The explosions of color in the California spring are blinding to those of us more accustomed to the unrelenting flat chill gray of a midwestern March…so it made peculiar sense to me this morning that I would think of Iron Butterfly’s epic song, with its mondegreen (look it up) title, while pondering the bougainvillea at the bottom of the steps.  As I have had a head cold for the last three days, everything makes sense.  The salmon in the refrigerator makes sense.  The creamy orange walls I painted on my last sabbatical make sense.  The trio of ficus trees in the courtyard make sense, as do the green and orange oregami birds dangling from the cord in the living room window. The visual acuities and dimwittedness of the last three days have allowed me to play a lot of “Angry Birds,” a ridiculous and addictive app on my iPhone, and to think about, well, Iron Butterfly.  I never really liked In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida but I appreciate its significance as a gateway into heavy metal (which I have also never much liked, unless you count a few of Trent Renzor’s more accessible tracks.. though I think Nine Inch Nails is more considered “industrial rock” than heavy metal…the genre labels mostly elude me anymore as they are infinite in number insofar as I can tell…a friend of mine once surveyed around 600 dance companies and discovered they had 139 different ways to describe themselves, genre-wise…who knew?)  And how did I get from the magenta bougainvillea at the bottom of the steps to Nine Inch Nails? Eh. Blame the Proustian logic of the head cold.

I added my first link, that being a food blog I recommend highly for delicious recipes and point of view. It is kept by an exceedingly marvelous woman who can dance and cook (most dancers can cook, I don’t know if the reverse holds true).