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For those of you disinclined to reading novels at the present time, this is a self-portrait at Cascade Creek in Yosemite--one of the most beautiful waterfalls I've ever seen. A whole bunch of yellow-gold creeks come together and tumble over the mountain. Absolutely unbelievably beautiful.


Here are 100 factoids:

1. I am most at peace when outside. Perhaps I’m horribly spoiled by living in Oregon, surrounded by some of the most beautiful places in the world. The only thing we don’t have here is San Francisco.

2. 4:00am is probably my favorite time of day. I usually wake up, look at the clock, realize I still have a few hours to sleep, roll over, get extremely comfy, and drift back to sleep. It’s great. It’s an odd sense of freedom.

3. I love to bake. It’s like a full-on recreational sport for me, involving tons of sticky, disgusting dishes piled everywhere. My favorite thing to bake is cinnamon rolls, which sometimes turn out perfect, and sometimes turn out as sugary little puddles. Oh well. Just need to bake more.

4. I know where Robin Williams and Nicolas Cage live in San Francisco. Robin has a pet dinosaur and Nick’s driveway gets blocked a lot. I want to go to a party on Robin’s back porch.

5. When I was less than five-years-old, I fell off a horse and landed in a pile of poo. It wasn’t my fault. The person leading me around wasn’t paying attention and a branch swept me right out of the saddle. I still remember looking at myself in the mirror back at the barn and bursting into tears because I had brown goo all over.

6. When I was 8-years-old, I had a dream about being a princess in a forest and having a prince named Eric arrive and play at swords with me. It’s still the most vivid dream I’ve ever had.

7. I have a savings account for a trip to New Zealand before I turn 30. I put money in every month. I intend to backpack, trek to the Milford Sound, stay in a bed and breakfast or two, and enjoy my freedom to the fullest.

8. When I was five, I asked my dad for a glass of water and he brought back a glass of white wine for himself along with my water. Not looking at anything in particular, I took a nice swig of the wine (most of which ended up across the room, on the floor, and probably in my sister's face).

9. I have a half sister. We are almost nothing alike. Beyond the superficial facts of me being seven inches taller and feeling like a gangly giant when around her, we seem to see the world in completely different lights. I wish we were closer.

10. I wear comfortable shoes. Always. I don’t own very many shoes, and believe they should last a long time. Why be uncomfortable in something so basic as walking? I like my Danskos a lot, and most of my hiking shoes are Montrails.

11. I have had three marriage proposals, though one barely counts since I was six and the ring was plastic. I’m not sure the others count overly much either, considering I was around the age of 16-19.

12. I cried when I found out my mom was the tooth fairy, but pretended I hadn't figured it out so I'd still get My Little Ponies.

13. I, at one time, owned 167 My Little Ponies.

14. I believe that the bottom of a waterfall is paradise. The top is great, but I feel like my insides are lit on fire (in a good way) when I stand, laughing, blasted with water and the sheer force of nature. I never seem to care how wet or cold I get--at least, not until I’m headed back to the car or camp and start to feel really, truly cold. Then I can get grumpy.

15. My three favorite waterfalls are Murhut Falls, Comet Falls and Lower Oneonta. This will probably change over the course of my life as I meet more of these beautiful ladies.

16. I once stole a thread bobbin and a button (of all things) from a store, just to see if I could do it. Turns out, I could. I also cried myself to sleep about a dozen times before I fessed up to my mother who laughed and made me take it back.

17. My most expensive piece of furniture is my couch. I have a huge love affair with my couch, probably because I have a huge love affair with pillows and the back is entirely loose pillows.

18. I run and bike as primary forms of exercise. I find them liberating, and will do them even on cold, wet nights with a head lamp if needed. I hate running in the heat, but only a little less than I hate "gerbiling" (running on a treadmill). Both tend to zap all the fun out of it.

19. I also do Pilates, and go to a kickboxing class almost every Saturday morning (my absolute favorite, though the fact that I like it at all seems to perplex people). Rock climbing is great, too. I would like to be really good at it.

20. One of my best friends and I have dated the same guy. Twice. Bear in mind that one guy lived in New York and the other in Wisconsin. And she lived in the Midwest and I lived here. Confusing, no?

21. I used to have a huge crush on Nick Carter, but I got over it once I discovered that we probably

For
Carl Solomon


I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed wi