It would be nice to watch a half-gallon of gold auto body paint slowly pour onto a clean, glossy, white Plexiglas floor. It would have to be poured from a height of no more than, say, 18 inches because much higher would cause the paint to splatter, which would distract from its visual serenity. Gold paint pours well. It's incredibly viscous, and it isn’t a pure color so the paint forms small oil slicks and shadows as it folds over itself. Then, gradually and with the assistance of gravity, the shadows melt away.

I was picturing this exact scenario in my head, just now, as I sometimes do, and it was really very gratifying. Is this the kind of thing people think about when they’re asked by their yoga teachers or kooky therapists to breathe in streams of golden light? I hope not because I never fancied myself a golden light breather waiting to happen.

Maybe I’ve been locked inside the city for so long that I’ve started to think about the various ways man-made plastics and computer lights and cleaning fluids can imitate some of the more enjoyable aspects of nature. Like a white ceramic dinner plate dropped from a rooftop, hitting the pavement flush on its bottom and then exploding—sending hundred of white fragments radiating out from a single point. (That’s Eddie Bauer Home’s equivalent of a very still, sunny winter day splintered by the sound of an ice sheet breaking away and slipping from a gabled roof.) Or my table lamp as sunlight filtered through a mushroom. Or, if I lie on my stomach against my plank wood floor, with all its imperfections pressing into my skin, it feels like the deck of an old ship. And if you close your eyes you can sort of feel the earth shift a bit, like wind moving sails. There’s nothing particularly natural about that, and there’s a lot about it that is patently crazy but, man, does it feel good.

Also, two words that feel really nice to me: endemic and transparency. The former, when I say it; the latter, when I think it.

And while I'm here, a few other things I've appreciated a little more than usual lately:
- Lamp light
- My old Series One TiVo, which I won in a TiVo contest many years ago but recently had to replace with horrible, horrible, miserable and terrible DVR
- Washington State Honey Crisp apples. If you find one, I suggest you eat it. If you find two, give the second one to someone you really love the shit out of.
- A musician named Adem
- Cilantro, and people who really stand behind it
- Managing to keep the weight off and the hair on all these years (not to brag or anything, but lately i've started to really notice what a rare commodity these things are in someone my age. i only wish all of my other age-inappropriate qualities were something to brag about.)
- Friends who know exactly what kind of candy you like
- My pork pie hat (OK. this one is bullshit. i just thought it would be funny to pretend that i've taken to wearing a pork pie hat. i wonder if david cross looks back on his pork pie hat days with fondness or regret.)
- A well-constructed sentence
- And a few things that i'm keeping secret from you