hopelessly devoted to... yes, that's right: Fargo. and Misfit.

Yeah, I know. I don't expect you to understand it right off the bat. I know it sounds strange, right: me, North Dakota, Fargo. 

And it's almost 11pm and I'm writing, and I'm not a nighttime writer generally. Because generally I'd have been asleep for a few hours by now.

But after Day 1 of the Misfit Conference in mind-blowing Fargo, North Dakota, I'm fairly-well buzzing. In fact, if it were possible to levitate, to achieve lift-off just by the power of a mind stuffed with amazing new friends, great conversations, unbelievable food, the brilliant speakers, creativity and inspiration just of Day 1, 

well, fuck: I'd be flying right now.

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stuffing my eyes full of pretty

The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours we live.

  - Richard Jefferies, The Life in the Fields, 1884

That's a quote I scribbled in my Moleskine last week, a quote prominently displayed on the wall of the Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Palace of Legion of Honor in San Francisco.  The timing of seeing that show with its reverence for capital-B Beauty couldn't have been better for me.  How wonderful that in Week 4 of my convalescence, I was witness to so much gorgeousness, gorgeousness I would surely have missed had I been on my regular schedule, too busy with regular chores to take a time out for a saunter through a museum.  The orange in the painting above when you see it in real life, with nothing between you and the canvas, is truly not to be believed -- the most remarkable marigold hue.  I stood in front of it a long time, in awe.

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My borrowed life of weekday leisure

A couple of weeks ago at lunch at the deYoung Museum with my mother-in-law after we’d taken in the so-good Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit, I was struck by how many people there were in the museum restaurant.  The place was packed.  There were tables full of people all around us and outside in the middle of a warm Thursday, and not all of them retirees, a din of happy voices rising.  People my age and younger, too, all at a museum in the middle of a weekday.  I asked myself my usual question at times like these:

Who are these people who get to do this?

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