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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Big Dog Demons
T.G.I Frida God, what a weekend. I shopped shopped shopped for a winter coat on Friday, had the girls in for dinner on Saturday night, and rode Frida all day but all day Sunday. That doesn't sound like much, does it? But it was a drain. So the shopping? Went not so well really, as I still have not a winter coat. I did manage to buy what Sophistica calls a "fuzzy" (one of those now ubiquitous jackets made of that soft, fuzzy material) to wear on my chilly little morning walks. I also dragged Max along, and Max is a genius shopper of shoes, so with his urging I scored a pair of super high black heels with white racing stripes on the side. They're really strange and cool and fasten with this velcro strip across the instep like some kind of hi-test mary jane. But alas, no winter coat. I did however decide to make my winter coat a leather motorcycle jacket, so at least now I have a destination. Saturday morning, I took Frida out to the farmer's market in the valley. It was so fucking cold that I wore my motorcycle jacket with its liner, used both my balaclavas, wore two pairs of gloves and long underwear under my usual riding gear. And I still froze my ass off. However, I was rewarded by the pre-dawn sight of hot air balloons lighting up the sky like so many stars. As they hit the burners to heat the air in their balloons, the insides of the gloriously colored balloons light up. There were a dozen balloons hanging in the sky over the road and they looked like giant flickering upturned raindrops. It was so beautiful it made me glad to be out, glad to be on the earth, glad and grateful for everything to be had in that moment. After that, there was the reward of hot coffee and a bag of the first quince of the year. I love quince. Not a lot of people in this country do, I don't think, but I grew up with a wonderful gnarled old quince tree and we had so many good times together that quince just makes me feel damned good. So, anyway, Saturday night, I had NicI, The Demon Who Always Does The Right Thing, and The Demon Grrlfriend in for dinner. I served (yet again) green chile stew, carne adovada, tortillas, and couscous pie. NicI brought nacho fixings and cupcakes, and The Demon Couple brought salsa and tomatoes from their garden. It was fucking cool to sit around chatting with the girls and to look through the wedding pictures from NicI's wedding and to just eat and eat and eat too much. Now that The Demon is in grad school, I don't see her nearly often enough (I am reduced to getting news of her from The Demon Grrlfriend, who I see every Friday night at the self-defense class), and so it was nice to hang with her. And NicI? I haven't seen her since the wedding. Sunday, like I said, I rode and rode and rode. I put many miles on my beauty, just crossing from one end of the city to the other and back. I did have a few funny moments. One of my favorites was when I was about midway through transversing the city for the second time and I hit some big piece of metal in the road (no, that's not the funny part). I pulled into a truckstop to examine my tires, thinking I might have put a hole in one of them. Luckily, that turned out not to be the case, so I jumped back on the bike and got back on the road--right next to some big dog on his big Harley touring bike. I pulled up in the lane next to him, looked over and nodded. He, big dog-like, gave me this perfect John Belushi raised eyebrow as he examined my hot little 250 sportsbike. I had to laugh in my helmet, it was so funny. It just cracks my shit up to see them tooling down the road on their expensive (but well-kept bikes) in their dirty, ripped up Harley gear, no helmets, sunglasses, long straggly hair, and (often enough) the pillion of their bikes loaded down with a bitch. If they deign to acknowledge little sportsters like me, it's with a minimal nod at best. Those big dogs. They're such elitists. But they're also true American road kings, still living the dream Easy Rider-style. I love it. I hope to be one of those big dogs some day. Anyway, so I did put miles and miles in, thinking always of Valentino, my love...and of the road, and of freedom and fear and responsibility. And now? I'm off to put in more miles in--this time on the information superhighway, looking for some fucking heated handgrips, as I'm planning on more early morning rides and I'd like to come home without icicles for fingers. Hope you had equally rewarding weekends, my Big Dog Demons.
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