I know I’ve seen this feeling before. It’s personified by the face of Jean Luc Picard in “The Inner Light” from Star Trek, and I’m living that face right now.

I have my cheaters on. I’d forgotten how useful sunglasses are when pretending you are not staring.

It’s fun to see what goes on in our new backyard.

We went to Pisa today to see how the efforts were going in keeping the Leaning Tower upright. It’s a big deal here and everyone is pitching in.

We are sitting in the crosshairs of a restaurant: food coming out from the kitchen is the same portal customers are going in to pay their bill. It’s close to chaos but somehow staying on the rails. I love this place.

There are boobs everywhere. I don’t know what the deal is but they are inescapable. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the Italians. But try as I might, I cannot keep my eyes off of them. I have a bit of sympathy for 15 year old boys.

My jury is out on the balance sheet of Christian good vs Christian evil. Given the evil that has come into my life via Christianity, at the moment I have my thumb on the side of the scale that’s says “RUN”.

It’s a funny thing when someone keeps catching your eye. I have a theory. It’s not a one way street: you are also in the eye of the beholden.

There I am, minding my own business, watching fireworks from our balcony. We have the stunning good luck to be able to watch the pyrotechnics celebrating St James Day from our hotel room and they have just started. My anticipation rolls into gleeful laughter, and almost immediately becomes tears streaming down my face. But I’m nowhere near sad. I’m also no where near confused because I know right where I am. This state is very familiar. I just don’t know how I got there

I am sort of delightfully hung-over. I know “delightful” and “hung-over” don’t belong in the same sentence. But there it is. I’m on vacation and the previous night was a ball.

I have an FM music station running in my head continuously. It plays what it wants when it wants. It’s almost a beloved pet to me. Where I go, it follows, humming along quietly in the back ground of my psyche, changing tunes according to some quirky emotional logic or algorithm.

I’m sitting across from the shaman cat lady who is reading my astrological chart. She is an interesting bird, a mixture of seemingly disparate parts. We are in a classically appointed office and she was then probably what I am now in age, early 60’s. Gray hair and glasses. So far, looks are congruent. Then she starts talking about cats.