Potpourri:  a mixture of dried flower petals,  herbs, and other plant materials, blended with spices and oils that appeal to the eye and the nose and maybe, if you’re a tactile person, the touch.  But not the taste (blech!) and probably not the ear either.

1. I’m listening to Music from the 60s on my TV.  This is the bonus of cable: many, many music stations from all through the decades and encompassing all kinds of music.  There is nothing watchable on TV tonight, so I dialed into the music, thinking I would do a little tasting from periods and players that are unfamiliar to me.  But I got stuck on the Golden Oldies.  It used to be my fantasy–okay, still is–that I could write to music. 
     Music is so incredibly evocative.  Just hearing a bit of a song puts me back in the time and the place and the clothing and the mood of when it was popular. 
         Please lock me away/
         and don’t allow the day/
         here inside where I hide/
         with my loneliness…
    I’m in my dorm at Pitt and it’s summer.  I sort of have a boyfriend.  A blobby fellow with bad breath who I  don’t really like, but he likes me, so I’m playing the girlfriend game.  Except he’s away for the summer; thus the game mainly consists of longing letters.  And I am so lonely…

2.  Linda Binstock once wrote a letter to her boyfriend which was composed only of song titles.  I’m still impressed. 

3.  I’m probably going to be leaving LiveJournal soon.  I’ve been unfaithful for quite a while. 

4. Several years ago–okay, many several, like maybe 1997–I had to get a new license because we had moved back to California from Pennsylvania.  I knew about California license photos, or rather, I knew that I had spent the previous decade being humiliated every time I had to show (and see!) my photo.  I had gone to the DMV after a particularly bad Sunday, in which a very happily married friend of mine christened her baby who she called Jane, and I swear I was the only single, childless person at the party. 
     To say I was depressed is an understatement.  I was dysthymic beyond belief, and I wanted some record of this horrible, horrible day on which all of my many failings were made manifest to me.  So I actually made the decision to allow the DMV to snap the photo while I was thinking and feeling the full weight of my life.  That particular mood passed and although some other doozies came and went, I could never bear seeing that photo and remembering that day. 
      So when I needed to go to the DMV for a new license, I was prepared.  I looked fantastic.  I had enough makeup on to do the Five O’Clock News, and my hair was having a day of peak performance.  I smiled perfectly, thought happy thoughts and goddam, if that wasn’t one of the best photos I’ve ever had taken.  Is.  Present Tense.  It’s still the photo on the license I carry.  It’s still how I think of myself when I haven’t been by a mirror too recently.  Sometimes I take it out and show it to new friends so that know that once, for one brief shining moment–okay, for all of my life, except these past four years–I Looked Good.
     The other day I was in one of those cosmetic warehouses at the checkout counter.  I’d just found the perfect hairdryer and one of the sales assistants had loaded me down with samples from a line I use.  I gave the checker my credit card and she asked to see some ID.  This is SOP around here, so I just whipped out my license with the perfect photo on it.  She looked at it and looked at me and looked at it again and said, “Boy, this is sure an old picture, isn’t it.”