The hot springs were as much an Iceland draw as the elusive and as-yet-unseen aurora borealis. So, after two days spent tooling around Reykjavik, I’m itching to get out into the countryside and into a geothermal pool.

It’s rush hour and it’s raining. I’m on my way to Trader Joes to forage for dinner when my car decides to slip into a coma (note to self: stop buying cars at places that sell über-crappy, budget jerry-rigs).

You’re an avid snowboarder, shredding down a Lake Tahoe mountain, when you fall…40 feet. You wake up in the hospital, paralyzed from the shattered neck down. You’re staring up at the ceiling through frightened blue eyes as a hissing machine breathes for you and the doctors tell you that you’ll never walk again. That your condition is “incurable.” That you might not survive the night.

I’m at the Aztec, which isn’t actually newsworthy, because I’m here every week—be it for the kale salad, the loose-leaf yerba mate or the free wi-fi (OK, and the free wi-fi). But I’m not here to milk a single glass of South American tea while rewriting my website; I’m here for the Starseed.

Too old for Rock Camp. Too lame for Guitar Workshop. Not talented, invited or naked enough to join The Sticky. My chances of making music with others are looking imaginary, at best, which makes sense given that I can’t play any of my guitars—bass, acoustic, classical or electric—at all.

A ghost haunts the river near my house. She wears a long black dress with a high collar (think Viktor & Rolf, only dusty, tattered and blood-stained), and cries at night. Some say she cries because she misses the kids she drowned in the river. Others claim she’s heartbroken over the military dude who refused to marry her because she was a dirty tramp who’d borne illegitimate children, which was what inspired her to off them just before she stabbed herself in the chest with a pair of scissors. They call her La Llorona (The Crying Woman), and—as legend has it—if she touches you, you instantly disappear. Freaky though it sounds, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe her ghostly finger is a portal to the ocean, the Louvre, or a Reykjavik hot spring.

It’s hot. Not like regular ol’ summer hot; we’re talking desert-mountain in July kind of hot, sweltering in the shade and wishing on an Ice Age kind of hot. You need water—big, enveloping water, not your usual mid-afternoon cold tub soak (which is really more confusing than relaxing because it’s shallow and porcelain and indoors, and there’s soap scum around the rim and your scrubby sponge is all janky and matted with hair).

It’s been over a year of residencies, sublets and couch crashes, and it’s time to get my own digs. I hunt tenaciously, determined to find a place rife with sunlight, privacy, built-ins and garden space, garnished with hardwood floors, cheap rent and a month-to-month lease.

I sprawl away my Sunday on the front porch of my housesit in a whisper of a sundress, soaking up the vitamin D, while reading the New York Times. Spring at last; spring at last; thank God almighty, spring at last!!!

The VP (Vagina-Penis) Dialogues show is proving to be an existential roller-coaster ride before I even set foot into Warehouse 21 for the It’s on; it’s canceled; it’s back on again multimedia extravaganza. Apparently, the venue—“a hub for youth directed development”—got all freaked out and flighty when an anonymous group of “concerned community members” collectively opined that sex education should be taught in the home. Logistical chaos ensued—or, at least, it tried to.