Fire and Nail Polish

Fire and Nail Polish



I took this place in great part because it has a fireplace. So it is early May, the first in fact, and it is still cold and rainy, God damned global warming. Anyhoo, I light the fire every night, and it not only takes the chill and dampness out of the air but gives me something much more. Movement. Life. Burning. Something not stagnating. Indeed, something in constant motion, its nature is to change, to grow, to burn, to feed. Since I was a kid spending weekends in my Grandparents house in Vermont, not far from Mount Snow, I would spend hours watching the fire. The flames, never repeating themselves, constantly licking and reaching upwards. Never a pattern. Fire is life itself, as it should be. Like the ocean, in constant motion, tides in and out and in and out and up and down and water where it shouldn’t be and where it’s not supposed to be and moving always, to please itself. Not governed by anything. I could watch the water forever, I have always been drawn to fire and water, but for the last ten some odd years I can’t remember the last time I took it upon myself to go to the beach, which is two minutes away, (except on the weekends, when Old Greenwich becomes the fucking Hamptons), I can’t remember in recent history when I prioritized what I have always known as a return for me to peace and harmony. Why? What happened? I took the kids to the beach on the weekends feeling like I was not a member of this club but a visitor on someone else’s account. But I GREW UP THERE. I smoked hash every day on that beach, and I should feel like it’s mine. It is mine. It is not theirs, those yuppy scum clogging the tiny concession stand with their impatient attitude directed with contempt and palpable disapproval verging on hate at the poor high school kids just learning about having a job, something these rich fucks don’t instill in their BMW spawn. And here on this beach, once my sacred land, because it sits on the sea, and because it raised me, as I traversed it’s trails in my acid induced un-reality/reality, grasping for life on a deadwood walking stick, thinking of everything, feeling everything, but mostly absorbing the essence of the earth, the reverence of it, the completeness of it for me as a human visitor to it’s timeless truth….these beasts of consumer burden made me feel shame here because I didn’t make enough money.
I blame myself for letting them get to me. I will never make that mistake again. That’s my water, my trails, my lost deer looking for some scrap of undeveloped land, sometimes swimming to their death in hopes of finding it.
I would go with them now, into the water, to certain death, rather than staying on these tainted shores.
Let us swim away dear deer, away from the talk of Luis Vitton and pedicures.