Playa Del Fuego; my favorite shirt; Zelda's exercise: synesthetic descriptions

Posted on: Sun, 10/14/2007 - 21:15 By: Tom Swiss

So last weekend was Playa Del Fuego. Fun but sort of mellow. Nothing really extraordinary to a Starwood veteran - though the naked slip & slide was fun. Also nice hanging out with the Zelda's folks at our camp, I think we did a good job of drawing people in, getting folks involved in our writing exercises.

The big bonfire ("burn", in the lingo) on Saturday night was actually a little disappointing. The fire was nice enough; there were some fire performers, which is cool but I'm getting jaded and not that interested unless they're really good; and there was a little bit of drumming, but not much and not for long. No dancing. I don't see the point in a bonfire without dancing around it in a circle.

But I had a good afterward hanging out at "Whiskey and Whores", a bar theme camp. Met a girl who spun poi, who finally gave me the key to figuring out the three-beat weave; met a few pretty women. which is always a favorite pasttime.(What happens at PDF, stays at PDF, so nothing more to say on that. :-) )

I got my palm read on Sunday night, a woman I was flirting with (see note above) had a friend of hers take a look at me. She told me she'd never seen hands as different as mine before - the idea is that the left hand represents your inheritance or destiny or somesuch, and your right your actual life. Apparently the life line on my right hand is very strong, she said something like "he's figured out the way to be 100 and look 50". So I'll take that, sure...


my favorite shirt

is a red 100% cotton long-sleeved button-down dress shirt off the clearance rack at Kohl's



it's the only red shirt (not counting t-shirts) that I own



one of the first few times I wore it

was during a trip to Japan

I went out to see a friend of mine play jazz



he was wearing a red shirt too

I told him I was reconsidering my relationship with the color red

he said he was too

he used to be a Buddhist mork, so, yeah, sure he was



I don't have a red power tie

(I don't wear ties, except for funerals, court appearances, and other formal solemn occasions)

but sometimes I think this is a power shirt

whenever I wear it I am reminded of and old joke about a pirate captain who wore a red shirt into battle so if he was wounded, the blood wouldn't show

(the punchline involves brown pants)

and I think of Star Trek, original series,

Kirk Spock McCoy and some guy in a red shirt beam down to the planet -

guess who ain't coming back



maybe that's why I don't have many red shirts...


Zelda's Inferno exercise: picking up from PDF, a poem with synesthesia descriptions

A helper to get started - "something you don't understand"

I don't understand this fear

sometimes I wish I could taste it, take a small bite, a nibble, get the sense of it

spit it out, of course, not take it into me but still understand it a little



and it's not that I don't know the taste of fear, I have a rich selection on my spice rack -

fear of failure, fear of dark places, fear of tight spaces, fear of myself,

fear of talking to that pretty girl I've got a crush on, fear of forgetting what's important, fear of becoming the monsters I have fought -



but this taste I can't imagine, this color I can't see, this scent doesn't carry to me

as if we beheld the world with different sense organs



and so I wonder if my seeing green is your hearing F shrarp is his taste of lemon is her touch of old worn velvet against the cheek



if we all even inhabit the same world



i have only isolated reports to go on

bottles for other islands

and I can't tell if the jungles, the trees, small animals, birds, sands, are the same over there

or not