“I learned that being envied is the loneliest pleasure on earth, and that self-absorption guarantees unhappiness, and that the worst motive for action is groundless fear.” ~ Alan Helms
There’s a lot to unpack in that single sentence, and I’m not going to dissect it with my nonsense, other than the links contained therein. It probably means something different for you anyway, and that’s the beauty of sparkling writing.
Almost every August there are storms that arrive in the middle of a sunny day, often resulting in rainbows that fill the sky and thrill the senses, if you’re lucky enough to be out and about. Such was the case as I was enjoying a cup of peppermint tea and a sudden rainstorm ravaged the area around Professor Java’s. Waiting out a spell of rain in a cafe is one of life’s greater solaces, so I hunkered down until the sun came back out. The brief pause was worth it, as I managed to capture this rainbow in the parking lot – a happy reminder of whatever rainbow belief system you have (I tend to err on the side of science, but I’m old-school in my preference for facts and scientific evidence). If there is something more meaningful about the rainbow to you, have at it.
Additional proof that rainbows often inform this blog:
As the true villain of the magnificently twisted thriller ‘Obsession’, Michael Johnston delivers a chillingly nuanced performance that grounds the film in its human footing while never straying from the atrociousness that ends up enveloping everyone. For giving such villainy such a pretty face, Johnston handily earns this Dazzler of the Day crowning.
Forget ‘The Office’ – someone should do a series called ‘The Elevator’ because that’s where all the crazy shit happens. Elevators are the great equalizers of an office building.
And what happens in the elevator rarely stays on the elevator if I’m there; I squeal louder than a pig.
All I have for this blog post is a provocative title, no racy finger-pricking scandal to accompany the pretty pink photos of the titular rose at hand. It’s up to the reader/viewer to fill-in-the-blanks, which always makes for a more graphic depiction of scenarios – your sick and sordid imagination fills any holes more insistently than some blatant nudity or sexual situation I might posit or deposit here.
Now I’m just playing with words and teasing easy targets, that’s when it’s not going completely over heads. People either get too much credit, or not enough – too few are the times when people get precisely what they deserve. Justice and comeuppance are the stuff of fairy tales – that’s why our darkest and most base tendencies love a fairy tale. Real life proves far more problematic – but a rose is still a rose, and a rambling blog post won’t make one damn difference in this wayward world.
Autocorrect never corrects when you need it to correct, but always changes the shit that you intended to write that way. Like, I’m never gonna write ‘ducking’ in my life (maybe), yet I consistently write ‘fucking’ this and ‘fucking’ that but it never just lets it fucking be.
WTD?
Next week at this time I’ll be turning 51, so this marks my final week as a 50-year-old, and the end cannot come quickly enough. Two words can sufficiently sum up what 50 was like for me: holy fuck. We now continue with our weekly blog recap in case you missed any of these swell moments… I wish I had.
Summer adoration because what’s not to adore?
The second verse is smaller than the first, because not all in the garden is symmetrical.
Summer is still bursting even when the heart is no longer in it.
A happy new addition to the downtown Albany cafe culture scene.
All those hapless people being impressed by anything remotely kinda chic… pfffft.
The tomato thief strikes again – when will they be stopped?
Happy hibiscus season to those who celebrate.
A visit to my hometown leads to this delicious lunch at Cali Cantina.
Musings over matcha turn a tinge dark, as musings tend to do near the end of summer.
Caught in med-metamorphosis, the artist pauses for a red light.
Friday fuzziness is pink and pretty.
When Virgos cry it’s usually a pretty damn big deal, though it’s worth noting that no tears have been recently spilt.
Finishing ‘The Summer Book’ when all the people really want is the glimpse behind it.
Listen, if parking is going to remotely be a problem, count me out. Tell me what happened later. I have the opposite of FOMO.
Madonna celebrated her birthday, and in honor of that the Madonna Timeline returned in fine fashion, with the first entry from her latest album.
Got my tits out for this summer boogie wonderland moment.
Wondrous echoes of a lilac spring have us nearing a full-circle happening.
Dazzlers of the Day included Joey Graceffa and Urzila Carlson.
Verbena bonariensis (I love that name) holds its purple heads high above the garden for a significant swath of summer. A favorite of pollinators, it brings the bees and the butterflies to the yard, and a welcome airy and vertical element to the garden plan, forcing an informal cottage charm to the most formal of proceedings. Known commonly as the purpletop vervain (almost as nice as its scientific name) its color echoes a cross between lilac and violet in hue – remnants of a spring memory happier and more hopeful than the typical latter-half-of-summer fare on display now.
