Dude! I know exactly what you mean! You know how you come in from Ultimate in the heat of the summer? You know how it is 107 and the heat is baking off the sidewalk, but you feel a breeze when you run and your muscles are all loose and so you play for hours until the sun finally goes down? And you drink both liters of water during play, so you sweat through your shorts and sweat through your shirt and when you get home you see the line of salt crystals where your sweat evaporated? And you wipe salt crystals off your forehead and you are so thirsty you slam the first glass of cold cold water and it doesn't make you not thirsty?
When you get like that, and you drank a ton of water but you're still thirsty, it seems like you won't get un-thirsty until you have something carbonated. Somehow, in the past couple years sodas have become so sweet that you can't drink more than a couple gulps. But you want something carbonated.
I stayed in that confused spot, wanting something carbonated but not sweet for two summers until mineral water finally occurred to me. It was perfect! I loved it! Fizzy! Salty! Not sweet! Drink a couple big glasses of tap water to handle the body thirst, finish with mineral water to convince your mouth. My other friend Megan and I were talking about our deep love for mineral water. Why did it take me so long? Am I a moron, that it it didn't occur to me for years? No, she said. You aren't a moron. You just remember when you tried it as a kid and it was disgusting. Why did grown-ups ever drink that? Bleah, tastes like dirt, bleah. She's totally right. It did used to be gross and now it is perfect. I don't know how that happened.
***
I told you all about the fun of Second Saturday, and a little bit about the Second Saturday flirting, but I didn't tell you about the art part of Second Saturday. We go into all the galleries, cruise through pretty quick. On the one hand, I suppose I'm a savage who doesn't look hard and consider the art. On the other hand, a lot of it really is trite. I'm as much of a sucker as anyone, so when I first started going to Second Saturday I loved the paintings of the oak in the foothills and the watercolors of the Delta. Now I just laugh at them. I think for you, those must be... waves crashing against a point with a lighthouse and what? piles of lobster traps*? Sometimes I see interesting stuff, but those cost real money, so they aren't an option for me.
Anyway, this Saturday, I was at my own gym, which also hangs a new show every month. Cruising by, recognizing some of the regular artists, not thinking much until one print stopped me dead, made my breath chuff. It was a beautiful blue sky, with an stylized gray bridge and a black silhouette of a man jumping, tied to a car that is pulling him down. The Determined Suicide. (I'll take a picture of it on Wednesday, to show you.) I backed away, scared. I've dreamed of driving off a bridge and sinking in a car half a dozen times in my life. It is the only recurring dream I have; that nightmare is no fun. But I looked and looked at it. Last night at the gym, I walked over to it a few more times. It is so beautiful. I has my full attention. 
I think I should get it, which is so strange. Why would I bring something morbid into my home? Where would I hang it, the one-day nursery**? Make sure Baby has my bad dreams? Obviously not that, but where would it go in any of the rest of the house, this clear beautiful portrait of one of my deepest irrational fears? Why would I invite suicidal ideation into my warm home? This isn't like me at all. I guard my equanimity closely. But this painting backed me up two steps when I saw it and isn't diminishing with a couple days time. I don't remember anything having this effect on any other Second Saturday, and I've been in and out of dozens of exhibits over many years.
So I was already suprised to like an Art so much when we walked by a corner where a man had posted his poems. They were really good! They were short, so I tried to read all of them. He had them typed up on card stock, signed. Last night when I went by, they were still posted, so I took a few.
Poet William Hughes of 22nd and K St wrote:
JACK & JILL'S
Cheese wheel
Of a moon -
Hung
in the delicatessen
Of June
and this one, so timely:
BILL FOR RIGHTS
A black man
Could be president.
We hold these
precedents
To be
self-evident
and the last, which I loved the most, because it is so very true:
GOLDEN RULES
Californians.
To avoid all
cancers -
But skin
Anyway, after all these years, I was finally floored by art at Second Saturday. We're growing up.
*HAH HAH HAH HAH hah hah hah hah ha ha ha ha! That was totally a shot in the dark, but it looks like I was right. Maybe there's something even more iconic. Maybe a wooden path over the dunes to the beach? Does that beat out piled lobster traps for kitch Maine art?
**This reminds me that before my baby sister was born, we talked about a mural on her wall. I wanted to do a trompe l'oeil type deal, of a large hole in the plaster with scared rats running into the room and two glowing eyes shining out of the darkness. For the baby.