The mattress test is unique to every individual. 'No one can tell you what is soft and what is softer or firmer' says Don. 'Everyone will say something different.'

Then I saw tissue float atop water without getting wet, and temperpetic foam that had you sinking all night long. "Nasa technology." Bruce said.

That's that mattress man.

My grandmother said that the sound of a train whistle is the saddest sound, but then she never heard the sound of a man putting his pants on in the dark.

“So, if you could choose the next life, how would you be?”
“I would be a cat”
‘You can’t choose a cat”
“Why can’t I choose a cat?”
“You just can’t. That’s going backwards. You can’t choose a cat.”

It has been said, that a woman cannot attain. Reflecting on the above conversation, I can see why I, a child, could not.

It has also been said that we are too caught up in the habit of our emotions to understand a god damned thing of what is going on…

It was the summer of too many years ago to remember, that an old wild college girlfriend of mine in New York and I decided to hook up over the summer and unwind in one of those decadent all inclusive resorts where you sit around like beached whales consuming everything you can get your hands on, and baking it in almost black and burnt under the sun.

Immediately after arriving at the hotel, we changed into our tankinis, jumped into the pool, and paddled our way up to the bar to float a few and survey the other right-lucky bastards. All of the other pool-goers seemed to have very little in common with us; they were speaking german, or were twice our age, or really, really on honeymoon. Except for Mike, who leaned in over the bar and chatted up the bartender. Marci could make conversation like any good cotillion-guided Texas born lady, and so where my memory drops off, I can only assume that she pulled up to him first. That, and she could sniff out a suitcase full of drugs on two acres faster than a Narc’s dog on Ritalin.

We hit the cache. He was visiting from Boulder, Colorado but arrived in Mexico after having won a dirtbike competition that afforded him this trip all-expense paid, with wads of hundreds seeping out from between his fingers. He’d been there for weeks, and planned on being there for weeks more, and aside from that, there was no nailing down really what he did. Now, as a nearly full blown cynical adult, I can call that all out as bullshit.

But… the twenties are such a magical time… So magical that we could slide off a plane into Mexico, and the first American we exchange names with has more flavors of dope than could fill up a whole pharmacist’s final exam.

Two days into the wave, he and I sat side by side holding hands like we’d known each other a long time. We’d positioned ourselves to sit in the pool chairs facing the sun setting into the ocean lined horizon, and he orchestrated the colors of it by waving his fingertips at the sky. I broke away to slide into the body of the hairy german man across the pool. My belly felt swollen and warm, my legs walked me in a way that made my whole body waddle, and I enjoyed the feeling of the sun on my chest without a bikini top for the first time in my whole life.

I snapped myself out of him, to look back at Mike who’s eyes were huge and smiling.

Marci walked up, and I stood up to meet her prickly and demanding presence. I pushed her back out into the resort, and nestled back into the pool chair beside Mike. A couple we had met, approached us wearing clothes from the night before, and told us that they had come over to meet us at the same exact time they had figured they had met us the night previous. It had become their experiment to try to recreate the exact same experience that we had had the evening before.

That the resort itself had experienced every night before since the day it began.

I was miserable. I was furious for Marci’s selfish manipulation, furious for the Plano couple’s obvious disregard for maintaining the proper time space continuum, and furious Mike’s taking control of the sunset, and furious for the entire insight. Mike wanted me to be excited about the experience, as excited as he was to have it and to share it, but I was miserable and frozen and I had the fear. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t get up from my chair.

This weekend, I watched “What the Bleep Do We Know?!” I wanted to cry.

What issues will the next pope face?

The new pope will face large challenges in overcoming the gap between the industrial and technological based flocks. Old world Catholicism is struggling to translate into what the world is learning through modern physics. We need leadership that can synthesize Catholic dogma and quantam physics, the same way St. Thomas Acquinas did for Neo-Platonism. Believing that God has a white beard and sits atop white fluffy clouds getting emotional about what is going on in the world is not a myth that works anymore.

“Eighty five is old.” is all my boyfriend and his mother could muster up.

But it isn’t old when you are supposed to be as eternal as Jerusalem, St. Michael the Archangel, or the Bible itself. All of the women in my family loved him, and hung his picture on their night tables and dresser mirrors like a Teen Beat magazine pin-up. His face was good luck, his cross-like motioning made everything you carried instant relics. He could speak as many languages as God, and he was so cute and little that you could wrap him up in a dusty tissue and take him with you where ever you went. As a teenager, I’d even heard a rumor once that he wore White Doc Martins commissioned by the Swiss Guard and was actually very cool in real life. When asked ‘What is your favorite food?’, the Pope’s response was ‘Whatever I am eating at the time.’ How cool is that? All of this, from a Polock born with a girl’s name.