My brain is scattered in all different directions, fractured moods, worry and love mingling at a terrible and loud party, a party where I don�t know anyone and everyone is doing drugs and I feel dangerous or in danger, I can�t tell which.

Some snatches from the filmstrip of me brain:

1. Student Julie in the last minutes of class, yelling her frustration at me at the course, her face turning blotchy and red and everyone sitting there uncomfortably, not knowing what to say and me, like a kid caught in the act, scared and embarrassed and teetering, fighting the impulse to collapse, to let the blows rain down on my covered head. I think I fooled everyone, I think I seemed cool and collected and reasonable. I hope. Driving home, a frown carved deep into my face, I listened over and over to Otis Redding sing �You Left the Water Running� but I was in that miserable little place beyond tears. And nobody there at the end to say you�re all right, girl and sometimes I need to hear that. Sometimes I feel so damned sorry for myself, don't I. But then Basho curled up next to me outside and the air was cool but not cold and the air was friendly and so and so and so. Here I am, facing another lovely and terrible day.

2. �Keep It Light Enough to Travel� on repeat. The Be Good Tanyas everyone. Get this music. You won't be sorry.

Wound up drunk again on Robson St.
Strange cuz we always agreed
At the start of every evening
That's the last place I wanna be
Coffee drinkers dressed in black with no sugar
They don't give me no respect
They say look her comes another one
And I don't know what they mean yet

And I say
Keep it light enough to travel...
Don't let it all unravel
Keep it light enough to travel

Promise me we won't go into the nightclub
I feel so fucked up when i'm in there
Can't tell the bouncers from the customers
And I don't know which ones I prefer

Promise me we won't go into the nightclub
I really think that it's obscene
What kind of people go to meet people
Someplace they can't be heard or seen

Keep it light enough to travel...
Don't let it all unravel
Keep it light enough to travel

I broke the windows of the logging company
Just to get a little release
I had to throw down my accordion
To get away from the police

And I say
Keep it light enough to travel...
Don't let it all unravel
Keep it light enough to travel

3. From Life of Pi:

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

4. Talismans. From Bathsheba: a homemade hat. Lovely. I wear it around the house and I keen. Oh, I miss her and I miss her handwriting and I miss her voice and I miss her everything. Damn. From Frances and Jeff: a knife. It�s brown and comfortable and weighty in my hand and I rub it like a worry stone. They�s good people. Real good guys, as William Carlos Williams once said about Emily Dickinson.

5. This morning�s summer storm in the midst of winter, in the midst of yucky icky lame stupid I hate you February. Warm and windy and the rain sheeting down so hard even Basho would not go out into it. And now the air is sunny and bright and polished clean as a bright spring. Thank the gods.

I�m filled with joy and misery and you�d think the two would cancel each other out or balance one another or something so that I might arrive at the center of calm. Doesn�t seem to work that way. My brain is a tempest. I don�t know why I was thinking of it, except that this gorgeousness made me want to do a pirouette just now, and so I thought how I loved to dance as a kid and how I loved to play music�I played the violin just for the ritual and smell of rosin. I could never play or dance in front of anyone. I would begin to shake and I would freeze up completely and hide my face. I remember my first ballet class, for which I begged my mumma all winter long, and I was little, maybe four-years-old, and I went there and I hid from the teacher and the other kids. I hid under a coat in the corner and peeked out at the dancers and the teacher in wonder and awe and fear. At home I danced and danced away down in the basement and I learned all the things the teacher showed us but after the second class when I hid out again, the teacher wouldn�t let me come back anymore. But down in the basement all by myself I played the music of the gods and I danced for the friendly one who I talked to all the time. I was closer to grace and to joy and the moral universe then. But I was still scared shitless of being noticed or looked at. Some things never change.

Eh. This too shall pass. Be well my brothers and sisters out there, be well.