All The Good Things In This World

Tonight has been one of the best nights of my life. I got home from work where I'd made two great arrests on a couple of big cases. Yolie was still at work so I cleaned the house and made dinner for us, put on some Hem and lit some candles. We ate taquitos and a salad with figs from our fig tree and drank Ketel One martini's and talked about our days, our friends, our sweet, sweet lives...Yolie told me that she felt today like she'd done such a good job of living that she could die happy right now. That no matter what finally claimed her she could hold her head up and know that she hadn't just dipped her toe into the water, she'd dived head-first and gleefully in to the deep, deep water. I told her how happy that made me, how I felt the same way, and that I would always remember that moment...if she died I could live with it because I knew that she was happy with her life, that she was satisfied with how she'd gone at it full bore the whole time. I was crying into my martini I was so happy and so raw and open and in love with her. With my life, too.

After dinner we cleaned up the kitchen and then laid down on our bed. It's covered with this beautiful, jewel-toned japanese fabric quilt Yolie made for us, a real work of art...anyway, we just snuggled and talked and goofed around and then made wild passionate love for about a week and a half and then I went out to the backyard and sat in my Dadairondack chair and had another inch of frozen vodka in a thick-bottomed glass and smoked a small cuban cigarillo and pet my wild dog and watched the moon and the stars and felt the acrid smoke in my lungs and wept and wept for my small happiness. Yolie came out and we talked some more. I felt the last piece of my latest big painting fall into place with a earthy thud of perfection, and a parade of all the people I love so dearly floated in front of my eyes...

Why me, lord? Why am I so blessed?

Oh, I am undone.



Undone.



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Happy Birthday, Laurel

Happy Birthday, Laurel. Just wanted to let you know I'm thinking about you today and wishing you all good things.




Red

The blue sky's as clear as it ever gets and that's good.
Who could stand it otherwise? I mean, shit, really.
Already it threatens to overwhelm the tiny mechanisms
of the heart and it isn't even speaking to us.
Its concerns are elsewhere, that much is certain.

Ah, but we believe it's all for us. I suppose
we should. There's no harm in it.

Today I noticed all the sycamore leaves drifting in piles
along the road that leads to the jail. Like a hundred thousand
empty paper bags all crumpled up and shuffling slowly
against the chain link fence. Murmuring to themselves,
too shy to try to bum a ride from the passing cars.

I don't know how the muscle in my chest keeps beating,
senselessly alive and insistent upon making its clamor felt
up in my head bones, along my muscles, in the tremors
of my wrecked hands. But I don't have to know, do I?
It keeps it up just the same. Like that blue sky.
Like the leaves that are falling and falling again,
so many you could never count them.

A dark thread pierces my beating heart
and binds me to all I love.






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Trace Evidence

If you can, get your hands on a movie called "Elling." It's from Norway.
Thumbsucker was another great movie. I liked Broken Flowers, too.
Those Wes Anderson flicks- Bottle Rocket, Royal Tennenbaums, The Life Aquatic. Terrence Malick's films- Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line. Yes. Heat. Napoleon Dynamite. Galaxy Quest. Eraserhead.

Turtles Can Fly, from Iraqi director Bahman Gohbadhi. This film you must absolutely watch now.

George Washington and All The Real Girls (two films) by that North Carolina kid.
Off The Map.

These are some of my favorite movies.


A note to my friends- I miss you all and I am fine but I am not, as you can tell, doing much on the blog right now. I'm not really reading yours, either, so I'm also missing out on all you are up to. I don't know what's at work in this, but I'm giving it plenty of room. I'll catch up with you all later.



Things are heating up everywhere.