Unseasonal Downpours

My city is bursting.
Baby greens reaching out with amazed sensations over every curved natural angle- all that can be created showing us how easily it can be equally overwhelming.
When I lay in the grass (and it may be the grass, the long, snapping fingers of ripples and roots that now have every right to make us think our hills can be as emerald as our bodies want them to be, that calls & salutes to me most) like I’m doing right now, and watch the clouds come from the ocean and put on slight of hand techniques so astoundingly magnificent (complete with Santa Claus’s luminescent head frowning at a family of shape-shifting gray whales below a sheer sheet of air cracked into patches or left laying as a film), I lose my language & start to learn.
Whatever sits beneath the green in Angels Gate or the green in Koreatown or the green at Sunset Junction, wither it be a street, a fort, a city, or a park, it has never before this winter realized how wealthy it becomes once things get stranger.
The gray tries its best, but our California sun knows how to bleed every opportunity.
We forget we’re so alive.

Yes; the water poured towards perfection, the wind closed its ears and screamed, the land, Los Angeles, drank away its poison with an older, clearer spirit, and the animals walked through the new fields yearning to make an impression- but how will we forgive this weird abundance when it again dissolves into our everyday struggle?
I don’t know, but I’ll take a few pictures.
And maybe write a thing or two.

Wyoming

I forget how incredibly diverse landscape can be sometimes, and then I go somewhere new and am blown away.  I just got back from a trip to Laramie, Wyoming, where I was in one of my best friend’s weddings.  She grew up in Wyoming and I never really thought about what it looked like.  I think in my head it was just a version of where I was from, and I didn’t really process what it would actually be like.

Laramie has been having strange weather this summer; thunder showers once a week or so, and the land is green and colorful instead of the normal dry browns of August.  It has been a long time since I’ve seen a proper thunder shower and I’ve never seen lightning like in Wyoming.  The sky is massive- stretching just end to end forever, and streaks poured down into the ground.  I didn’t even see a strong storm, just a mild one moving through.

I don’t know that I could live in the west, but I sure could visit again.  I didn’t get to get much out of the town, but what I saw was amazing, and I’m still trying to process both the trip and the wedding.  Such a nice escape.

Microclimate Dinner

I had dinner with a new friend tonight, and as we sat talking about poetry and music and all of that lovely stuff it started to thunder.  I haven’t heard thunder in a while, and it was sort of surprising.  I thought at first it was a large truck rumbling by, but after a loud crack and some lightning- thunderstorm for sure. 

I’ve had a lot of fun in thunderstorms, but I don’t think I’m ready to run around in them quite yet.  In thinking about it, I had very specific company when drenched by rain, and I’d like to keep it that way for a bit longer. Oblique, I know. If you know me and my history, it isn’t, but I don’t feel the internet is the best forum for Old Memories involving Other People.  Knowing me shouldn’t mean details of your own life get broadcast.  

Seattle doesn’t seem to have many thunderstorms, but it does have a strange sort of climate, where it can downpour and shroud the city but to the other side (east? west? I don’t have the best sense of direction) the sky is breaking blue and rosy sunset.  

The flowers all seem that much brighter in rain, and maybe it’s just because they are held up against the grey sky while the sun still strikes their petals.  I love Seattle and its ability to be so many things at once.  

Return of the Rain

Morning arrived like a boat today.  By that I mean a gale storm.  By that I mean my windows were portholes and I could almost feel the house swaying.  I woke up sometime in the early hours to wind and pouring rain.  It’s been on and off all day and it feels stronger than most of the weather that comes through Seattle.  I don’t know why exactly- it’s been windy before, but it feels different somehow.

Maybe it’s wind and change and spring and all of it.  I’ve been in Seattle a little more than six months now.  David wrote about the Riverside grey, and it’s funny to be so grey here too, but so different.  I met someone on Thursday night who said I must have come from somewhere terrible to love Seattle so much.  He was shocked to find I spent time in Southern California, a place he must imagine is all palm trees, sunshine and blue skies.  He was from the Seattle area and went to school here for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees.  And yet he seems to hate Seattle.  So why not leave?

I met someone else on Sunday and it was refreshing to hear how much he loved visiting Seattle.  It’s a shame he was only visiting and was hopping back on a plane about a half hour after we chatted.  I would have loved to show him a bit more of the city and helped him to fall for this place as much as I have.  Do I bubble and effuse about Seattle enough?  Six months in, and the newplaceloveblur hasn’t worn off yet.  But it’s easy to pour my emotions into location.  If I couldn’t, why am I still here?

What the Space Contains

Seattle is full of changes.  I woke up early this morning and took a bus out to Bellvue.  It was grey, but dry, when I left.  Glancing out of the window during my interview the skies were pouring buckets.  By the time I was finished only residual water blew around in the gusty air.  As I waited at the bus stop it began to hail.  When I got into the U District it was sunny and scrubbed clean.

