kitchen. He brushed orange-chocolate crumbs onto his threadbare flannel while he probed my dishwashing brain for the fabric of the universe. His big grinning eyes were limitless and engulfing, their curiosity infectious.

But I'm full up with these intense, involved experiences, and occasionally recall a pace of life that was more realistic, a flow not quite so  erratic or all-consuming. Instead of the bumpy lumpy stop and go chaos of work/school/co-op intensity, I daydream myself into the avocado smoothness of a past life. If I concentrate, I can feel the sun from the windows during that first felafel summer in the sunroom, cozy best friend stories across the island in the kitchen, and the lotus-like pull of boxed wine with jewish boys and philosophers... until slowly my heart is warm and light again. Joyful and refreshed, it is a tender, rich, velvet avocado... and the world is my garlic, my jalapeño, my cilantro...



_

Madison is saturated with sweatervesty, hair gelled, overpriced espresso miel gargling frat sympathizers. They are matched one-for-one by sweatpantsy, swoopy haired, mascara laden, milk-fed midwestern women who wear furry australian boots as if the Australians know more about snowtrudging than Wisconsinites. Among their numbers is the occaisional wire-haired, electric-eyed, rope-belted socio-intellectual outlier. Despite his peculiarly soothing solidarity, my indented contour cauchy integrals and I still feel vaguely displaced here. We know a better place to study, and so often daydream of a pair of those square chairs in a 3rd floor window on the southern wall of the Reg, gazing over our knees at the sheets of snow that crack and slide geologically slowly down the orange rooftops, over the faces of gargoyles.


_

I have had too much soup.

Above the vague sensation of distension, I feel a warm familial love seeping through my stomach lining, and I meant to read about the power to save the world tonight, and I meant to go to sleep early, but I'm moved to trudge through the snow instead, to nurture friendships I'm still nervous about. . . to support public radio. . . to eat cake.



_

Sometimes, I find myself zooming in on something uncontrollably, like a thumb. It approaches, slowly at first, growing magnificently large and peculiarly bulbous. It becomes overwhelming and overtakes my field of view. Fingerprint crevices, once a distant, sandy terrain soon begin to swell outlandishly and morph into tremendous craggy mountain ranges. I zoom like a skydiver toward their ridges and they accelerate toward me, the details approaching with full force. Before I crash into the deepest part of a valley between ridges, I wake up.

At home, the scale of life is magnified. My absurd distance from this place ordinarily catapults me over the hills and valleys of the lives of my family. Upon touch down, the plots of the lives who created mine are relayed to me like cliff's notes, but the details are lost. I flash past in a slick green race car, tire decals whizzing along with me. Strapped into double seat belts and housed in a roll cage in case of emergency, my life is both wildly safe, and fantastically adventurous. 

In the senility of my grandmother, the incredibly fast youth of my young cousin and the wrinkles in the face of my twin, I am confronted by the vast length and breadth of life and simultaneously am faced with a great certainty of our mortality. And so, rising up and away, the clouds engulf my field of vision, as does the feeling that there's something very twilight zone about my experience of time in cat spring.


_

Last night, a tired, awkward, engineering machismo of peer pressure, miller lite and bowling was massively outshone by costumes and rollerskates in a feminist living room. Long after I'd tired of the self-involved drone of peer pressured consumption and had escaped to devote my night to a defeated exhaustion, I was instead snatched up into the bright underworld of charming radical darlings and their hip vegan cookies. I was rejuvenated  and comforted by familiarly ostentatious genderbending, an enormous aluminum foil robot woman, bubble wrap on the walls and birthday cake for the DJ. It was there on the dance floor that despite the wee hour of the morning and a chronic lack of sleep, a sweet coconut smell from the earthy hair of identical lovers made its way up my nostrils nearly down into my stony heart. We danced as if we'd been friends for years, as if they'd known the 5509, as if we were dancing in the redworm. And though my odyssey is still in its prologue, I wished already for a second chance at the night, a stay on the dawn like that Athena gave Odysseus and Penelope when at last they found each other and their olive tree.


_

I raced south on LaSalle past Ohio into a familiar cloud of Blommer chocolate smell. Soft bubbles rose in my chest as my heart simmered with a steamy fondness that melted the snowflakes in my eyelashes. My 27c's wobbled fast over the waffley grating above Chicago's frigid black river, and I wondered how it's possible for so many people to love this place from the superheated, hermetically odorless interiors of their cars. What melts their hearts if not the cocoa in the icy air?

Are you simmering them too?


