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Oh I miss writing.  Here I find myself awake while everything else in the house, excepting crickets & spiders, sleeps peacefully but my mind is good-and-buzzing and for the first time in a long time I want to tap something, probably innocuous & forgettable, out on these keys.

My dad used to say that blogging is good for one's mental health--- I haven't been mentally healthy for a while, then, but I've found myself blogging/journaling in my head for the last year or so. I note to myself in the prettiest words I can dig up the unusual energy of a shopping center parking lot during a momentary power-outage: You almost don't notice, stepping out into the warm mistyness of a September night, that something is amiss --owing, perhaps, to the generator-powered backup lights glowing from the store windows-- but as you step into a darker spot in the pavement and see only the outlines of the hundred parked vehicles, shrubbery, & fellow shoppers as they move with an almost electric anxiousness & excitement, it hits you. It's scary at first, and then that feeling kind of settles over everyone, the one you have when the lights go out at home, "Where's the candles? It's game night." Groups of talkers giggle and huddle closer, encircling some imaginary campfire between Barnes & Noble and Bed, Bath, & Beyond; Skateboarders, barely pushing 13, swish by with a bat-like, sonar-directed trajectory, because the shadows make everything more fun, and I tighten my grip on Eric's arm, not out of fear, but because these heels that looked good at the beginning of the evening now threaten to topple me, and it feels good to know someone's good and steady, no matter how dark it gets.

I have a lot of these little inner musings in retail situations, actually. Gloria Gaynor was belting out "I Will Survive" in Marshall's the other day-- Nice of her to oblige us all as we sorted, through the clearance rack first, of course. Evenly spaced strangers all trying to find something that would look nice, not break the bank, go with that sequined blazer that was, in hindsight, probably a mistake. It was by second verse that I noticed the first backup singer... down the rack in XL, then another a little more brave up in S, and a voice across the way by the pants (size not noted) joined in by the chorus, which seemed oddly well-recieved by every other, quieter, woman in the store. Everyone wants to be brave enough to tell that --whoever-- that they're pretty strong and won't take any guff and want to be pretty much loved. And if one happens to find a knockout sweater that Ralph Lauren wasn't able to sell last season, so much the better.

That's it for now. I'm probably going to slip back into the ether for a long old time, but I had to stretch my brain tonight.