I love JJ’s Blues - one of the nicest Blues Bars in all of the Bay Area. Also the best thing to have happened to Sunnyvale after my friend Sidkid.
Update in 2018: I'd written this in March 2010 when I was a heartbroken unnecessarily maudlin young person listening to John Lee Hooker's album Face to Face. I still intensely dislike anything Blue but I'm more forgiving of its takers.

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The skies can look as blue as the peppermint candy I love to hate but they are waiting for their blue to be licked off: Stick tongue out, one long swoop of the tongue across the icy blue and off the blue should go. But but…blue is one color I intensely dislike. Blue as the Pacific Ocean, Blue as the clear blue skies, blue as the mint candy, blue as the cupcake frosting, blue as the argyle vest? It fills with me so much distaste that it makes my eyes well up and soon the iciness of the blue freezes the tears to icicles that prick. Blue is death and rigor mortis and the heart shaped vein on my chest. Blue is the lady in the cigarette smoke on the heavily guarded Thursday night. 

Turquoise and Aquamarine(I can’t tell the difference) is charming, but charm is not something that can be inherited or passed on to the rest of the Blue family. Teal is of upholstery and woolens and carpets and curtains in old women’s houses and Rexine seats in diners that you only visit in a town outside of nowhere, when you’re going nowhere. Azure is of the Indian Ocean where the tortoises walk and the palm trees shade; Azure is the Arabian Sea and the dhows and the ocean mist outside my bedroom window in an age gone by. Kingfisher blue once flew by when we were kayaking on the slow-slow rapids. It’s also the night when tandoori chicken red is licked off the fingers and lager is counted out in pitchers. Majorelle rocks the Casbah. It’s the clash when midnight blue meets Sunset Boulevard. Indigo is ink and the color no one talks about. It’s overshadowed by blue even in the rainbow. But sometimes I think Indigo is Blueberries like Blueberries are indigo. Blueberry blue, now I can be partial to that.

Yes, Blue is selfish.

Prussian Blue reminds me of the Second World War and who would think King of Prussia is in Pennsylvania. It sounds like a Blue state but it could be Red and White striped too. Cobalt is the chemistry lab assistant’s voice screaming, what salt gives you a cobalt blue colour? But then cobalt blue makes you think of canary yellow. Canaries and coal mines we will leave for later. Cornflower blue is Laura Ashley’s catalogues of cowslip yellow wallpapers with baby blue trimming and cornflower blue flowers and mint green leaves. Salad. On the Wall. Sweet Carolina Blue is the sunshine on the people in the shirts on the clothesline. St Patrick’s blue is the drunken stupor bile of the green beer. Persian is mosaic on mosques in Iran, evil eyes on the Turkish merchants. Navy blue is sailors and balls I never attended and hickeys the young lads left on lasses they’ll never see again. Baby blue is for cribs of babes with diddly-doos and Ceil is the matron in the labor ward. 

But blue? Blue is my nightmare

from last night

Where I was wearing a hideous blue sari (gasp!) and being dragged to an engagement ceremony. Mine. I was pushing and shoving and screaming and crying. Inside a Maruti Omni that is the Volkswagen Transporter’s third world cousin. Ten times removed. Then right there in the middle of the fuss in my nightmare I remembered I had loved the man but the thought of marrying the man was an oddity and so something is amiss: Why did I agree to marry the man, Why did I not want to marry the man? Cold Feet. Blue. I realized it was a nightmare and he could wait at the altar till the nightmare was recycled in someone else’s head, someone else’s life. I then continued to fret about the hideous blue sari that I was wearing with a green blouse. Ao and Shino. 

Blue were the streaks in his hair and his hair and oh my god, his hair was Beatley Blue. Not his in the nightmare, he wouldn’t do that to himself. Blue is Blue Lagoon that cocktail in the forgotten Mangalore bar mixed by the bartender so half-heartedly. He’s in a blue funk. Blue da ba dee if I were blue I’d die too.

Blue gives me the blues. The cold blue sky is shedding its frosty stare, it’s cloaking the misty air tonight and it is creeping up my feet, it’s leaving a blue imprint everywhere it pricks…I’m just feeling the blues.