_

Dusty, gummy and tumultuous, with gale force winds this place inhales my free time into its warm funky belly and regurgitates it, gloppy and organic, onto the kitchen floor. Years of crazy have diffused into the walls. Occasionally the crazy seeps back out of the masonry to agitate the dormant paranoias of minds asleep within its bounds. Otherwise innocuous seeming shelves drip with the eternal slowness of ancient, long crystalized grade A dark amber maple syrup, and I think of Hexxus, of Ferngully panties, and of home.

All thoughts lead home.

Our revolution will of course clean it up eventually, but for now, Loth is not quite home. Instead, Loth is cookies in my mailbox, hot quinoa sweet potato soup at rainy midnight, strong hugs, dirty floors, dirty dishes, dirtier drama, total chaos, more bikes than people, and soon... one Miss Gina Rose.


_

The frats are quiet tonight, but out in the streets, thousands of electric Madisonites jubilate. I can't help knowing that despite its leftward titilation, Madison is no Chicago... and Bascom Hill is no Grant Park.

But that's okay.

Nice work team.

Sweet dreams, free world.



_

Today, Madison's first enormous snowflakes fell on my caramel apple ice cream.



_

Today was long, and full.
From the solitary early morning handling of gourds at the farmers market to quirky costumes at an alley cat race and all the way down through the day to blueberry cookies and fervent discussions of ethics after an enormous chaotic dinner between strangers and friends.... today was full and tumultuous, challenging and exhausting and thrilling and excruciatingly long... but sporadically serene and occasionally well documented.

 

_

Last night we made food in a kitchen that we would later overwhelm with bounteous overfull bike carts of bright, crisp peppers, okra, prickly pears, and mangoes. A bike guy grated sweet potatoes and asked me if he should chop another onion.
Of course, the answer to 'more food?' is always yes at Loth.
So he braved some tears and said he couldn't remember the last time he'd cried. I smiled a low smile. Even as I routinely stirred the rice pudding and retrieved orange peppers from the fridge, I could still secretly feel freshly dried salt in my lashes and a familiar rainy sensation in the back of my throat.
I was simultaneously present and distant, tremendously serene and schizophrenic cradling so many vegetables in my hands and so much chicago in my brain.



_

_

... and I ( ain't got no photon-induced thermal stress coefficient... )
_

Fingering the silvery plastic backing of the green silicon stopwatch circuit she had plucked from the ground, she asked me what I was thinking about. Actually thinking only of the blood on the rock at my feet, I asked her instead about her future.
While she spoke, she unknotted the handkerchief around her neck, baring the dusty flannel collar that lay unbuttoned to her tender caramel sternum. Aloof in matters of academia and finance, but unabashed about sucking at her bloody cuticle, she dammed the dripping with floppy handkerchief ends that she wrapped bulkily around her digits. The tangled handkerchief impaired her curious inspection of the little green silicon chip, so she slipped it in the pocket of her holey, patchy, anarchist pants, and we got back to moving boulders.

Later in my room, though, she wore the circuit around her neck as she told me about her many months of courageous, careless, jobless, righteous rambling, and a reckless jealousy quivered under the skin of my quixotic chest.

And now, not long after she arrived, Gina has left Madison for New York, and has no doubt already left New York for somewhere else, disarming everyone she encounters with a funny green circuit around her neck and tiny silk flowers braided into a strip of her hair. They hang just below her chin, near the small dark feather of some homely small bird, and many other bizarre, unlovable objects that in her life on the edge she has tied into her locks.


_

The angry bloom of roses beneath my mangled fingernail is no match for the algae bloom festering in the lake. Its typically limpid water now a nubilous green universe of swirling photosynthetic galaxies, it certainly harbors nearly infinite swarms of single celled organisms. I am overcome with the magnitude of the universe when I find myself knee deep in this complicated, microscopic biosphere, each green speck representative of myriad independent lifeforms.

Certainly, some of those little algae woke up this morning to feel incredibly joyful, grateful for sunlight, the fruit salad in the refrigerator, visits from old friends, for visits from new friends and for flowers. Other microscopic phytoplankton perhaps woke up incredibly lonely, empty-armed and chilly, with big holes in their chests nostalgic for the tender warmth of some special charming cyanobacterium they had always been so excited to know. Still more woke up in existential crises, suddenly confronted by their delirious smallness in the universe and the enormous magnitude of other lives encompassed in it.

One of the algae no doubt woke up this morning magnificently, euphorically, tragically confused, a wash of all of these thoughts at once. That algae should have perhaps stayed in bed and slept it off instead of crushing her fingers under lake rocks and brunching and picnicking and studying and lighting bonfires...

... but then there was this squirrel in the house...



_