Nice videos.

The President is not your daddy.

Because the light started being perfect on Monday morning.

If it was Monday, and if it was the light I remember. Because you know I am always mixing up events and properties, switching them, only it’s not mixing them up exactly, they’re just all equidistant in my memory. But this gentle, sweet light that morning just drew me out.

Light that is harsh you don’t want to view too closely, you stand back at the far wall, clear across the room, and look out the windows from fifteen feet away; this morning in question was just the opposite, with a blanket of fog over the river just thin enough so it could still reflect the pink and gold the sunrise stained the clouds with. More fog in the woods and fields, all full of deer. Sweet, gentle light that brings you across the room of your head until you’re right there, face pressed up against the glass of your eyeballs, not wanting to miss a single detail.

Light that says You must remember every single thing. Paint it if you can or take a picture of it or write it down if you like, but remember every little thing.

When I look at the webcam of the Internet’s biggest camgirl, Mt. St. Helens, I am reminded of the harshness of the light where I grew up, because I grew up just a few miles from that mountain. The light there, in the summers, in my memory, was too bright to look at without squinting and drove me far back into my skull.

No one can paint Greece. Correct me if I’m wrong. The say the light there is perfect, and it is bright and clear and unique, but I’m wondering whether the idea of it being perfect is influenced by it being Greek, as in, Here we are! Greece! Naked beaches! I’m going to try ouzo again, only not get sick this time! But if the light really were perfect, you’d think you could paint it.

Although, that reminds me of one sunrise many years ago: Alpha’s face golden sitting on a dock somewhere on Crete. Not just her face, the rest of my then-girlfriend too: faded blue teeshirt and jeans, long straight blond hair, golden in the sunrise, the most perfect moment I’ve ever seen. Even if I could paint, I’d still leave that image alone. Although, here I am, trying to describe it. We slept on the beach, which was made of stones and filthy with tar, and woke to that sunrise.

Maybe I just have a thing about sunrises, except this light here has been perfect ever since Monday. The sunsets driving home are just as fine, and the light in between as well: right there, face pressed up against my eyeballs is where you’ll find me. Taking it all in.

You forgot Poland.

[Probably distracted by Peacedividend.]

Jeong-A is not a charming globe-trotting Korean lawyer who just quit her job in Hong Kong, but is actually a middle-aged Australian professor of semantics whose wife left him because he spends all his time chatting on the computer with what he thinks are young women, but are in fact middle-aged men like himself posing as young women.

When I was small and my little brother even smaller, he ate some thyroid pills my grandmother had left out on a counter at her house. We got to watch him get his stomach pumped at the hospital, through a tube stuck down his nose. A nun spoke to me, which was a bit frightening as I wasn’t used to nuns.

So I should have expected this to happen: I left my Irish traditional music CDs out and now Gamma has discovered her love for traditional Irish music. No more Xtina or Shakira for her. There’s a stack of CDs of jigs and reels and slow airs in the kitchen now, next to the CD player.

I come home rather late from work nowadays so it’s mostly over by the time I get home, but sometimes Alpha is still hanging from the ceiling by her finger- and toenails. The only mitigating detail in this for Alpha is that Gamma seems to have good taste, and plays the better-quality stuff.