Sometimes you have to...

Chalk everything up to experience....





And run away...


Find Sunshine in places you'd never think to look...

Sometimes,
you just have to
Pretend....

Hitchin' a ride....

I believe in Peace and Love...
Everything in between is just a roadtrip....

I would have sent postcards.
I swear.
But I didn't take stamps, and
after a while,
I was sure if I just whispered to the wind....
scribbled breadcrumbs on lonely dirt roads,
left love beads in unexpected places....

You'd know....


It feels good to be home again...

To unpack my imagination
and toss it wildly on the floor,
next to crumpled blue jeans and empty cigarette packs.
To wake up to it the next morning....

Yeah, It feels good to be home again....

Let the Peace and Love begin....

Empty Closet

It was lousy Chinese take-out food, the noodles old and dry, but I was famished, hungry from accidentally fasting.....I twirled the lo mein with the plastic spork, and made little piles of soy stained snakes on my plate. The fortune cookie lay in it's plastic bubble, all perfect, and most probably stale, but keeping it's secret until dessert. I don't eat fortune cookies.


But I like the sound of snapping them open. One second in the life of a giant Rice Krispie. And I like the way the words fall out, perfectly printed in blue ink, and randomly selected from a box of a 1000 other fortunes, to land in my world. "The night life is yours".....


45 minutes later I was piled in the back of an SUV, heading for the double doors. It's homecoming night, every night, their faces smiling, up and down. "Glad to see you, Nice to meet you, How's about a beer, dear?" Friends. Lined up in a lazy circle around the bar. We play musical chairs. Where you are when the music stops, nobody knows. Telephone Tag. Stories passing between us like a party reefer, eyes growing bigger each time it's told until the truth is just a glowing ember in a pile of ashes. And we all know it. Throw our heads back and laugh. We'll fix it next time the story comes along....


"The night life is yours".....
Here in this windowless Friday night world, we leave our 9 to 5's, our coats, and our ghosts at the door. And for just a few hours...

we're free.....

And we all fall down......

We really did go to the beach, I swear. We just spent a lot of time at the Tiki Bar. I mean, they put it right there. We had to trip over it to get to the ocean! So as soon as we emptied the cars, hurling stuff through the motel room doors, we trapsed our little fannies down to the bar and parked it there. "Woo, hoo! We're at the beach"!

The deck teeters over the edge of a steep dune, haphazardly reconstructed by the hurricanes, and the wind howls through the railings at night, making the tarps billow, the ceiling fans sway, and the bartender's tips, if not scooped up right away, blow to the next lucky recipient. Dollar bills scurry across the splintered planks like tiny runaway rodents and float like lost kites in the sky. Little kids, whose parents, hours ago trusted them to the sandbox, chase them in the neon night.

And so we danced. In the sprinkler mist piped in like Musac from the Tiki Bar roof. Barefooted with beers in our hands. Over and over again. We danced with each other, with strangers, with lovers, and hubbies. We danced with other peoples hubbie's, bikers, and the boys from The Brotherhood of Death (you know who you are.....precious skin headed just-turned-21 friends) We danced til one of us had splinters in her toes and one landed on her rump, feet to the sky. We danced until I fell off of a perfectly good chair, cracking a rib, and got up to do it again. (Kind of like when the music stops, the safety bar rises and you have to exit the Tilt-a-Twirl and walk on perfectly flat earth again....Just another day at The Fair!)

We danced until we were silly......

Enough to do other silly things... To roll down the dunes, into high tide, biting the sand straight from the ocean's lips. To give out our email addresses to people we wouldn't give our names to.

Sometimes you have to runaway.
To do what you really want to do.
To heal.
To find the reason.

June 18th, 2007.....
Report from the "he's so handsome" Doctor......

What have you been doing, Kim?
You went to the beach?"

yeah, I did.
And oh, yeah, I drank beer.....

Come here and give me a hug.

and then go do it again....

You're in remission!


Feel the Love......

Tequila Sunrises and other shots.....

5:34 A.M......

Mad cats spitting over chicken bones owned the abandoned Tiki Deck. Their Halloween silhouettes arched and tiptoed across the splintered planks, smiling with greasy lips and staring at me with liquid eyes. I mimicked them. Arched my back and tippy-toed past their rheumy faces, past the early morning stench of Friday night beer bottles....

And dove..... feet first,

fanny next, over the mountainous sand dune, onlto the cold wet sand, bulldozed flat by a midnight tide....

The sleepy pink sky flirtatiously batted her eyes and golden streaks of her mascara rained onto the the glassy sea.

"Good Morning Sunshine".....I whispered.....

"I've come to find peace"......

And then I ran.....in the cold coquina laced sand. Barefooted and free.

At the frothy water's edge, I paused to twirl, to point my toes, to be five years old again and was greeted by myself, a mermaid ghost doing water ballet in the mirror on the thin morning tide. I smiled at my own reflection until she was swept out to sea...

Mounds of blackened sea weed littered the shoreline - dividing the hard cold surface of the morning from the soft sugar dunes of the night. I lifted a foot and sent a tangled mossy pile of it flying....watched as a bridal bouquet of barnacles, treasure shells and bottle caps freed themselves from the knotty web in flight.....

A few more steps and.....

Half buried and half alive, a billowing orange blob lay breathing, exposed and then hiding again with each lick of the waves. It wallowed, quietly gurgling and then gasping. It's lungs filled with water, and then it lay breathless and empty again. I crouched near, but not too close. And then with one steamroller roar, the ocean flipped it on it's belly....

"I'D RATHER BE IN BED"

Giant letters tattoed on it's fluorescent chest.

I drug it's water logged ugliness to safety, into the arms of the Sun. Lay it, flattened, on a mound of sand just high enough to be an island.....

I salute you, sweet stranger,

wearing those dollar-store words....

And once here,

flinging them off in a fit of freedom......

Because,

of course,

there's no place anyone would rather be...

Than here........

Take my hand.....

We're doing it....



Bailing.....
Throwing it all in the back of the car and driving off...



May seven sunsets and seven sunrises.... be blessed....

With perfect strangers we fall in love with...
Ice cold bar beers...
Spicy chicken wings...
Periwinkle soup ,
Barefoot sandals,
Bloody Marys,
Grafitti in the sand.....
Band-aid tattoos,
Found treasures...
Moonlit nights and the cat that jumped over them,
Coolers full of melting ice,
Salty white sheets covered in sand,
A margarita now and then,
Frosty window units dripping through the night,
Sunburns that feel good....
Rock and roll laughter....
Slow dancing to fast songs...
Spooky seawall stories...
And the yellow butterfly.......

Clink!
Here's to getting the days and nights mixed up...



For seven days and seven nights!



Feel the love.......