WALL FLOWERS AND COLOURS inspired by OAKHURST LODGE, RIVERSDALE

 YELLOW COAT
A roady song.  I'm a roady and I am writing another song.

I think Joan Baez was the wall flower's Bob Dylan.  No offense to Joan Baez. A Wall flower could sing along. Her diction was better. Elocution was a value.  I flowered on walls.

No one talks about wall flowers these days unless they mean flowers growing on the wall in a basket or a climber.  A barrage of more offensive terms have become familiar. Geek used to be a bad thing, now it's a good thing. No judgment either way, but society morphs. Different values for old connotations emerge all the time.  It all starts in the school yard.  

School is a form of torture.  The classroom is where humiliation, sleep deprivation, lights in your eyes, orders from the bad cop are screamed at you and then you pee your pants. If you react badly to this form of torture they send you to the head who beats you with a stick.  OK. Back in the day. 

The playground is like the prison yard. Alliances are formed.  Some gang into bands and others fight. Only the Jews feel anything for the schmuck in the corner of the yard with no clue how twenty kids get together, choose sides and play a game with invisible rules.  

One just hangs back in wonder.  A nice Jewish girl used to give me her sandwiches made by a food guru and I survived until my last two years. Getting out of there was tangibly close.  The books were the key.   

We didn't have phones or pods to capture our eyes or hide behind.

All the geeks were wall flowers too, back then, only I was not a geek per se. They propped up the walls while the rest popped lolly pops into their mouths hung with a chum. 

So I celebrate geeks.  It took 24 years for me to find Ayn Rand midst frowns of disapproval and disdain. She's an atheist so everything she wrote was dismissed by the Christian world I grew up in, with nuns and no guns. 

And now, the glorious misfits, the geeks, are taking over the world.  Not me. Not so much.  I am a clan mother, a Baba Yaga, with not a slither of political interest except for the interest I have in those who have an interest.  With my new-found (recently, in the last however many years) wisdom of Kabbalah. I know more than I used to when I knew alotalot about everything.   

I only know a smidgen of what there is to know, and what there is to know is illogical and supernal and invisible to the eye.  Laughing.  And they all liked The Little Prince who said "What is important is invisible to the eye."  

They thought it meant love.  It did, but not puppy love.   Gangwar love.  Revolutionary love. Unreasonable love.      

I hope the captured geeks are independent and not being manipulated by wrinkly old men who talk with cigarettes dangling out the side of their mouths, with ease, as if the cigarette were part of their mumbling  Think X Files.  Is it there that the grey smoke rises in an airless room like a serpent? 

On a road trip.  My eyes couldn't stay open.  Stopped at Oakhurst Bed and Breakfast in Riversdale. I have a bed. It's large, white linen, there is a television and a shower; and an air conditioner. I have a bedside lamp that focuses on my book and my body is comfortable.  My driving eyes are wide open now that the road has gone.  As hard as it was to keep them open, it's as hard to keep them shut.  Go figure.

The establishment is surrounded by trees filled with birds, pigeons, and littlies, the wind drives the leaves into a flutter and there are ripples on the blue water pool outside all of which I can spy from my upstairs room window.   

"You need a cigarette," the voice in my head repeats as if it's an airport notification about abandoned baggage, but it's a smoke-free zone.  I've smoked so much I'm all croaky.  I left my toothbrush in the house in the bay and have no toothpaste. 

I snuck down to the dining room and pinched a salt pot. Brushed my teeth with my fingers, gargled with hot salt water after drinking copious cups of coffee. I recommend it. It clears the throat and the teeth feel clean.  A sip of the salty brew took the cramps out of my thighs. 

I have no sleep in me tonight.

Tomorrow I shall rise early, rather than wake up early, since I shall no doubt not sleep at all, which is a blast since my internet voucher is just about to run out and there is nothing but SKY News which is to the news like herbal tea is to filter coffee. (Thank you, Harry)

I like the feel of this establishment.  I could spend a week here.  Since this is Bucket List time, I shall begin to save and do just that.  Come for a week and do all the things to do they offer in the bedside information booklet and see what there is to see.

Joan Baez is here because the song is fabulous.   I used to have it on a tape, (yes, that long ago), and I lost it.  I've only just found it again.

My eyes could not stay open on the road;  now I have a bed I can't keep them shut.

LOVE AND LIGHT