Happening upon a planter of these downtown, I’m inspired to consider a wilder and less structured garden vision for next year. Poppies and cornflowers and hollyhocks come to mind, a cottage garden of sorts being the likely setting for my winter dreams, and the color palette being what you see here – lilac and pink and all sorts of pastels to keep things cool and soft for whatever the next summer throws at us. A happy and heartbreaking couple of words: next summer.
Plunging back into the Solid Gold Summer that has proved such a magnificently-mixed bag of emotional mayhem and mid-life crisis moments, I present to you ‘Boogie Wonderland’ to get your feet moving and your body grooving. Yes, sir, we still love to boogie, and this beat is sick and relentless. The lyrics at first go surprisingly deep too, if you read just a bit into them – and then suddenly they don’t, reminding us of the push and pull of the seriousness of summer, and how none it will matter in just a few months’ time.
Midnight creeps so slowly into hearts of men
Who need more than they get
Daylight deals a bad hand to a woman
Who has laid too many bets
The mirror stares you in the face
And says “Baby, uh, uh, it don’t work”
You say your prayers though you don’t care
You dance and shake the hurt
Sound fly through the night
I chase my vinyl dreams to boogie wonderland
I find romance when I start to dance in boogie wonderland…
A disco boogie moment reminds me of this year’s BroSox Adventures with Skip – one of the more exciting ones thanks to all the was happening in the city that weekend. Putting this summer into the past will be a bittersweet endeavor – best of times, worst of times, and all the shit – but I’m almost ready. Haven’t quite given up the summer ghost yet, and when I step into the heat and sun, and the tomatoes tumble off their vines and the salvia is still drawing the hummingbirds, it feels gloriously endless.
By the pool, hidden from the rest of the world, a sanctuary sees us through these final lovely weeks of summer, a song keeps us dancing, and the love keeps us going.
All the love in the world can’t be gone
All the need to be loved can’t be wrong
All the records are playing and my heart keeps saying
“Boogie wonderland, wonderland”
{Note: The Madonna Timeline is an ongoing feature, where I put the iPod on shuffle and write a little anecdote on whatever was going on in my life when that Madonna song was released and/or came to prominence in my mind.}
Thanks for coming
Sometimes I like to just hide in the shadows
Create a new persona, a different identity
I can be whoever I wanna be
Create a new persona
Honestly, I wish I could be like?other?people and?just not care
But?out here, on the?dance floor
I feel so free…
Never before has a Madonna timeline served so many purposes and marked so many moments as this one may be doing right now. First off, this is the return of the Madonna Timeline feature, which has gotten away from us since early April of this year. Second, this marks the first selection from Madonna’s latest album, the rightly-celebrated ‘Confessions II’. Third, this is the first time a lead single coincides with a timeline from that album. And finally, today marks Madonna’s birthday, another milestone in a day of them. On a personal note, this entry finds me in better spirits than I’ve been over the past couple of months, as I learn to throw things off over which I have no control, leave people behind who aren’t worth my time (sorry, friends and family, if you can’t be bothered to return a simple text, I won’t be bothered to return any affection) and come into a new level of genuine self-respect and worthiness. In other words, a realm of freedom I haven’t felt probably ever, and it’s fan-fucking-tastic. Makes one want to go dancing…
Oh, by the way, it all started like this
So, how’s your evening so far?
Don’t be a vibe kill
Beginning with a muffled stampede echoing the start of Madonna’s ‘Confessions Tour’ (which celebrated the original ‘Confessions on A Dance Floor’ album) ‘I Feel Love’ pays musical homage to Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and Madonna’s own tribute to that ‘Future Lovers‘. It’s a brilliant if somewhat subtle re-entry into the club world from whence she was born, and nobody does this better than Madonna – it’s doubtful anyone ever will. When she starts the minimalist melody of the song, imploring us to meet her on the dance floor, it’s exactly what we so desperately needed at this moment.
Come on, meet me on the dance floor
Come here, baby, I can give you much more tonight
Oh, baby, let’s do it right
It’s really hard for me to trust people
Can you blame me?
I never know what people like me
That’s why I like to go dancing
Safety in numbers
That’s why I like to go dancing
Safety in numbers
Safety in numbers
The first time I hear a new Madonna song, I’m sometimes a little unsure. It happened with ‘Like A Prayer’ when it premiered during ‘The Cosby Show’ and all of America was watching. Same thing occurred with the slow-burn genius of ‘Secret’ as I was keeping my first kiss with a man quiet. It happened again with ‘Frozen’ on an icy night in Rochester, NY when I was on the brink of ruining myself by falling for a one night stand. Both of those instances took a few listens before I gave in to their brilliance. By 2000’s ‘Music’ I was more ready to immediately dig what she was putting out, the same way I instantly fell for ‘Hung Up’, and this one had similar thrills when I first heard it. Madonna still knows her way around a dance song.
