Perfect Day day part 1

Some days are like words spoken lightly; ephemeral, they float off. Perhaps they are stored in the memory's body fat, accumulating until a host of everyday days are burned off by some wild bender.

Some days, you wake up and suddenly it dawns on you (yes that was a terrible pun): now THIS is going to be one of those days. And sometimes they are.

At 10 am on Friday I was sick. I knew I wasn't going skiing. Even though the snow is new and fresh and calling in the way only snow can call. At 1 pm I was wavering. Maybe I'll feel better. At 4 I was packing. At 6 I was in a car on my way to Kirkwood. At midnight I was at altitude, ready for that strange sleep I get: air different, sleep light, easily disturbed, rarely more than five hours, and then waking up one eye at a time. How am I? Groggy like a boxer losing in the fifth round? Elated with breathing the rare air, light on the earth?

Wake up to rituals of fending off certain illnesses: netti pot with salt, zinc in capsules, doing that thing that person told you to do to imagine getting better. Then breakfast: the fresh ground coffee brought from the flatlands, the eggs with the right salsa, juice and toast and eat it at the kitchen bar on a high stool in front of the computer. Make the new playlist for that day because you have a feeling it might be one of those days. Mixing, listening, talking to Ian about writing and Pete about skiing, cleaning up, finding every bit of ski gear right where you left it.

Leave the house with this playing in your helmet:

Endless Reverie (Zaman 8 Remix)            Azam Ali                       

Innocente (Falling In Love) (Mr. Sam's Remix)            Delerium Feat. Leigh Nash           

Big In Japan            Alphaville                        Forever Young

love letter to japan            the bird and the bee           

The Answer (Feat. Big In Japan            UNKLE           

Young Forever (feat. Mr. Hudson)            Jay-Z           

Joan      Talvin Singh           

Cities On Flame With Rock and Roll            Blue Öyster Cult           

(Dawning Of A) New Era            The Specials

Don't Go Back To Sleep     Vision II- Sprit Of Rumi/Graeme Revell

Star Shpongled Banner            Shpongle                       

Always            Blind Pilot                    

Vibrate On       Augustus Pablo & Upsetters           

Man in the Street            The Skatalites

Our Lips Are Sealed Dub            Fun Boy Three


Step into the brilliant sunlight, another bluebird day, and hoist the skis and the boots. Three, four hundred yards to the lift, as the lungs get used to the effort and the body shifts and it occurs to you that you aren't ill, in fact...the opposite. The mountains are forever, and this life is not, unless this moment is forever, and the mountains as well, and all these bipeds doomed to die, and their muddles and fears and glimpes of eternity.