Tonight's Zelda's Inferno exercise: riffing off a phrase from Kurt Vonneygut, "If this isn't pleasant, I don't know what is." Mine sort of turned into a list poem, but I think it has some potential.
"...all times I have enjoyed / Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those / That loved me, and alone..." -- Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Once I sat with a friend on his back porch, drinking crazy ginsing liquor and smoking cigars and laughing late into the night.
Once I danced around a bonfire and handed out golden apples to women, saying to each, "For the prettiest one"
Once I drove home in the light of dawn after playing music at a party, playing all night, people coming into the room where I was to hear, the first time I drew an audience of strangers
Once I stood on the beach with my fellow karate-ka in a thunderstorm - and this was stupid - but we trained in the rain, punching and kicking and throwing each other to the sand, and shouting our kiai to challenge the thunder
Once I sat in a hammock in the woods and strummed my guitar, making up nonsense songs
Once I lay all morning with my lover sleeping beside me, not feeling the need to be anywhere else
Once I shared a tea of strange mushrooms with some good friends, and we drummed and chanted and hugged trees
Once I lay out under the stars on the side of a mountain and watched rocks from space burn in the air
Once I took a woman I barely knew on a long drive just so she could get out of the city, we drove out to a place in the suburbs where the road runs through a park and we rolled down the windows and she shouted into the fresh air of the summer night
Once I lay in the snow and flapped my arms and carved winged angel shapes into the icy parchment, and as I looked up the clouds spoke to me
Once I sat in a park in Osaka in the peak of the cherry blossoms and played the shakuhachi flute (badly) and watched the petals fall
Once I rode with my best friend four hours to the beach, with the windows down and the music going and companionship without limits, the American myth of the open road in full force