Come on, meet me on the dance floor
Come here, baby, I can give you much more tonight
Oh, baby, let’s do it right
I feel so free
I feel so free
I feel so free
A little past the midnight hour, in the darkened spring night on which it first becomes available, ‘I Feel So Free’ plays from the computer and I feel like a younger Madonna fan again – excited and giddy and anticipating something miraculous. There is hope in this music, hope in this spring, the way hope perennially arrives in the spring when we just start to doubt its return. Madonna’s been doing this for four decades, and that she still wields such power and casts such a spell is a reassuring dose of nostalgia and future promise at once.
It’s dangerous with just one person
And that’s not a nice feeling
But out here, on the dance floor
I feel so free, I can’t explain
On the dance floor
I feel so free
Been so lonely, I can’t take anymore
Give me champagne so I can get on the floor tonight
Oh, baby, let’s do it right
As a lilac spring began its perfumed bloom, and Madonna’s lilac and fuchsia-hued ‘Confessions II’ campaign went into overdrive, I felt on the verge of something and at the end of something else. Like most of the Madonna moments of my life, it was pure inspiration, and I drove around for the next few weeks listening to this song, fueling the spring days that unfurled in beautiful form. And this was only an appetizer for what the ‘Confessions II’ album was about to deliver…
I feel so free
I feel so free
I feel so free
SONG: #182: ‘I Feel So Free’ – Spring/Summer 2026
Major sign of my advancing age:
I don’t fuck with bad parking scenes, I just won’t go.
“It was August, and the weather was sometimes stormy and sometimes nice... no matter what happened, it was only time on top of time, since everything is vanity and a chasing after the wind.” – Tove Jansson, ‘The Summer Book’
Even as I slowed my reading down to a few delicious pages a day, the ending of ‘The Summer Book’ came too fast, and now that I’m finished, I feel the sadness that sometimes accompanies the end of an enjoyable read, especially one that dovetails so perfectly and meaningfully with the current season at hand. I wasn’t ready for book, or summer, to finish, but one already has, and one is well on the way.
“Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.” – Tove Jansson, ‘The Summer Book’
Birthdays have become a bit of a mixed bag for me. Outwardly I pretend to love them, crafting carefully-curated wish lists for various friends and family (how easy can gift-giving be with a wish list?) and setting up dinners and lunch dates with the people who matter, but when I really think about it, and when I look back at my history all the way to childhood, I realize I’ve often gotten out of town for my birthday, as if somehow trying to escape from the day. Even when I stay home, I’ll often go out somewhere else like Lake George or the Berkshires or anywhere other than home. In my childhood, I’d request excursions to beaver sanctuaries or Great Escape to get away. It’s a realization that came to me when someone posted online that Virgos always cry on their birthday.
It struck me profoundly that I wasn’t alone in those feelings. Not that I cry every birthday – that is relatively rare – but there’s always been a melancholy undertow to the day, usually a result of disappointing expectations that are only and always in my head, and some careless behavior from others that somehow always manages to manifest on that particular day. And if you can’t get basic decency on your birthday, it does have a way of etching away at your self-worth over the years. (People are going to ask for receipts on this, but I’m done with hurting people with their own truths.)
Slowly, I’ve come to accept this, and I continue to try not to be such a spoiled, whiny brat in the face of all that hurts and stings, and that’s the goal for this and every year that follows. It’s just another day. Whether my birthday happened or not, whether I was here or not, it’s only ever going to be just another day. My life isn’t changing the world in any substantial way – most of our lives don’t. We want to think we matter – we want to think our story is the main story, the only story – but the truth is that we matter no more and no less than anyone else. Some make bigger waves and cause bigger splashes – some do touch history and bend it one way or another, but most of us just don’t matter. That’s a hard truth to face, and one that seems to rear its head whenever my birthday rolls around, re-enforced by the rest of the world on that day in particular. And as bitter as this post might sound or read to you, I no longer harbor bitterness in my heart. A little residual hurt, echoes of confused sorrow, perhaps, but no more bitterness or anger, because that eats away at the soul. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after almost 51 years here, it’s that no one but me is going to protect myself – and happily that’s the one person on whom I can always rely.
South African-born comedian Urzila Carlson is giving the world some badly-needed laughs at a time when general merriment seems to be at an alarming low. Based in New Zealand, Carlson elicits an unabashed joy from her audiences, easily earning this Dazzler of the Day crowning. Check out her website here, where you can find upcoming show information.
Fuzziness is usually the state of my head these days, which doesn’t make it a welcome state for the most part. May this post go a little way toward redeeming the notion of fuzziness, lending it a cute and cuddly aspect through this vibrant flower currently in bloom on our patio.
A fuzzy Friday in mid-August calls for the world to pause and stop spinning, just until you get a gander at these beauties.
