Lessons From the Kissing Booth

Dear everyone,

People keep rolling their eyes at my NO FEELINGS fall 2008 plan, but the fact is that it has been my best idea yet. As a rule, I am barnacled with feelings, and this year has just spackled on layer after layer of crazy and broken and made of health hazards, and frankly that is no fun at all. No Feelings has given me a pass to ignore all of that, because I have to give myself permission to break my own rules, and my waters are the calmest I can remember. This must be what it's like to live with anything but a head full of saturated Dick Tracy colors. Curious.

Curious, but a little boring. Since I just got...well, not quite dumped, but definitely discarded, I've been trying to avoid spilling poison into anyone else's waters, but honestly over the last few years I've developed a bit of a taste for causing trouble. I've been keeping my hands to myself, and my hands are getting restless. So to speak.

I spent most of September living almost entirely off of tomato sandwiches, because my tomato plants turned out to be the greatest tomato plants in the history of the world, so there was no reason to eat anything else. They're almost done for the year, and I will miss them most of all. Other people's tomatoes just won't taste as good. The rest of September was spent running around, as my giant pile of shoes and junk mail, and my end table can all confirm. The end table is covered with flight times and sunglasses and buttons and guitar picks, a giant Jim Beam belt buckle, an unsmoked pack of flavored boutique cigarettes, stickers, and all manner of other flotsam. Clearly, my habit is to walk in the house, take off my shoes, drop my junk mail on top of them, and toss the extra things in my purse on to the end table.

But, you know, fall is here, and the only thing better than fall is spring. And you know what that means. It means soups and Humphrey Bogart, lots and lots of rain, pumpkin carving, dressing like a giraffe for Halloween. Cider, and sweaters, and hiding my hands in your coat pockets. Re-learning how to run without tripping over loose stones, and carrying boxes of bandaids in the backs of our eyes just in case. Waiting for the first walk through a dark filled with the smell of homefires, and then the second.

The economy might be about to turn us all into hobos, but we will be happy and friendly hobos, with our hair full of smoke and our hands full of orange and red leaves, and our face full of smiles.

love,
me