All quiet on the home front.

But content. Sometimes to get the things you want, all you have to do is ask.

I was wrong.

I had the pleasure of finding this out through two fascinating conversations with two of the men running the fair. The first man was young, lean, white. He wore mirrored sunglasses, and had muscled arms. He ran the rope game-- climb the rope ladder without flipping over and you'd get a prize. He demonstrated this, and often, to show it was easy. It wasn't. He told me he was planning on going to South Africa in the off season, because you could buy bricks of pot for nothing. He told me he would take me out, anywhere I wanted to go, because he made lots of money. Sometimes a thousand dollars in a day. He amassed his fortune $2 at a time.

The second man was thirty-four, stocky, skin a dark, dark brown. Most of the staff were white. He was quiet. He ran the bumper cars. Let a few people in. Let them sit in their seats. Make sure they are sitting. Flip the switch. Watch. Watch. Wait five minutes. Flip the switch off. Repeat.

I stared at him for a while, and at the bumper cars, not quite grasping that the metal grate that served as a ceiling conducted electricity, powering the cars. I asked him how it worked. "I flip the switch. It turns on the power." He tells me.

"Yes, but how exactly does that make the cars run?" I asked.

He looked at me. "The power," he repeats, indicating the red on/off switch. As if that explained everything. I watched the cars bump into eachother for a moment, and then asked him how long he'd been travelling in the fair. It was his third year. He'd left a bad relationship back in Mississippi, and he wanted to travel. When he met the right woman he'd settle down, and that's why he was in the fair, travelling from town to town looking for the right woman.

He didn't look at me when he said this, and spoke quietly, and without confidence. "You're very shy," I noted.

"Don't talk to people much. I mind my own business. People don't seem to want to talk to me. I just do my job."

"What makes you like your job, if you never talk to anyone?" I asked.

He was silent for a minute, staring at the kids giggling and ramming eachother with their bumper cars. "The children. I love watching children. I want to have some someday. When I meet the right woman."

I smile at him. "You're gonna have a hard time meeting the right woman if you never talk to anybody," I tease.

He smiles self-consciously. He asks me how long I'll be around tonight, because they broke down the fair in an hour, and there was nothing to do after that, if I wanted to, maybe, he could take me out to dinner. Maybe I was the right woman. "Why are you looking at me like that?" He asked.

I was just listening to him. Asking his story. Nothing special.

"You making me nervous looking at me like that. Ain't nobody ever listen to me the way you do. Do you want to maybe go out tonight?" He doesn't look at me when he says this, and I say I might be back later, I wasn't sure. I wouldn't be, I knew this already.

He looks up at the bumper cars. "I've got to stop this." He gestures the switch. I realized the ride had gone on ten minutes longer than it should have, distracted by my questioning. I told him goodbye, and he nodded, tight-lipped again.

Well I see that the world is upside-down
Seems that my pockets were filled up with gold
And now the clouds, well they’ve covered over
And the wind is blowing cold
Well I don’t need anybody, because I learned, I learned to be alone
Well I said anywhere, anywhere, anywhere I lay my head, boys
Well I gonna call my home

We are woven together as fairytales, as our own archetypes, as legends. The art weaves life into something of mythic proportions, our hair windswept, our eyes jewels reflecting the night.

I think that myth of ourselves is the lifeblood and that keeps fire in our veins. I look at my love and see him larger than life, his movements so fantastically beautiful a dance there in the heavens; until you realize there is nothing so beautiful as a god up close.

I have a little mud, a little rain, but I'm trying to remember how to fashion my own myth from the ground up, remember what it's like to glow inside my own story.

"People who do not break things first will never learn to create anything."

Tagalog proverb

From Jonathan Carroll's blog, which always gives me something to mull over.

I can see the appeal.

There's a closeness to one's sense of life or imminent lack thereof, road racing beneath the wheels, body wrapped around a stranger, or friend, or lover... I smoke and drank too much, bare feet planted in the shore, watching the algae glow electric blue against the waves. Spilling secrets and salt tears into the sand, and blinking back the stars, and thinking I've never felt this awake.

It was not there yesterday.

It made me laugh-- in my life, the correlation isn't to age, but to stress. Occasionally binge-drinking, and laying on my face. But mostly, stress.

I swept my hair up into pigtails, and proceeded to go out and meet the sunshine.

A moment of clarity descended when I flipped open an old notebook and began to read, thinking I had written a fiction too fantastic and full of twists to be believed.

A few pages later, I realized it was my diary.

Sometimes I wake up and think everything is going to be just fine.

playing in the background:
half of learning how to play
is learning what not to play
and she's learning the spaces she leaves
have their own things to say
and she's trying to sing just enough
so that the air around her moves...