The Road to Hell is a Bowl of Cherries

I had a friend, once, who arranged my refrigerator magnets to say "the road to hell is a bowl of cherries." I saved those nine magnets for years before the tide of progress caused me to through them in the goodwill bin.

Half-way there. Things are falling apart--my car is having electrical problems owing to the fact that the muffler needs new rubber bands so it is hanging on by a thread; the mechanics who last replaced my air-filter used the wrong size, so I have been cruising for the last 13,000 miles with basically no filtration; the #12 fuse keeps blowing up; the battery fell out of my computer this morning.

Mercury retrograde always hits me a few days late and all at once.

Yet all of this is simple and relatively easy to fix and I am here in Ashland, the town of $2.50 cup of coffee (they try to serve me single origin Ethiopian as if I will be please to drink the cardboard dust) and it is beautiful, amazing, and I am happy to be stranded here, if only for hours rather than days.

And, it's September, the air at five this morning was so chill that I had gooseflesh running up and down my arms. I slept with the doors open, under three woolen blankets, listening to the crickets, the creek, the stars moving across the dome of the sky.

Juxtaposed between departure and arrival I dance in this limbo to get comfortable with these feelings of frustration, addiction, emotion. I move into the day fresh as sleep falls from my eyes.