june 21

outside our apartment there's a space created by the funky geometry of the building. it's mostly covered by an overhang, and i think it's meant to make up for the fact that we're on the first floor and don't have a balcony. there are two couches out there, salvaged from someone's sidewalk, some wood blinds of a sort, a plant of unknown genus, five stumps, and a broom. chuck and i did some arranging and cleaning - the wind currents sweep everything into this furnished corner, and there's a tree with small white flowers that smells faintly of honey and leans over the spot, giving it shade and a sprinkling of nanoblossoms.

they get caught in your hair. if you squeeze one, a little bead of nectar wells up, and you can harvest it with a fingernail and lick it up, and it tastes like a drop of fresh afternoon.

the hammock needed rope to hang it up with, so we sped off to ace hardware, and then to rei, which is perhaps the king of pop outdoors stores. to me it exists only as a catalog, but here it is reality, with walls and shelves of gear that you can't live without. it's all shiny and specialized, and as chuck noted to me, not really real at all. it's pretty and most of it you don't need to enjoy the outdoors unless you intend to bring a nylon version of you living room with you.

they shaved the back of my head cuz aparently it needed it. this is normally a ritual that involves the spontaneous decision to whip out the buzzer, strip me barechested, usually outside when it's cold, and put my hair up in a topknot so that i look like pebbles flintstone. it's always been a girl, too. two different amandas, my mom, and this time cherie. it's fun to have it that short, because people will play with it, which is one of the greater pleasures in life. my little spines ended up everywhere, and i had to take a shower to remove my neandertal layer. someday i'll take the razor to the long mop i've been growing for three years, altho oli would kill me, and my brother would have no comrad defense against our grandparents. there's a picture of my grandfather with long blonde hair, but he says it was a wig, and it was california in the fifties.

chuck and cherie have fallen asleep on the couch, and wayne's finished his set with "love you on the floor". another saturday night lays down to rest.