10 August 2002: In My Underwear

Saturday, mid-day. But it’s early morning for me; I didn’t get out of bed until 11. Last night I went to the Khan’s house for dinner, hung out until around midnight, came home, mucked about on the internet, and then mucked about with 3D modeling software for hours. Which produced a couple of portraits that I liked enough that I decided it was time to add a gallery of my digital art to this site. So then I mucked about with Dreamweaver, doing that. I got to bed at 6.

We’re having a heat wave here. I’m writing in my underwear. My upstairs neighbors are playing vintage 1950s lounge music, really loud.

Nine days. Dragon Lady will be home in nine days.

If she were here now, I’d have someone to dance to this infernal lounge music with. In my underwear.

A week ago... only a week ago? Yes, a week ago, exactly a week, after spending all afternoon with her, talking and talking and then kissing and kissing... kissing her for the first time and knowing that it would be two long weeks of wistful wanting before the next time ("Is this real?" she asked, and I thought, "Is anything else real?" but I didn’t say it, because her lips were right there and there were better ways to spend the moment)... a week ago, after she went home to pack for Maui, I went to a pleasant little dojo barbecue at Foxfire’s house (mmm... barbecued dojo...), and then went into the City with Grapple, Spry, and others to hear the very best lounge music there is: Pagan Lounge music, as dished out by the World’s Premiere Pagan Lounge Ensemble (actually, the World's Only Pagan Lounge Ensemble), Rosin Coven. Merlin was the opening act.

It had been almost two years since I’d been to a Rosin Coven show; I’m going to make sure that it’s not that long until the next one. The last time I saw them was at Burning Man 2000, one of their daily sunset performances, during the early stages of what proved to be one of the longest, greatest, and most intense acid trips of my life (the one where Bonky, Cygnus, Omega 7, and I got caught by the apocalyptic dust storm out in the middle of the playa... we had this whole Star Wars style fantasy going... Cygnus was costumed as Jabba the Hutt’s alien dancing girl, Bonky and Omega 7 looked like crashlanded rebel pilots with all their high-tech gear, and I, in my robes, was the quintessential Jedi Master, guiding us across the wastes of Tatooine, avoiding the Imperial Stormtroopers in Mos Eisley, and getting us safely back to our base).

But I digress.

At the Rosin Coven show last Saturday, as part of the distinctive Pagan Lounge atmosphere, there was a gypsy fortune-teller giving free tarot readings off in a corner of the sit-and-hang-out area before the show. She gave me the eye from across the room. She looked familiar. She beckoned me over with an eyebrow. It was Madame Zulaka. I had dated her very, very briefly, almost a year ago, shortly before I got together with Vanilla. A couple of nice dates, but we weren’t quite right for each other, and anyway she was still recovering from a recent bad relationship and wasn’t ready to get into anything new yet. We’d parted on warm terms, and immediately lost touch with each other. She looked well on Saturday; much happier than she’d been back then. And I, of course, was glowing, from my afternoon with Dragon Lady. The last time I’d seen Madame Zulaka, I’d done a tarot reading for her: portents of sweeping changes, major growth to come. Now it was her turn to read my cards. Three-card spread, Rider-Waite deck. Wheel of Fortune, Four of Wands, Eight of Cups. Interpretation: I have been riding a wave of serendipity, and now circuits are completing themselves, outstanding karma is being resolved, circles started in the past are coming to their right and proper conclusions. And I should accept how it’s all worked out, and be happy, because it’s good.

The astute observer will have perhaps already noted that my encounter with Madame Zulaka was, itself, a perfect illustration of what the reading was talking about. And indeed, my life has been especially full of such gracefully concluded karmic circles lately. They are beautiful. And many of them concern the resolution of outstanding karma with past lovers. This is part of what I was talking about a few entries ago, when I said that there were "signs and portents" indicating that there was going to be a wonderful new relationship in my life. It first came to my attention with the series of encounters I described in the entry entitled "A Plague of Exes." Since then, there have been other such incidents - some minor, some major. I was going to tell you about a couple of the major ones in this entry, but it’s two o’clock in the afternoon now – time for me to eat breakfast.