things animal, vegetable and mineral, my belly button, politics, knitting, poverty, sustainable economic development, community housing land trusts, chocolate, food of all kinds really, people, stripey socks, laughter, singing badly, balancing on the heels of my shoes, books, sushi, economics, and sea life. Honesty.
Let me tell you about the Hmong. Not that I know anything about the Hmong, but really that is neither here nor there. The Hmong believe that your placenta is the most perfect jacket you will ever wear. No really, stay with me for a minute - I'm not going into crazy hippy feminist land. So they bury it (traditionally under the dirt floor of the hut where you were born. And the thing is is that when you die you need your placenta to protect you on your travels in the world after death. So you must travel back to your birth hut, fetch your placenta, and put it on. But along the way you have to retrace your earthly travels in reverse. You have to trace your life backwards in order to gain protection after death.
Now you can't tell me that isn't beautiful. It is a reckoning and a joy, a balance.
livers of lives, dancers, scientists, storytellers, acrobats, carnies and low flyers,
outliers
drinkers, swingers, natural food eaters
anyone who is fascintaed by a brush stroke,
or heat stroke
fairy tale makers, and builders of dreams, people who really know how to use a hammer, or a camera
loretta lynn, etta james, fiona apple, rufus wainright, sister martha too, tom waits, bill- er mike doughty, kinks, crooked fingers, cyndi lauper, ani, kirsty maccoll, pouges, smiths, chopin, most things really, except for the things I hate.
Y tu mama tambien, eternal sunshine, unbearable lightness of being, lovers of the arctic circle, born yesterday, cat on a hot tin roof, elizabeth, gross point blank, say anything, the princess and the warrior.
no thanks
Unbearable lightness of being, book of laughter and forgetting, so the wind won't blow it all away, the amazing adventures of cavalier and klay, most beautiful woman in town, one hundred years of solitude, grapes of wrath, a million little pieces, justice is conflict, three seconds of eternity, east of eden, master and margarita, little dee, you get the drift... I'm really a goth at heart.
I am my own goddamn hero. Or protagonist at least, I am an american after all.