Reflection is a Flower of the Mind

You could buy this Estes for $350k. I think it would be
worth the outlay to be able to study it regularly.

We marked the end of our first week on the cove taking David's brother's family down the coast to the big city so they could catch an early flight the next morning. I got all dressed up and wore sparkly shoes. There were proudly gender bending youth holding hands on the sidewalk while an osprey cruised overhead. Outside the place we had dinner, a tattooed, bearded guy in a trucker's hat sipped beer from a can while my niece pet his Dachsund named Zelda.

You can't really see my sparkly shoes, but I am beautiful.

One of the things I really like about my brother in law is that the two things he is most interested in exploring in a new city are food and the art museum. At the PMA we found a special exhibit of paintings by Richard Estes, a photorealist of whom I was vaguely aware. His cityscapes are full of reflective panes of glass and strange angles that allow the viewer to see inside and outside buildings and beyond the frame of the paintings. And he uses random juxtapositions of signs and advertising and other word-bearing objects to make subtly ironic jokes ... or perhaps my apeish insistence on pattern recognition makes me find these jokes on my own. I found his images vertiginous in a way that a mere photograph never could be, and I will be thinking of his paintings for a long time. Also at PMA was a sculpture called "Raising Cairn" by Celeste Roberge that was so uncannily upsetting to me that I fled nearly in tears the window that made it visible to me.

Reading:  I am determined to finish American Gods today. 150 pages to go.

Writing: Thinking ... Talking to David about his writing ...

Dinner: We ate at a place off Longfellow Square. The food was very good, the service was middling, the wine list was great, and the cocktails were hit and miss (very good Corpse Reviver, middling Caiprinhas). The highlight of the meal was the warm goat cheese salad, which was, I think, the very best salad I have ever eaten. The paella with local shellfish and house-made chorizo was also notable.

Soundtrack: My young niece really liked the Everything But The Girl compilation that was playing when we drove to the salt pond near New Harbor on Friday. Twenty years ago at this time of year, David and I were falling in love to Amplified Heart.

Random thing: On the rocks, my favorite rocks, one of my favorite places in the world, today, I saw the two smallest spiders I have ever seen. The first had a shiny spherical black body the size of a poppy seed and tiny, barely visible bright red legs. The second was shaggy and gray and the size of half a short grain of rice.