I'M STILL TRYING to sort out how I felt after the last First Thursday, almost two weeks ago.

It was a big week for breasts in the Seattle arts scene. Jem Studios' "Blue Boobs" group installation, the Tule Gallery's two 10-foot-tall hyperrealistic bust paintings, and the usual other figurative-art stuff.

I'd have enjoyed it all as I usually do, except it was the week after my mother's partial mastectomy.

Just after I'd come to terms with near-addictive fascination, acknowledging that I had nothing to feel guilty about i/r/t my hormonically pre-programmed craving for the sight and touch of female skin, I learned my favorite female body parts had threatened to kill the first and still most beloved female in my life.

The "Blue Boobs" installation was beautiful, but the close-up breast images in monochrome-blue paintings and videos looked too creepily like, not X-rays, but like some weird other kind of medical photography.

And the breasts in the Tule pix are exactly the scale (and eye level) of a mom as seen from the POV of a nursing infant, though the women's faces aren't really "maternal" looking as much as pop-art sendups of '60s-mod fashion art.

I do know a few things at this perspective. I'm not going to stop loving women's physiques. If anything, I hope I'll be even more appreciative of precious gifts life and beauty are.

Especially after the Friday night right after First Thursday, when I witnessed the finish of the annual Belltown bicycle race. As the winner sped across the finish line in the alley behind the Rendezvous, an apparently drunken man suddenly stepped out and slapped him. The racer fell to the ground; Medic One quickly responded to a cell-phoned 911 call but took almost 15 careful minutes to get the guy into the vehicle and away.

(Last word: He's apparently going to be all right. As, for now, is my mom.)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin' at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can't make it then or want a double dose, there's another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.

TOMORROW: On a much lighter note, e-commerce is trying to get hip.

ELSEWHERE: The next step toward taming the arts: Quantifying them... A faux-Sassy webmag likes today's incessant "positivity"... This is not, repeat, not, a real eBay auction; but this is...

(For an explanation of the above, look here.)

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