i’m excited this morning, my head filled with various instruments of dissonance…enough that my thoughts blend and twist and delight and disturb me like a favorite My Bloody Valentine track…with enough layers to combine a dirge with elation and compress it all into one long, busy sigh of complicated pleasure.

why so dissonant? my dreamy self will dress soon, in long, protective sleeves. this emotional pacifist will put on some badassery, inside and out, grab my badass best friend and go shoot some guns. hells yeah. we will learn our careful aim and techniques from a Texan, a real ranger, someone with lots of guns. i will shoot at circles or other inanimate targets, haunted by visions and the ghost of an ever-preserved charlie heston. i will fire safely down a range, prepared for the recoil of the gun, and maybe my soul a little. i know i will flinch at least…challenge my ears, my nerves and my gentler sensibilities. and. i. can’t. wait.

mixed emotions can make me ambivalent…or they can thrill me. mixed emotions are the signage that advertise my boundaries for me. sometimes i need to sift through to the firmest emotions and fortify a boundary…and sometimes blow one apart. today i will do the latter in a most literal way. that’s (one of) the funny thing(s) about boundaries…we need to establish protective boundaries, the kinds that teach others how to respect and please and support us in being our best outrageous selves. then we need to turn to our inner gunslinger and blast our way through the boundaries that limit what we think we are entitled to experience in this life.

i love comfort. i’ve kept jeans longer than any job or relationship i’ve ever had…but i bet like me, you feel the beauty and perfection of comforting things most when you come back from somewhere well outside your comfort zone. staying inside that zone decreases the scope of what we think of as possible, as acceptable, as inevitable. comfort zones breed contentment, then boredom, and then either complacency or rebellion. some people find complacency to be a natural, inert state. i find that complacency destroys both my sanity and the refuge of my comfort zones…makes them into dingy, depressing prisons of habit and stunted opportunity. from within those prisons, i can only decide to die or rebel.

so i’m going to go blow some holes through my complacency, renovate my comfort zone, add a piercing rapport to the sound of my rainbows, throw a pinch of gunpowder in for flavor and lay a little heat on my palate. sounds to me like a meal i might wash down with an ice cold mexican beer when it’s all said and done…or maybe some tequila…to flush the lead taste from my mouth and swallow the awkward chunks of these poorly mixed metaphor. wow,  i’m thinking in some seriously strange tasting visuals about guns and alcohol. thank God i’m not driving.