Dear love, your Pink Minotaur is up in the aerie with her well-deserved matching pink ice-filled drink, à la the Kate Winslet exercise plan - workout followed by a glass of wine. I've been remiss in the workout department for a week. I got tired of the Law & Order SVUs, the nine a.m. hour wasn't convenient, and I didn't think the show was ultimately so great for my head. I like to workout these days to Charlie Rose (D asked me once - does he like it too, to which I responded with a not-terribly withering look). His show got bumped all last week (in the one o'clock hour here) in favor of a pledge drive and ancient Lawrence Welk shows and the like (good Lord - but let me continue) for the Tea Party set, and now a wicked thought occurs to me. Since children don't have the right to vote, then perhaps there should come an age that voting rights should be stripped from the ancien regime who gifted the younger generations with the mess we're in, and stubbornly vote some demented line out of sheer orneriness, because it's certainly not about their grand- and great-grandchildren's futures, it doesn't seem to me. Yes, I know this is a terribly mordant suggestion and will never fly... but perhaps children ought to demand it, or at least demand a say in the rotten world they're about to inherit, because the snake in the demographic belly is so enormous and now aging, and the young ones will be paying for it dearly.

Darling, I'm sorry. I'm actually in a really nice mood, if a bit tired. And a bit disgusted. How did I get on this? Oh yes, so Charlie Rose came back on again today - phew. Except: Alan Greenspan, for the hour. Oh Come On. Do you expect me to workout to him? He who helped get us in the world of economic mess that we're in? Do I care - should anyone, except for radical freemarketeers, care anything about what he has to say?

So I did one workout of sorts, with monstrously effective thoughts of you, then fell asleep, then got up and went about a few light chores - watered hanging baskets, made caesar dressing for tonight's dinner, a salad of the enormous head of CSA romaine (there is something about biodynamic produce, it is more vivid and alive in both flavor & appearance), and homemade croutons. Then I did a second workout - the rubberband pilates kind - at four, switching between Oprah and Ellen, which wasn't so bad because Jennifer Aniston was on the former (I find her incredibly dull, but very earnestly so) and Gwyneth, on the latter, who is easy to "love to hate," and I suppose I do, but there's something about her that manages to remain always a little offbeat, quick, unpredictable, as giddily silly as she is.

I'm glad I'm back to the workouts - what with my obsession with camembert (most recently indulged at the arts colony over the weekend) and otherwise sybaritic tastes in cheap wine & home cooking - I too felt a need for vigorous atonement - no, I mean toning - à la Gwyneth, who told Ellen that she works out five days a week to maintain her amazing figure. Nothing comes for free, she said, as she admitted to a love of fried food.

Also, I felt physically better after the workout - it must help with circulation - it has a marked salubrious effect on my sense of wellbeing and energy, and helps my aches go away. Strange, that. Actually, some of my worst moments in a day are right when I'm waking up. One might think I'd feel rested after a night's sleep, but no, instead I feel sore & achy & fatigued as though I'd been in a wreck. It isn't until I get moving that I feel like myself, and really good.

So my darling dear frog-prince, can you tell I'm not feeling too inspired today? No poetic metaphors issuing forth as my fingers clatter away at the keys. I read a bit more of the Huffington biography of Picasso. He's aging, and he's got a new young love now, Françoise Gilot, who effectively replaces Dora. But he cruelly tries to play one off the other, except that Françoise is a sensible cookie and not easily sucked into his b.s., and so she resists moving in with him for the longest time. (I peeked ahead, via wiki; in later years after leaving Picasso, she eventually marries Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine. If there's a cure for this...)

Darling, how are you, are you doing all right? I wonder where you are, star light, star bright...

I have huge gaps in my grasp of basic cultural history, such as a good imaginally working knowledge of Greek mythology. So thinking about the Minotaur theme, I looked up the myth online, and happened on an account written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his Tanglewood Tales, a retelling of Greek myths. I'm a little sorry I started with that one, because I get the feeling that perhaps he Disneyfied it, whitewashed it a bit it seems, took out some of the darker aspects pertaining to Our Hero Theseus, who kills the Minotaur (in whom Hawthorne does see much pathos). Ariadne crucially helps Theseus, giving him a spool of thread that he holds as he makes his way through the labyrinth, while she holds on to her end, giving a little tug now & then to let him know that she's with him, even if not right there beside him. After dispatching the Minotaur, Theseus finds his way back thanks to Ariadne's ingenious homing device as well as her steadfastedness - she never lets go. Nor does he, which would have been, within the labyrinth, if not death by Minotaur then perpetual lost wandering exile.

Hawthorne's version reads uncontroversially enough, until the section where he insists that previous accounts of the myth, in which the Minotaur-slaying Hero abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos, are slanderous falsehoods, and that indeed the hero invites Ariadne to come away with him on the ship back to Athens, but she declines out of love of her father, even though he is the wicked old King Minos. (I wonder why Hawthorne here seemingly goes out of his way to remove the implication that Theseus, in abandoning Ariadne, might be in possession of a flawed moral character; in other of his writings Hawthorne seems particularly well-acquainted with and interested in examining contradictions, ambiguities, and perversities of human nature.)

So I'm trying to get to the bottom of which variation of the myth is 'truest' - and I stumble onto a rich association, of a Richard Strauss opera, Ariadne auf Naxos. I don't know the opera, but I love Richard Strauss, so perhaps I'll try to follow that golden thread.

But the more I look into this myth, the more it does look as though Ariadne fell madly in love with Theseus, and came away with him, and never got over him, not after he left her on that island, though perhaps there was a previous claim on her, by Dionysus...

okay, it's all frittering away at the edges like baked crinkly superfood kale chips that Gwyneth says children will love

I don't know the myth well enough, still exploring

dearest, aspects of myself this afternoon pulsated swimming pink involuntarily moving efflorescent mysteriously vividly contracting and expanding drawing in and pursing out in fluttering pulses all undersea for the moment amidst throaty seaworth athwart swimming to inaudible air again capsule landed on the sea and pay attention to other aspects of the room the ceiling fan whirring white body pink tips shapely foot against the wall images of you at me your mouth single pearlescent drop glistening