evening sunlight

i am relishing every extra minute of sunlight we are gaining every day now. (am i wrong, or is that sentence grammatically incorrect? something about it feels clunky.)

anyway.

oh yes, sunlight. i don't know what it is, but there is something so special about having sunlit evenings. being able to come home from work and eat dinner, go for a ride around the lake, and then stop at sebastian joes for ice cream, come home and it's STILL light outside! amazing.

my housemates and i are yearning for the warmth of spring. personally i can't wait to take the plastic off the windows and air the place out. perhaps i'll plant some plants along the sunny side of the house.

bbqs in our back yard. (which i'm sure our extremely hard-partying yet friendly neighbors will crash. but who cares, it's SUMMER! and there's beer and meat a-plenty for everyone!)

my housemates claim that they are going to put in a horseshoe pit in our back yard. i will be surprised if this happens. but i won't complain if it does. though the sand will surely attact every cat in the area. you wont catch me walking barefoot outside. i tend to be averse to parasites.

music & movies in Loring Park. nothing says summer to me more than sitting on a blanket at dusk in Loring park, sipping homemade sangria from a two-liter pop bottle and swatting away mosquitos, listening to live music and getting ready to watch an old movie. with friends, of course. In my mind, i'll always associate Loring park with the music of Erik Satie. it was around 2002 one july monday and i had gotten off of work early. i had gone and bought a cd at the record shop that my friend who worked there had recommended - Reinbert de Leeuw plays Satie ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Satie-Gnossiennes-Gymnopédies-Sarabandes-ouverture/dp/B0000041DE ) so i went home, changed, made up some potent pseudo-sangria (half a two liter bottle of limeade mixed with one bottle red table wine, and a few good sloshes of brandy), packed a baguette, some cheese, grapes, crackers and headed to Loring park to meet some friends.

it was about a 5 minute walk from my apartment, and when i got there no one was around, so i just staked my claim and sat down, pulled out a book and my sangria and enjoyed myself. well, by the time my friends showed up an hour later, i was pretty well lubricated. we talked some more, watched the band play (it was some african band, if i remember correctly. i remember it because they invited all the little kids in the audience onstage to dance with them. it was quite cute.)

anyway by the time the sun had gone down, and the movie was about to start, everyone had settled in to their blankets with their respective mates. i started to get quite....not really drowsy, but very... contemplative. i took out my cd player and headphones and stuck in the Satie disc and laid back and stared up at the stars.

to this day i can't recall ever having such a trancendent musical experience as i did that night. Satie's music is so delicate, so melancholy, yet so....beautiful and calming. combine that with the star-field filling my vision, and the soft kiss of sangria running through my veins, and i was very nearly completely blissed out. Satie's music spoke to me. it was as if i was hearing the soundtrack to my own dreams, music which i had always heard and felt throughout my entire life. as i lay there looking at the stars, feeling all the humanity around me, the pulsing city, and the humid night air - i felt perfectly of the moment. perhaps you know what i mean? i felt THERE. i could feel exactly where i was in the universe, and it was exactly where i needed to be at that moment. Satie, sangria, stars, loring park, and friends, and the warmth of summer embracing me and telling me that all was ok. we were all going to be ok.

yeah, i can't wait for sunlit evenings.