Dollars and Sense.

Even when it is too hot to breathe steadily, I sleep with a heavy blanket over my head.
I spend money I don't have.  The rolled up red yoga mat by the door, the yellow dress hanging on the wall, empty journals, the black Victorian picture frame from the tea house (no picture in it, only the stock photo of an airbrushed blonde), three cans of tomato soup, make up, a box full of Indian tea.

$102.21.  Living "within my means" this week and next.  Two cups of coffee today. $10.

Coffee Dates

It was cold last night and raining and the sky was a mellow mix of yellow and magenta and his car windows kept fogging up.  All of the baristas inside know our names and know our orders and they greet us with smiles.  They're in on the joke and give us nicknames and extra shots of caramel in our lattes.  I eat the whipped cream with my finger and kiss his nose and they watch us.  We eat it up and snack on salty skin for dessert.  Lick lips, repeat. 

We leave and turn the heat on until our blood is boiling up.

I slept for four hours after our coffee date, after our sex.  My neck was sore when I finally woke and it was still raining.

The Sky Was Yellow Tonight

Runaway

I dreamt last night that my father had died.  This is a direct result of the fight we had two weeks ago and the silence that continues to follow it.  I want to do good things and I want to feel good.  I want to drink the wine and smoke the grass of the earth and have sex in $69 hotel rooms.  My Father, he said "he'll never love you."

He'll never love you.

I only try to defend myself when I know that I'm wrong.

My dresses are always a little too short and the only book I've ever written was a series of short stories about the sex I've had.  I smoke cigarettes and I smoke weed and if there's a chance for a shot in the back of a dim bar, you'd better believe I'll be the first one tilting my head back and slamming the glass back on the table.

What if the world were really going to end in 2012?  Would I stop?  Would I go at it even harder?  Would I stop trying to twist his words into something meaningful? 

Would I reconcile with my father?

Would I stay in bed and write poems about all of the Saturday mornings that I'd never get to see?

Smoking Music

There's a broken cinder block just outside the door if you go through the warehouse of the office and at least 5 times during the day I'll go and balance myself on it and smoke cigarettes.  There's a man who works at the company we share the building with, who has long hair and wears sandals and blue jeans.  He sits in the back of his red Ford pickup truck and plays the same twang-y tune on a fiddle every day.  Our timing is nearly perfect - when I'm smoking, he's playing, when he's playing, I'm smoking.  I watch him with some sort of fascination but I look away and blush when I see him turn his head to look in my direction.  I become overwhelmed with guilt, as if I'm watching some private affair, something I shouldn't be gawking at.  It's not that the music is beautiful (or even in tune most days), or that the man himself is attractive, it's more that there's a man in this cold-concrete-corporate parking lot and he's playing the fiddle and wearing brown sandals in the back of a red truck.

We've never spoken and probably never will.  When the winter gets here, just like last winter, I won't see him at all.  And then at the first sign of spring, when the snow finally melts from both the bed of his truck and the top of my cinder block, we'll return to our spots and he'll provide the smoking music and I'll provide the attentive audience.  It's kind of this thing we have.

Inspiration.

As with paper journals, I tend to begin blogs and leave them half finished, loads of blank pages after only a few entries of uninspired thoughts on men and love and glittering parties.  My intentions are always the best - to write each day, sit down and untangle the thoughts from my brainstem, letting them flow onto the screen and against all odds make sense of the hours.  But, my intentions fall like dust and that dust collects on journal after flowery journal and when inspiration strikes again and I sit down to write, I feel the nagging need to begin anew, to start over, a fresh start among all of the other fresh starts.  Each time I place my fingers to the keyboard, I start by telling myself 'this time will be different.  This time I will continue and I will not lose sight and even when a day seems entirely uneventful and there is no new love to speak of, I will write.'

And so now I am here again.  A shiny new blog in front of me, just waiting to be filled with stories and songs and photos and waiting to learn about me, and I say it again.  This time, this time I will write and I will not stop writing and I will find beautiful inspiration in the mundane days at the office, or the nights spent sitting alone watching sitcom reruns.  I will write because I have to write, because I need to write.

Welcome, reader, to Tired Foxes.

Tenderly,
Tired Fox