Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Beauty, Tin Snips, and Heart-Broken Me



Running to work on the beautiful W & OD. At last, with fists of fern and sumac and a tuft of the Japanese knotweed with its navy blue berries and its stem full of backward teeth sawing my palm, I got to work in Reston and had a reborrative sluice in our building's clean and roomy and biker-friendly shower, with its little fold-down wooden slat seat like a sauna for all your bottles and balms, and was drying my hair - my old, spidery, webby, haunted, hemp-hank Bedraggle ...sigh...Poor, old, Hemp-Hank...when...

There I am. All adrip and I fire up the Travel Air 1800, and am fluffing and poofing gamely, and curling with an Encouraging Lift for a Youthful and Flirty Wave - all of which is akin to yanking on the armrests to keep the 747 in the air, but I'm beaming bravely and exclaiming heartening things like, "Wow! Burt's Bees Organic Green Tea and Fennel Seed Shampoo! We are glossy, richly foaming, and we smell great!"

So the first floor Ladies's Room at 1900 Campus Commons is drenched in fennel steam and all the while am whipping around with my little blue fanny-packable hairbrush....

But the Serpent was indeed among us. And lull me she did, that pretty blue brush, and wrapped me in clouds of Green Tea and Fennel Seed making me beam like an idiot as we merrilied along - the Travel Air 1800 roaring like a Harley on a mountain curve, buffeting me with a blast like the ginger and nutmeg-scented winds baked out of the hill grasses above Santa Barbara, and I'm singing a Camera Obscura .

"Hey! Lloyd...I'm ready to be heartbroken..." I croon (pretty loud, really) through the roar, sweeping up a magnificent Farrah-y hanks, swathed in scarves of black currant and jewel weed extract, and I switch 'er on High and I'm really singing now: "Cuz I can't see further than my own nose at the moment!.." And Lloyd and I are loping in long, tress-swinging, brown-legged lopes over sand that glitters like sugar - just like me - or smashed glass. Glittering like Me and Santa Barbara. And we are both the color of Demerara sugar.

So, all of us are swinging and loping and gleaming and we smell delicious and we're ready to be heart-broken, when goddammit that vicious little blue hair brush whips around and cleaves itself to the side of my head like a lamprey with its rasp-toothed suckering mouth parts, and would not come loose.

And I had to put on a shirt with one hand and go across the hall to the HV/AC guy who cut it out with tin snips. Now, when I see him in the hall, he pretends it never happened.

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