My fascination with the homeless community here continues. My latest penchant is for a man who stands with a cardboard sign on which is scrawled 'FREE STORY. ASK ME'. I didn't ask, for the tattered pages of my mind are cluttered with more than enough scribbles for the moment, and i would prefer to wonder.
I encountered my first Santa Cruz farmer's market on Wednesday, whereupon i sampled my first oyster whilst a beautiful floral dress provided the soundtrack via a ukulele and a cassette player. It is hard to be unhappy in this land of perpetual sunlight. I purchased a bunch of flowers and attended my first bikram yoga class which was tres amiable and i felt at peace with the world.
As the sun searched for a bed for the night in the cloudless stretch of indigo above our heads, we headed to the beach. The tide was high and we perched precariously on the rocks, watching our mistress the ocean bat her lashes coyly upon the sand and toss the seaweed strands of her hair at us seductively. The late night mist created orbs in the flash of my camera, giving the impression that the air around us was full of celestial beings, clamouring for a glimpse of the endless galaxies swirling above us and enveloping our minds completely in their glorious magnitude. The stars here make me feel so small and insignificant, but in a comforting way. My life, this world, our incomprehensible smatter of milky way are simply one of many. Perhaps nothing is ever truly worth fretting over, for we are such a tiny element of the universe. The Earth will keep turning, gravity will continue to manipulate us like a mad puppeteer. Perhaps we ought to cry not for ourselves but for the stars, for the fact that those beautiful burning balls of fire are really trails of death, murdered by mathematics and the speed of light. I saw my first shooting star.
Saw my first banana slug too. I tripped over it. You are supposed to be subject to a lifetime of bad luck if you step on one, and a very long period of good luck if you kiss your first. I did neither of these things, for i live with three black cats.
The next evening i went to an open mic night at a voluntarily run anarchist library and cafe around the corner from my house. Books engulf the walls and fairy lights illuminate the wrought iron tables in the leafy garden, the trees decorated with old fire extinguishers and an accumulation of the debris of life, like anti-consumerist Christmas trees. The theme of the evening was feet, and the comperes lay on the floor with their bare toes in the air and let them do the talking. One man made us release guttural howls and squeaks into the air with our voices. Another sang a song to a baby in the corner. A woman showed us the dirt caught in the wrinkles of her soles, preserved for someone on the internet who wanted to pay money for her dirty socks. My housemate Jynx sang about the pile of unwashed dishes festering in our kitchen. A group of homeless men sat outside of the gates as we left, gathered around an old radio, laughing at the rest of us.
We ended the night drinking red wine upon a mattress while a circus ringleader we met hammered nails into his nostrils and showed us the self inflicted staple wounds on his body. He serenaded us with a rendition of 'Happy Birthday' played with his knuckles upon his skull.
After spending another afternoon perfecting my downward dog and vinyasa, i bade 'namaste' to the heat and donned a floor length evening gown and a pair of elbow length gloves to attend a cinematic, theatrical melting pot of the murder mystery 'Clue'. A french maid drank pepper flavoured vodka by my side as i flounced through the town in a haze of feathers and fur.
The weather remains warm and i whiled away Saturday reading 'Into The Wild' in the park and advising a homeless man intent on fondly referring to me as 'Little Paris' on the length of his cornrows. 'I would love to go to England one day', he told me. 'But it probably won't be today'.
I returned home to find our front porch was being used as an amateur film set, complete with clipboards, coffee runs and a lighting rig Hollywood would be proud of. One bright pink dress and an obligatory red plastic cup later, i made my acting debut as 'Girl Number Two'. Palm trees do line the sidewalk here, after all.
Another day, another trip to the beach.
Dogs delighted in the salty tang of freedom on the wind, as a man beat a drum beneath the cliff.
The sky above the boardwalk blushed as we stared at her fleshy pink nakedness, before turning a deep dusky lilac. The careless gods must have used the same brush with which to paint the sea, for she too became tinged with lavender and air and water blended into one.
The beauty of the dusk finally allowed the stars to have their moment and i descended into town to wear my purple lipstick and dance to The Smiths at 'Goth Night', which occurs every Sunday in a bar downtown. It is a marvellous fracas of Robert Smith inspired hair as the cares which plague the modern goth are left to smoulder in whiskey tumblers on the side of the bar as everyone remembers the blissful ease of forgetting.
We welcomed the dawn of another day by drinking champagne around a bonfire outside of a vintage trailer as a boy strummed 'House of the Rising Sun' on a guitar he made himself and we all sang along.
'I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.'
-Leo Tolstoy
-'Family Happiness'
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