Sleepless Not In Seattle

In Seattle, I slept like the dead (which is not very accurate since technically the dead aren't sleeping).  Let's say I slept very well.  Rain and cold weather kick start the hibernation genes which had just started to shut down before I left.  Seattle reanimated them putting me at their mercy.  Reanimate is a good word choice here because I feel very Zombie when the weather turns dreary.  So maybe better to say I slept like the un-dead.

Anyway.....one of the things I always look foward to when I travel is sleeping in my own bed again.  Ahhh.  I never sleep as well as I do there.  Not last night.  My head was a midnight country carny show that you could see for miles.  All of it centered around the idea of designing and decorating my own chucks.  WTH!?!  Yes, it's a cool idea that I saw in Seattle, but not one that should have kept me up all night.  I must have decorated a dozen pair last night in my head.  Each time I would have to kinda pull the chucks out of my head while the inner child cried and whined.  Then I would sigh and close my eyes to the peaceful blankness inside my head.  Only to find less than five minutes later, that same kid had pulled out a brand new pair of chucks and gone to town on them.  I don't know how many times I went through this same process, but I fell asleep while it was going on.

The first pair was definitely the nerd chucks busting with science stuff.  The unraveling strands of DNA that turned into musical staff, or piano keys, or interlocking celtic vines.  Paramecium.  Cartoons of Einstein with some of my favorite quotes - "Curiosity has its own reason for exisiting" or maybe "Not everything that counts can be counted.  Not everything that can be counted counts" or "Imagination is more important than knowledge" or any number or other phrases that flit through my head and settle onto the constantly morphing shoes.  Or Richard Feynman "Stands at the sea.....wonders at wondering....I".  Yes that's the one.  I love Feynman and this statement is very Yoda-like.  Swirling atoms.  Equations.  Everything I love that is remotely geeky.

Shoes #2 these were more about power and magic.  It all started with the lions and how cool it would be to have them with me all the time.  Full of helpers, totemic abstractions, Reiki symbols......

Shoes #3 these were more about the writing.  Snippets of Wm Carlos Wms,  Poe, Mary Oliver, Carlos Castaneda, Tolkien's elvish script.....

Shoes #4 - the girliest of girly shoes (I know - WTF right??).  Pink chucks with sequins stitched around the perimeter.  Hearts and stars.  Lots of stars.  The shoes then morphing entirely into midnight blue chucks with silver falling stars and constellations.

Shoes #5 - these would have a copy of Houkasi's iconic woodcut The Great Wave Off of Kanagawa.  Just in case you aren't familiar with it by name, that would be the picture at the top of the blog.

Shoes #6 Day of the Dead Shoes full of skulls and flowers and.....

and on and on and on it went.......

I think I was finally able to go to sleep because somewhere in all of that assembly line of shoes, I decided  on the design of the first pair.  I had been plotting some ink for a while.  But I could never quite bring myself to get it.  First of all, I feel like I have enough tats for now.  Secondly, really good tats are a budget buster.  So I imagined putting that design on my shoes instead.  And where it might have worked as an armband, it totally rocks the chucks.  At least one of them.

Now all I have to do is come up with a design for the other one and I will be able to rest peacefully.