“Why tiptoe through life to arrive safely at death?” (Ludacris)

Turquoise cures writer’s block.

Self care = cleaning house, rearranging furniture, adding new art to the walls, doting on potted plants. I’ve been doting on my potted plants this morning, and I started cleaning the house. I’m using the approach I learned at Laguna Pueblo. You start to the right of the front door and clean each wall as you come to it. I have 28 walls in my house. I’m on wall #2. Still in the process of cleaning out the refrigerator, although I did dust five years worth of dust off the top of it. So proud. And threw out six bottles of beer that were there when I moved in eight years ago.

So much fun.

I listened to Chris Vogler discussing his take on the Hero’s Journey, and it started me thinking about transformational narratives. This led to pondering the mythic meaning of the key images of 2020: masks, social distancing, obsessive hand washing. Where is this inward journey going? What elixir will we bring with us when we emerge from the underworld? How do we turn all this into story?

“I am the path.” (Chris Vogler)

Zhangye National Geopark, China

Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, from the album Stranger in Town

RIP, Kevin Tran

A candle by Frederic Malle, the scent of an old well-kept French house or a Paris living room after a dinner party.

Things to remember about coffee:

Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Peets and Blue Bottle are corporate sell-outs. But I still buy Peets Major Dickason’s Blend at the Safeway.

Might still be okay: Flying Goat Coffee, the Optimist Blend; Counterculture Coffee; Spotted Cow Coffee; Dallis Bros. Coffee, the Ethiopia Kochere.

Beans to buy: Celebes Kalossi, Javanese, Antiguan, Blue Mountain.

Unknown blend mentioned in a Stuart Woods novel: Medaglia d’Oro.

So the end of the world came and went yesterday with nary a whimper. A planet colliding with Earth. Melancholia. Haunting movie, but hard to take.

A National Geographic special on Gravity introduces gravity as the force that is responsible for everything in the universe — from the big bang to the formation of galaxies, stars and planets, to holding all the matter together from the atoms to the universe,

so it’s like God,

and it’s a force.

I am with the Force, and the Force is with me

At the end, the narrator called Gravity The Mighty Ruler of the Universe.

Gravity = The Force = God.

A delicious Twilight Zone episode, “The Bard,” written by Rod Serling. A failed writer uses black magic to conjure up William Shakespeare, who then writes his stuff for him. The episode was interrupted by an ad for Sharknado 5.

That’s the whole range of the writing life right there.

I love my profession.

Song of Songs

Ruth

Lamentations

Ecclesiastes

Esther

White – slouchy brown suede bag

Fringe

Chiffon, silk

Khaki

Soft blouses

Persistence and Belief in Yourself