NO, VACANCY

Some things will never change. I am a nomad, and the way I look at tile is in a nomadic way. The dark squares rise up from the light ones if I let my eyeballs relax and I sort of look past the floor into the ground below. Eventually, if I don't blink, the squares will lose their borders and become fuzzy, and then my whole field of vision will start to go black as if my eyeballs were drying out and I was going blind. It's a surreally focused zoned out unintentional meditation that I become aware of every time I see a floor with these particular one inch square two-toned ceramic tile patterns. It 's been happening since I was a child in our bathroom at home. I would stare endlessly in nomadic tile trance while sitting on the toilet or stand wrapped in a towel after a shower staring at the floor.

Yesterday, while leaning against a wall in someone's kitchen, I found myself mesmerized by the same kind of floor, though differently colored, and the dark squares started to separate from the light ones. Everything went fuzzy, and then suddenly...I was able to remember several other similar floors, all made from the same tile that I had encountered at different stages of my life that had all affected me the same way. I could see all these floors at once - all those little one inch tiles with slightly varying patterns and pairs of colors separated by years and miles in my life. I wondered just exactly how many combined hours I had spent being hypnotized by tiny two toned tile floors.

All this has nothing to do with being nomadic, except that you did look so beautiful beneath the mirror at Caesar's Palace, if I do say so myself. And I have no schedule and nothing but time and nowhere to go and I don't know what to do with myself and I don't mind. In fact, it's kind of a nice change. Often, I drive around thinking I'll go somewhere, but just end up pulling over and falling asleep in my car. It's quite comfortable. The driver's seat goes all the way back.