Fully Integrated

I'm participating in Reverb10, and this post is in response to a prompt from author Patrick Reynolds: Body integration. This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn't mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?

I could tell you about my increased pilates training, and how a dedicated effort to strengthen my core has done just that, strengthen my core. About how after a 50-minute work-out with my rock-star trainer, I put my legs up against the wall for the cool-down meditation and because my mind and body are probably so integrated my thoughts are crystal clear, my emotions quickly channeled. I could tell you about long runs in the country, lost in thoughts that empty themselves out, crossing the threshold and letting the endorphins drive.  I could.

The author of this prompt submits a smokin’ hot shirtless photograph of himself for this reflective end-of-year exercise and I think, well yeah, that’ll put me in my body. I’m not sure that this is what the prompt is meant to evoke, although if you snoop around long enough on this guy’s website you'll see that indeed he does use sex to sell his health regime. It must work.

It does.

I’ve been considering this prompt all day and I can’t think of any better way to get to a more cohesive me, alive and present than a first class orgasm.  Of course there's the physical release, but this catalyzes the letting go of something else that seemed so necessary to harbor, except once released, it heightens the pleasure.  Briefly, I touch it: a clarity creeping dangerously close to some kind of universal memory, experienced only in such private passages, a vulnerable stretch of glistening moments that lasts forever in the moment, but is still, in retrospect, fleeting.

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Further Defined

Here's a word I could easily guess at incorrectly.  Barmecidal.

It feels like it could be something that you drink at a bar for medicinal purposes.  It might mean you've been standing at the bar so long that you are slowly killing yourself.  It could mean somebody has been sitting in your corner spot at the bar for so long that it is absolutely within reason to consider homicide to reclaim the prized red stools. 
Or at least manslaughter.    

But it probably means you've been at the bar for so long, too long, that your capacity to estimate the amount of cash you actually have in your pocket is highly distorted, which is why it seems like a good idea, at the time, to buy another round of patxaran. Ya falta menos.

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Cinco de Mojito

This is a day where you're more than certain to hear us whistling our favorite countdown tune: uno de enero, dos de febrero, tres de marzo, quatro abril.  cinco de mayo...where we stop and cheer before June and July get their due.   

Usually, by cinco de mayo it's warm and wonderful, with all things weather hinting fiercely at the arrival of summer and all that portends: full tables on sunny café terraces, the challenge to find empty chairs at Luxembourg garden, empty Velib stations, longer days and later dinners.   By May, the worst of the winter and wetness of spring are behind.  Usually.

Not so today as the wind whipped like a wild thing and forced us to bundle in heavy (though fashionable) coats and scarves and boots.  Oh, the sun gave hope, but offered little warmth.  Summer feels as far away as ever, but for the bags of fresh mint that lay waiting to be mortared and pestled into that hot weather favorite, the mojito.   Nor could we imagine a rosé; drinking the pink today would be like wearing white before Memorial Day.   

Wearing white, of course, reserved not even for the seis de junio - but for our favorite damn day of the year: seis de julio.   Ya falta menos.

Last Call

The saddest time of the night, if you can remember it.