Reality Nibbles Your Juicy Soul Like A Ripe Strawberry

Sometimes you just have to get away from the ordinary. Preferably far away. Where not a single McDonald’s wrapper flaps mockingly from the grass, where the fastest speed you can travel is the one your legs move you at, and since you have nowhere to be, that’s not very fast. A place where you get up early because you can’t wait to see what sort of wild orgiastic feast of human experience awaits you, not because some small box of endlessly forward-marching red numbers coerces you out of bed with tiny whiny whips of digital soul death. Somewhere you can say exactly what’s on your mind, no matter how perverted or strange or achingly beautiful, and it will be well received, or at least respected.

Fortunately there is such a place.

I spent my Memorial Day weekend with the folks at Playa Del Fuego, getting a desperately needed IV drip of reality. My id was in critical condition. You read it here – all angry and uptight and intolerant. I was only one tantrum away from going out and buying a Ford Expedition. It took me nearly half the weekend to unwind enough to have fun. But you can’t spend too long around free flowing laughter and homemade wine and men in dresses and women with beautifully painted breasts and giant trampolines and spinning fire and naked slip n slides and inflatable pools full of rose petals before your entire spirit just collapses in a fluff of wild expansion like some soft, gooey big bang.

And suddenly I feel free again. Relaxed. Able to remember that this whole life is a good cosmic joke, mere improvisational theater, and the funniest ones get the most applause. Once again I am a good mother of a wise and uncannily hysterical seven year old. Once again my cat is worthy of petting. My job and traffic and Bush and Iraq are things I cannot control and do not try to. I am centered in myself and not everyone else. And I swear on a stack of Tom Robbins paperbacks that I will never go that long without feeding my soul again.

When you’re not gripping it till your knuckles turn black, life has a funny way of moving. Reminds me of the Mississippi River, the way it used to shift across the plains from year to year, but now we’ve got it trapped by levees and locks and dams and it’s creating all sorts of problems. Anyway, so I came home and got offered a free apartment in Olympia, Washington for a full year. Which is sort of like being licked all over with tiny fairies that look sort of like Heath Ledger. Except that now I have to decide what I want instead of pining for what I can't have. Do I really want to move away from all these cool new friends? Do I want to drag my daughter 3,000 miles away from her dad? Do I want to do this just one semester before I finish school? What kind of hysterical irony gives you what you want on a silver platter at the exact moment you really can’t take it?

I’m not going to pretend for a pop-culture second that this is a decision I can make. This is one of those times in life that I know well enough to just sit back and let life unfold and trust that whatever happens is exactly what should, and that any attempt to exert my will over this outcome will simply tarnish my freshly-polished id and send me running screaming back to PDF for another dose of reality.