FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN, A RETROSPECTIVE

We didnt expect to his 100 posts for the year, but it looks like we made it to that pretty easily. A good percentage of the posts were original, and some of them were really pretty good. We werent sure how to close out the year. We noticed we had not done a "Fully Clothed Women" in a long time, and have a lot of material from our FB album of that name. It has been a few years since FB took any of my pics down, so we must be keeping it clean enough for community standards

So here are a few from the last year and a half or so.

Body Language. Lots of Body language.

Just look at all the Body language.

"The color is gone

everything is Autumns end,
washed too many times
And then I see something red
a firebush still in leaf
and it takes me like you take  me:
tightening my heart, 

flooding me with blood… 

as if late Autumn red 

walked naked from her bath, 

came wet to my bed 

and said, “I’ve been a bad girl."

From Peregrine @http://youreyesblazeout.tumblr.com/

"Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?"

Danielle LaPorte 

"...a girl worth kissing, is not easily kissed..." 

I guess I went on a Raymond Chandler kick. What a wonderfully expressive wrter. I should actually read one of his books this year. Here are two of about eight I did.

“She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.”
Raymond Chandler

 “There are blonde and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points...

There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you found about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial. 
There is the soft and willing alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading the Wasteland or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindesmith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also.
That makes two of them."
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

"Its not far down to paradise..."

"Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it - the same night, as a matter of fact."
Holden Caufield from "Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger

.

“In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge. I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons....”

~ Anne Michaels, from Fugitive Pieces

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM BULLETHOLES

Oh, OK, one more. We weigh heavily what gets into Fully Clothed Women, and why its gets there.
Sometimes we commemorate a great event, or a birth, or even a death as we did earlier this year with Maureen O'Hara. Something about this image, and the story, just tears me up. Maybe its because we are all so damaged and that sadly, a little bit of Kindness goes a long long ways.
Or maybe its because, happily, a little bit of Kindness goes such a long long ways.

                "SHE GAVE HIM WATER"