Ok, I'm calmer now.  I just had one of my flip outs from lonliness.  Had to get out and drive around for awhile.  Not really many places to go in this blasted town to meet people besides the bar.  Shoot, only about 6,000 people live here; so I drive the strip and listen to music like I did in high school. 

Freaking out for lack of feminine company is not what I need right now, but it's what's happening.  Whenever I used to get this way I would run as quick as I could to my "bad influence of an indian princess".  Now I don't dare.  I would lose myself to the empty pit of spiritual death that was becoming me a few months back.  Even now a Disturbed song comes on and reminds me of driving around fast in her loud car and her dark, dark eyes.

  NO!  I can pour myself into something else.  I can type madly until this is out of me.  I can draw a scribble picture, or take a shower, or go out for a cig.  Whatever I do, there's still a sickly memory in the pit of my stomach of the things that happened.  There's still the lingering scents of our musky cave.  A black beetle still crawls around in my brain, tempting me to do things beyond any sanity.

  Time to straighten my shoulders and my back.  I'm brushing myself off.  I've left the smokey places where blinds never get opened.  Time to find someone who isn't afraid to look at the sky.

   I got full time and I'm the frontman for young adult programming at our library again!

   *Puts on wooden mask and does a tiki dance around the big red barbeque.*  I feel like twirling some fire...

  Well, well.  Finally my lucky day rolls around.

Staff meeting at the library this morning.  I get to sit down with our director sometime next week and discuss giving me back more of my hours.  I'm on the book sale commitee.  In fact, all four of us in the children's dept. are in on the book sale... and no one else.  This should be interesting. 

March 5th will mark our library's 100th birthday as well!  Hurray for us and my most grateful thanks to Mr. Carnegie.  Big things are brewing in our little library.  Glad to be where I am.

  I remember a place I used to go.  A place of dreaming.  A place of strangeness.  Scenes of times and stories within me that I can almost still smell.

  The red blazer left a trail of dust along the road.  The plains roll by, the antelope run.  The truck bucks into the dip, then climbs the hill toward the badlands and a huge plateau.  I remember standing on that hill many times, leaning into a ripping wind, looking out to melted cliffs, and releasing my voice like an eagle on wing.

  Walking around that place, you felt like you were on mars.  The convoluted and sagging landscape formed faces and figures from your mind.  There was a hill littered with little orange crystals (calcite).  By this hill was a sandstone table, and upon it was the figure of a man I had made of stones, the top of his head was a cluster of those dirty orange calcites.  It meant alot to me to come back time and again, and see it had not been disturbed.

  I remember climbing the plateau with friends, both in hot and cold weather.  I remember jumping off it's cliffs and running down it's valleys.  I made my body feel true, to lope and dodge and climb, like an animal. 

  Once, the largest valley was snowed and iced over, slick and steep.  We slid down it on our backs, yelling, screaming and flailing.  Our momentum was frightening in those days, while I was in college.  We went down that hill so fast and out of control, I'll never forget it.  Bruised and exhilarated, we regained our cold feet, and trudged through the hard pack in the zero degree weather.  Our breaths mingled and went out to the sagebrush, and the hills, the antelope, the farms, and the slaughter-yards.  We went back to the truck, where we knew we would drive back to town.  Where hot meals and homework awaited.

For one moment though; we were innocent people having fun, climbing a hill in blistering cold, just to slide back down again.

Winter will come soon to the land I live in.  I've felt a tough one in the air already.  Let it remind me of who I was, am, and the stories yet to find.

I've been a little absent as of late, my appologies.

The contemplative lifestyle has led me recently to catch up on my reading.  I've been going through books at a fairly good clip lately.  This is what I've been reading:

Athyra by Steven Brust is a great tale of an assasin's lifestyle, set in a place called Drageria.  Wonderful swashbuckling adventure, and some of the best fantasy mysteries I've read.  Brust is one of my favorites, and picking him back up spurred my latest reading spree.

Pure Dead Wicked and Pure Dead Brilliant by Deb Gliori.  The first in this series is Pure Dead Magic and is probably found in the Juvenile section of the library.  Love this author, some would term her work Cyber-Goth Fantasy.

Circus of the Damned by Laurell K. Hamilton, a semi-erotic vampire hunter novel.  Engaging and fairly addictive; but I've also found a type-o, a blatant, missing comma, and two identical sentences in close proximity (The road dissapeared over the hill. something about the parked police cars. The road dissapeared over the hill.), which annoys me that it wasn't better edited, so I'm compelled to get a pen out and mark them to see how many I can find.  But still a good vampire mystery.

Graphic Novels: The Bone Series, Contract with God by Will Eisner (a classic), Too Much Coffee Man's Guide for the Perplexed (Just up my alley), and # 2 in Niel Gaiman's Sandman Series The Doll's House (By far, my favorite GN author to read).

Non-fiction: A Tribe Apart by Patricia Hersch, is a details this journalists interaction with a group of teenagers.  She found out some startling things about us (I was a junior when she started the book).  Like what kind of crap the adult society is offering us when we grow up. Different ways we are coping with increased technology and population.  As well as insight into the sinking feeling that we belong to a tribe with different rules than normal society.  I'm still reading through it, but it's bringing up resentments and sympathies within me from about a decade ago.  I know I've helped create today's counter culture, and I refuse to leave it behind.

In Praise of Slowness, --ever wonder why computers and machines seem like they should give us more free time to persue our interests, yet is only looks like they've made thing tougher?  Me too.  Still in the beginning of this book, couldn't tell you much but "take it easy" & "stop to smell the roses, they'll be wilted soon."

and a few others I might mention later if my fancy tickles me as such.  I've had a wonderful time re-defining my addictive mind, though I still have urges to get utterly f#cked up.  I'll take the simple, juicy pleasures instead.

If everyone would pardon me, I have some ripe peaches to eat.