it was a pleasure to burn

Every time I open the refrigerator, whether it is to get a water or an olive or the baker in my day’s diet coke baker’s dozen, water drips on my head. Every time. It can look like there isn’t dew in sight, like the point of saturation is degrees away, that the molecules couldn’t possibly condense out fast enough to meet strands of my hair, or my eyelash, or my nose. And then it happens. One thick drip.

I’ve been writing all day and don’t have the energy to post something very interesting, but I wanted to get away from the photographs as if they might cover up all of the mess that words, truths and untruths, have caused these many days.

See, the theme of my life is that one drip that doesn’t seem like it’s coming but always does anyway, despite geography, despite the truth of physical conditions. Not all of it is messy. There are some smiles. For example I ran out of vitamins and went to the store to get more One A Day for Women. Only after I got home and took one did I realize that I had purchased One A Day for Active Women over 55. See, that’s a drip in a way, but it still makes me laugh.

Pablo Picasso said that there is nothing more difficult than a line. Some have been able to deal with it or rather rearrange it to make it suit their own need. Pablo certainly did it his way, though he probably never felt as though he could get all the way into the shell and shuck free the emeralds. I think about writers and painters and vitamin buyers, who all try for the line, to avoid the drip. I guess the learning is in the failure sometimes too. When I’m less hopeful, in life and art, I remember what Ray Bradbury said. It was a pleasure to burn.