Our days are numbered.

Another night spent on my porch, drinking High Life and white wine on ice with assorted lady friends and Thad. I whipped up a nice caprese salad! I made fire in the grill but no one would leave the porch to look at it. It was gorgeous.

This was last week, when the biggest problem with my car was NOT the smoke pouring from the hood but the dead battery. Up For Anything flagged down a jazz musician for a jump but he was worried my sick battery would somehow infect his Scion. While attending to the car, an episode of Elimidate broke out on my porch and two ladies kissed a passerby. Which was fine, you know, whatever, but lately I'm craving wholesomeness, sort of how bodies crave foods with the minerals they need, like...Crunchwrap Supremes. I wanted knitting to break out, or sober conversations about God. No time for that, anyway. My car is so broken!

I eventually chased Mulligan down the street and forced him to assist me, an endeavor that paid off for days and days in the following ways:

He took my battery out and charged it for 24 solid hours; cleaned the engine block; I went to his garage sale and got myself a green dress and beige nail polish, a white dress for Cousin, a ruffly dress for Selma, and a chair for Pretty Kelly; I meet the seventh Ms. Mulligan and their dog, Mulligan ("Mully") and three more neighbors: Lisa, Ricky, and Maria. It was a fully Mulligan weekend, and wouldn't you know his workshop is spotless, he's selling ancient carpet samples, she sells Avon, and they have a framed poster of the Irish Declaration of Independence in their garage?

It was a spot of wholesome in a time of...not debauchery, or even unwholesomeness, but that floaty feeling you get sometimes, right, when looking at your life? Mulligan does not float above anything. He's deep in the streets! He is ground level!

Everytime I love something I wonder what it will be like to lose it, and lately, I want to squeeze this damned city SO TIGHT but now is not the time to think about leaving but staying put, ground level--now is for living, and sitting, and riding my bike before the ice takes over.