I’m not sure how exactly we ended up here. It involves marriage.  And step uncles and fathers and weird shit I’d rather not delve into.  And less genetically it also involved John spending as long at the Alamo car hire place choosing a Ford Focus as it did to cross the pacific and that was something like 24 hour hours (I forget how many hours exactly because I was watching a lot of movies and we crossed the international dateline at  the point I took several hundred painkillers and passed out watching Clash of the Titans possibly the worst film ever made despite Sam W wearing nothing but a dress in it). But here we are and I’m wearing a mask that I’ve decorated in feathers and glitter and I’m barefoot and the light is glinting through the trees in such a way that it makes you feel like you’re standing at the bottom of a wine glass filled with cabernet sauvignon on a late summer’s evening. And I exhale and want to freeze frame this moment on life. I’m standing in the wild flower garden of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first house in California and I’m watching girls dressed as butterflies lying in the drive dancing with their shadows and having to explain to Lula why she can’t join the party and I’m thinking yes, I’m thinking this is it. This is the most perfect vision of life ever given to me.

Except there’s no babysitter.