strange how summer happens so fast, how the air is gray and sharp one day, sun-thick and lolling the next. the flowers are each events, drops of food-coloring twisting knots in the crevices between rocks. the temperature doesn't actually change, because there are blankets and parkas and overheated fast-food restaurants in the wintertime, ice and skirts and running in the shade in the summer. sometimes i break into apartment-building swimming pools late at night and submerge myself, quietly, in the corners. nobody ever notices.

i've found a friend, a little mutt-dog named dal. someone was giving him away because her boyfriend was allergic and i don't have allergies or boyfriends, so he came with me. he's very dark brown and very soft and opens cupboards with his nose but never misbehaves. we eat table scraps now, from recently abandoned tables on the sidewalks outside of cafes. dal likes the pickles that people leave after finishing their sandwiches, and i like the hashbrowns that nobody seems to be able to finish. we never go back to the same place twice.

sometimes i toy with re-entering normal life, but i can't figure out why i would ever want to. i sang a spanish love song to a girl on the street yesterday, from my perch in a tree. she looked around and around, but like most of them she never thought to look up.

i decided that it was time to leave so i needed a car. one of the older ladies in town had died recently, leaving an old white honda civic, and i'd made friends with her daughter, who ended up holding the estate sale. i bought the car for $500, and named it platelet, and we aimlessly floated around the nation's circulatory system for a little while. i love the road late at night. i do not mean for love to be an abstract term here - i mean that late at night i engage in the act of loving the road. it's like sex but more subtle. i rode my platelet late-night into the hazy blue coronas of gas station fluorescence, and i bought as many candy bars as i wanted. i'm learning that at a certain time of night, at a certain number of rpms, the vibrations begin to sing songs into the space behind your eardrums - songs that keep singing themselves even after you pull off the road to listen. i shut my eyes and listen once i've rolled to a stop, and the car shudders against the shoulder as the semis whip their fat fast tails past us. i love realizing that there are really only the most mundane rules in the world. people, nobody's stopping you from waking up at 3 in the morning to see the lunar eclipse, and then running into someone's cornfield with a ball of yarn to find your way home. you can eat a watermelon or a receipt, you can stop your car and check over your shoulder only once before walking backwards until the car recedes into a tiny dot on the horizon and you've trusted the world a little more with every step. you can buy a bottle of beer and pour the whole thing into the dust to watch how it rises up in bubbly ridges and streams and swirls along the path of least resistance, and you can learn both something about what to do and what not to do in your life from that bottle of beer.

i ended up in ohio after a number of days, and i've been working at making sandwiches at a deli in the middle of nowhere. you'd be surprised at how many people from nowhere want sandwiches.

sometimes i hang out around the phone booth in town, watching people make their calls. there's a tiny little light there, that casts a weak-fallen-star glow onto their varied faces. in a phone booth, people look like mannequins in shop windows, simultaneously supremely on display and beautifully disinterested. the phone-lines suck away their attention, visualizing the invisible eyes of the contacted party. sometimes peoples' conversations are quick, low-toned and urgent. a huddle in the center of the little glass room, furtive drumming on the plastic coin receptacle, the frustrated bang of receiver and the vengeful trickle of quarter on quarter into oblivion. sometimes there's a lazy sprawl, legs akimbo or propped against the walls, a smile that drips down the glass like sly saliva, a piece of gum stuck in the "pizza" section of the yellowpages. i read about a blind man with perfect pitch, a man who could sing the telephone regulator into complacency and be in contact with anyone in the world. sometimes i pick up the receiver and hum into it, wondering if i'll strike the right tune, until a canned lady pleasantly informs me that if i'd like to make a call, i need to hang up and try again. sometimes i follow her advice, but more often i quit and leave the booth with its little stars to someone with extra quarters and someone to call.

whoa. here she is. insanity.

everything has changed. i'll tell you later.

for now: here she is.

life, as always, continues apace. zoom. the other night walking home i sang a song about seahorses and rocking chairs and fire hydrants. it was just me and the earliest birds out at 3am. i'm so busy these days.

you remember that moment playing heads up seven up as a kid, when you waited and waited, tensed, your entire being centered around that one eager digit, and then someone tapped your thumb and it was like a realization, a disclosure, kind lightening striking..? i feel like that sometimes.