Just completed what felt like on-camera therapy, at Home of the Future/Richard Wicka's joint, for his ongoing Five Minute Series.
First off told the story of when the life of Yours Truly felt like a bad reality t.v. show - when the breakup with the X happened, when all came to fortuitous fruition after receiving two emails from a stranger (the Angry Husband) in Cleveland, OH.
Then he presented YT with a list of scenarios and I was to expound if one hit a chord, so to speak. One of my favorite expoundings was about an encounter with an insect and I told of how as a child I was stung repeatedly, how my mother noted that in a playground there could be a group of players and a bee would dive-bomb me.
So, one family car trip, I had a wasp stuck inside the sleeve of my blouse. Which I did not realize until I felt something and hit my shoulder and then was stung and went hysterical.
My mother, turning from the right passenger seat, struck me with an amazing blow to my face, an open-handed slap to assuage my hysteria. It worked. I was stunned and she ripped off my shirt, exposing me and the newly-dead wasp.
The End.
And so much more.
I feel slightly mentally depleted from this Five Minute experience,
now onwards to Kennedy's concert this fine Middling City evening, to hear The Thing at SoundLab. Chilly, frigid SoundLab.
Yours Truly is dressing accordingly - layered beyond belief.

Layers of Love.

After a few rounds of saber-rattling, Yours Truly confronted this holiday, the first of the triad, and at the moment I am on top, perhaps prematurely brandishing my saber in the air, waving it in triumphant loops overhead.
Ran into, amongst others, Bob Stubblebine last night, of Flynn's and BoHo fame. A past regular of my feted and fabled Thanksgiving feast. He queried and I replied that these past two years I have become a spectator of the day rather than an Olympic athlete who prepped and trained for weeks whilst amassing recipes (in addition to what I deemed a tradition, the somewhat godawful ginger candied carrots I made at my first feast fourteen years ago and subjected all others to from then on), getting the work/live space into a suitable dining room situation (replete with two very long rectangular tables side by each to make one fucking huge table) and scrape the photo dust bunnies off the ceiling, making calls, fielding the RSVPs, shopping, cooking, cooking, more cooking, then the big E, then the big C.
E = entertaining/good.
C = cleaning/bad.
I did squeeze in some excellent cooking today for me and Kennedy (before I trek to parents' place and visit and see the fam) as that is what I do. I read the recipes, I imagine, I shop, I slice, I dice, I spice, I serve and eat.
Just spoke to Rio and Ron (again, amongst others) and they are right now en route to Nature. If it was not 23 degrees in the Middling City I might appropriate that idea.
And Thanksgiving can only mean another thing - in two days it is the annual World's Largest Disco, a slopfest of non-stop memory lane hits. Was involved in a burst of emailing a few weeks ago with some North Buffalo fellas about this so-called event as JW,Esq. got all high and Cali mighty critiquing one of the MC's best attributes remaining. I jumped on his e-shit, noting that he is a walking disco narrative, a f/t party boy for certain.
And now, a fable:
It was roughly about a handful of centuries ago that some renegades sans polar fleece braved the Atlantic Ocean and headed out for spices and freedom and fresh air, so to speak.
Upon their journey they might have become hungry and eaten one of their group who perished. They landed. And upon the place they landed, a beach of rocks, they clung to one rock in a style remiscent of the Transcendentalists - deeming this rock, this place, this beach, this new land of spices and such heaven on earth . . . as suddenly an arrow whizzed past one of the group's head and then another whapped into the rock. They called it Plymouth Rock but it should have been called Pilgrim Rock. They did not sail in on the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria as that's another story. So they were then surrounded by natives in animal skins, who kind of laughed at the newbies in their light woolens and uncomfortable shoes. So they communicate as one does in the throes of travel, all voice and face and hands until they all became pals and feasted together. Actually, the natives did all the cooking. The arrivistes did not dig the maize soup or the newly-slain animal of undetermined origin but they feasted so as not to be rude, or at least they gave off that vibe. Cranberries, a native plant, were on the tables. Time went on. Cities were built, the natives faded out, the maize soup persevered. A meat that nobody particularly adores, turkey, became the representative food of the vague anniversary of the landing. Stuffing, everyone's fav, came later.

Stuffing Love.

Back in whitewashed Middling City, aglow this fine morn with crystalline beauty and that hushed, winter phenom.
Regarding the lack of EuroPosts, as You asked.
In Europe there are opera houses in each small city, coffee to beat the band up with - as they say - in every establishment (including some primo clothing stores), that whole 'We are like so united yet do manage to still have a loathing for at least one ethnic group, especially those trying to be our cabbies, our maids, our benefactors" vibe, and museums and galleries that run exhibitionistic circles around any of those in the MC.
Yet, when it comes to the wi-fi molecules, they are sparse. And when one does find internet service in one's five-star hotel situation one will be charged out the EuroWazoo to use said internet. Like at College Hotel in Amsterdam. 14euros for two hours. And they mean it. And odd deals like if you - oops - log on before 11AM you will be charged the daily rate for the next two hours tops. But if you sign on at 11:01AM you will be speeding along the autobahnnet for 24hours. And 24 hours does not need to be translated into metric. Dig.
So there was a dearth of good internet situs, resulting in the sad lack of Yours Truly even being on the internet. A bad thing. A highly unusual thing.
Now, back in the USofA, with the oddest of presidents repped thusly in the international press, I am back to absorbing up as many wi-fi molecules as I can net into my aura.
Amsterdam was not the Vegas-like sleaze centre I had imagined but a much more (well it is November, fercrissakes) walking and usual cultural city. But here and there you do spot the lusty conventioneers, those men of all ages who are there for the p.o.t., the window shopping.
And jazz sax Peter Brotzmann's art exhib, a dual exhib with jazz drum maniac Han Bennink, stretched into two adjoined buildings, filled every square inch with their sculptural, painterly, collage pieces. The PB I have my eyes locked onto was #18 on his list/prix list, a small abstract blur upon which he outlined in red his right hand. A must.
So all was beyond fab. The usual wonderments of Europe: the oddities, the better food, the champagne, the walking, the art, the design sense that encompasses most things, the trains.
No jet lag.
But here, in the MC, time passes most days more slowly than elsewhere.
Out into the new snow.

New snow love.