Oops... ran low on energy—

and fell off the 30:30 bicycle on my third day.

Kept tinkering around with my story collaboration with Valerie yesterday. Writing poetry, in contrast, hasn't been as much fun. Or ticklish. We've reached 3000 words by now. Yay!

Here's an excerpt:

           Once in the house, Jim wouldn't even look at Carmen: "I'm going down to the corner for a drink."
           "Well, hurry back," she quipped while shrugging into a terry robe. There was something about running water that made her feel French, as if she'd managed to run for her life and actually escape the guillotine. The tub filled up and she filled it with bubbles.
           Alone at last with Richard in her bath. It lasted about two hours. Fish and wishes are connected, she mused. That was dogma to her. Like in Arabian Nights: talking fish swimming in endless lakes that existed only in the parallel universe of near sleep conversations.
           Such fancies got her in with the writers at her job in a publishing firm. She had to organize her reading habits around committees and publicity, but occasionally got to take an author or two out to lunch. That was how she met Richard. He was always there with a fork in her spaghetti meatballs, a finger in her chocolate pecan pie.

5th driving lesson:

Yikes. The only thing I can say is that I can't do a U-turn even if my life were to depend on it.

Additional self-prescribed requisites for the September driving exam:

• two hundred (200) tablets of Valium;
• seven (7) eye implants on crucial points of the head;
• one (1) lobotomy.

Today's queen of the jungle is Rachel's Angelina: