Like children cavort under chairs

Don’t fret the whimsicality of strangers;
songs hummed below the breath
are songs waiting to be sung.

It’s irresponsible to be scared to fall in love.

That’s my random italicization of the day, for what it’s worth. A lot of undercurrent in my brainwaves lately, thoughts below the thoughts I know I’m thinking and I’ve got to dig …. A cough has welled up in my throat, and today my stomach and chest are tired from exertion. If I hold the cough in, my lungs start to spasm, as though there might really be a frog in there, hopping against the inside of my neck. Now that my workweek has begun, I’ve little patience for being sick. Curse our fragile shells. Sometimes the saddest I get is when I think of human frailty. The image that springs to mind is Marianne, with her birdlike arms that will not straighten, bones light as feathers; but who has a spiritual and mental framework equivalent to a mountain of steel girders: immovable. Much as a seer loses eyes and gains a whole new sight, she lost her body (which she had cherished, being a dancer) and gained a new structure to live in.

–

Ain’t no feather like a feather feather feather ’cause the feather feather feather don’t stop.

Ahhh, Webley. As far as musicians go, he’s the perfect madman for our age, strung out on music and stories and intrinsically imbued with some sort of positive glow so you can’t help but feel like you know him, and might somehow be related to him. Saturday was his last concert of the year, in which he goes through a death process (which changes every year). This time around, we strolled from the Town Hall (where the concert was held) to the park a block down. In a four-stage process (Balloon, Feather, Boat, Tomato), he was divested of his hat, his accordian, his clothes, and finally his hair. The whole ceremony involved a lot of walking in a crowd of about a thousand people, in a park in Seattle at midnight, and occasionally stopping to watch the next spectacle (his accordian was sawed in half by a giant feather with a knife on the end and hung from a tree; his hat was attached to a small hot-air balloon and let loose to roam the Seattle sky; his clothes were burned in a fairly large, paper boat; and his hair was cut by the four maidens, one of which attended him for each stage of the process). It was a moving process. After his clothes and hair and hat and accordian were all gone, he was ushered into a little car and drove off with his four death-maidens. Later, they drove by again; legs sticking out the windows and at least one, probably two, of the maidens on top of Jason Webley in what looked like a very passionate attempt to remind him he wasn’t really dead.

The world needs more madmen.

Vote for me for President and I promise that I’ll do my best to make the United States of America at least 13% less sane. Oh, and free tacos for everyone. Mmmmmm, tacos….