My life lacks adventure right now. Adventure and romance. I have this urge to sit in the woods all night and look at stuff, such as the sky, or to go explore something. Get in the car and drive around looking for neat stuff, or walk through the city. Have a romantic date with my wife or draw some pictures of her or see a stupid action movie with my kid before she leaves for half a year in France. Meet someone new and interesting. See a concert. Have an intelligent conversation. You know, adventure.

I live west of the city so I drive into the sunrise in the morning and into the sunset on my way home. Poor the people who live east of the city and have to look into their rearview mirrors to see that.

They repair the freeway with tar here, when it’s just a small crack, leaving small, narrow strips of tar here and there in the lanes. The lanes are light-grey concrete or asphalt, which although you’d think asphalt was black is actually a medium to light grey all things considered, besides there is no black in nature as I have said before, and the French Impressionists back me up on this.

The strips of tar are shinier than the surrounding road. This morning they were all purple, reflecting the sunrise which was especially extravagant. Nature really outdid itself this morning.

I’m that tar, sometimes. And everything else is everything else.

I was debating with myself whether to go out into the not-so-cold-but-windy and get something to eat at the store down the road, or to just sit in my office and be hungry and shiver because I haven’t gone downstairs to reclaim my heater yet.

If you go outside, you’ll be gone for twenty or thirty minutes, get some fresh air and your co-workers will get used to you being gone and leave you alone for the rest of your lunch break so you can work on that creativity project you started to dislodge your blocks, I said to myself.

But it’s cold out and I’d have to stand up and put on my coat, I replied. It was an actual debate, not a metaphorical one.

Then I checked my wallet and remembered I have no money today and that ended the debate.

Now I think I’ll run downstairs and steal back my heater while my co-worker is away at lunch.

I’m trying to paint.
Sky is hard to paint, for example. As is night, or the time just before sunrise. But even if you can’t paint it right, at least you see it more clearly when you look at it because you’re thinking about how to paint it.
And you notice things like, nothing is ever really black. It’s always some color, actually. Rarely white, too.
Fire is also hard to paint. It’s all like, hold still, goddammit, fire.
Sky is always changing too, but more slowly than fire unless you’re being sucked up a tornado funnel. Another difference is you don’t get as much opportunity to observe fire if you’re lucky.
We had a good chance to observe it at new years at the house of friends when they filled the sterno receptacle under the fondue set wrong and it overflowed and was all, Flame On! and charred our pot and melted our fondue forks.
The kids loved that.
The flames were bluish green and quite transparent with darker cores and danced around.
The sky this morning was grey, but not a single grey, a multitude of greys with a bit of color over by the horizon where the sun was apparently thinking about coming up. And there were feathery bits far off and up high, perhaps rain slashing down. And a variety of clouds, from no clouds to heavy black rain clouds.
And the woods were a nice burnt sienna/ultramarine against that when I drove through the woods. The rain, you might be able to get that with a sort of wash, you know, lots of turpentine in the paint. And the branches against the sky – I’m torn over whether to paint each branch with a small brush, or sort of blur the near-black of the branches into the light grey of the sky there.
And then I round a curve near Vienna and it’s like god is pulling my leg, bright orange sunrise off to the left, massive pink swatches of rain off to the right, all the elements pulled together and for a moment I’m not even trying to imagine how to paint it. And I’m not thinking about how I hurt my wife’s feelings this morning or about how my one daughter is worried how things will go for her in France or how my other daughter has no “off” button.
Sometimes the only thing that saves you are the details. And I wonder how I would paint my family.

Someone here at work has started their new year off on the wrong foot with a dose of bad karma by stealing the space heater I use because space is so cold. Also my window is not well-insulated and it’s drafty here. Also my radiator is anemic.

A little investigation has revealed found the culprit: one of the hot secretaries here. I am told her legs had been getting cold. So, now, the moral dilemma: let her keep the heater and I risk kidney infection and eventually dialysis three times a week, or reclaim my heater and maybe she starts wearing trousers or long skirts instead of miniskirts?

Must meditate on this.