I like that Seattle seems a place of fresh starts.  The rain comes and the winds blow and everything is washed clean.  Crossing over the lake today I watched the water; one side relatively calm, the other choppy and white-tipped waves.  There is probably a very good and sound scientific reason for this, something about the bridge and the air currents, but it seems fitting even without knowing how the disparity is caused.  Of course one side is violent, the other barely ruffled.  This place is nothing if not bi-polar.  It makes me think of something Nicelle told me– LA is a place people go when they’ve run out of options.  LA snags them before they reach the ocean.  It’s a last-chance place; make it here or you won’t make it.  Seattle doesn’t have the desperation of LA, but for me it feels similar.  I don’t feel as destitute as I would have in LA, surrounded by opulence and poverty, shimmering neon lights and broken glass, smog and jacaranda blossoms.  And I don’t feel hopeless here, but there there is something about the edge that seems similar.  One place is close to Mexico, one is close to Canada, and both are pushed far to the West Coast.  Seattle seems the safer place by far, and I am carving my niche here, slowly.  

A friend said it usually takes him at least two years to establish himself in a city.  When I groaned and begged him to take it back he did, but it’d been said and I suspect it’s truthful.  It will take a while.  There isn’t a way to skip past this, but already I’m getting better at figuring out what bus routes get me back and I’m getting comfortable walking into places on my own.  I’d love to be sharing this place with someone, but I think it’s a good thing I’m not.  It is so easy to triangulate my self-perception against those around me.  It’s one of the comments I received most about my thesis: this is a story about a narrator who isn’t actually there.  Everyone else is, but there is just a space where the body of the speaker actually resides.  An emptiness. 

I’m working on figuring out that what that space contains.  It isn’t a negative or empty place.  It’s just uncertain.  It was missing from my work because I didn’t know.  I still don’t, but I’m working on it. 

Typical Day

This morning I grabbed an umbrella as I dashed to the bus stop.  On my way home I was dapper and dashing with a hooked walking stick… sun on my shoulders.  

It’s hard to believe that I was in Seattle a year ago, under much different circumstances.  It was sunny when I flew in, and then rained (with a bit of snow) the entire week.  I was still waiting to hear back from the University of Denver, my heart resting on the pages they glanced over.  

It’s easy to trace back into stories and find the starts of things, but it’s much trickier to recognize the New Thing as it happens.  Seattle has been all sorts of things in this past year, and predictable has not been one of them.   Does that make it predictable in its unpredictability?  I’m not quite sure.  I know that I like it here, and I keep trying to carve my own little niche.  With starts and stops, with the help of new friends and the support of old ones.  

In a year, what I’m doing now will seem scripted and well understood.  Or at least, I’ll have perspective.  But it is sort of nice to, every now and again, remember that scrap of paper I found when I was cleaning my room to move.  An old survey from elementary school; I must have been in about 3rd grade.  “What will you be doing in 2010?” Many answers are laughable (I’ll be a vet, because I love animals and animals love me! / I’ll be married with three kids.)  One looks like it’ll be true: I’ll be in Seattle.

Bi-polar is just another word for indecision

Yesterday I went for a run beneath sun. (Discursive note- there is a certain place along my route where the electrical wires strung over the road hum.  It feels dangerous and palpable, and I kind of love it.) Later that day I went to the grocery store to pick up some bulk flour and got caught in a downpour as I walked back.  

 

The apron I wear baking

Today opened with rain, and I started to bake with grey skies outside the windows.  Now it’s sunny and bright and I’m only 1/2 of the way finished with the double batch of Tassajara bread.   

 

The weather is indecisive here, continually shifting from one extreme to the other.  Seattle is becoming a place of extremes for me and I find myself mirroring the dramatic shift of sky; at once joyful and at once frightfully angry.  Is anger the opposite of joy?  It feels like it at the moment.

A beautiful day…

…after a long and difficult night.  The weather today was perfect.  Highs in the mid-fifties with flotillas of thick, dark clouds making the sun play hide-and-seek.  We bought some pies with my “Christmas bonus” (Marie Callendar’s gift card) had lunch and did some grocery shopping for Christmas dinner.  All basically escapism from spending most of the previous night in the emergency room.

I once saw someone wearing a t-shirt that read simply, “Fuck Cancer.”  That says it all.  Over the past couple years I’ve watched one of my closest friends fight not only Inflammatory Breast Cancer (not your run of the mill breast cancer–look into it ladies), but the after effects of the intense chemotherapy that saved her life and gave her congestive heart failure.  Her third husband kicked her out during her second round of chemo because he “just couldn’t deal with it”  (some men make me ashamed to be of the same gender) and Beth and I took her in.  Since then, we’ve seen her highs and lows, her good days and bad.  Last night was bad.  For medical reasons that are too involved to go into here, my friend became severely dehydrated.  This caused her blood calcium to spike which brought along a host of other body chemistry symptoms.  Suffice to say that she’ll likely be in ICU through Christmas.

But today was beautiful.  Her children and their father (her second husband, who still loves her) came to see her and stayed with her while Beth and I ran errands.  We had a lovely day, enjoying the time alone-together, shopping, holding hands, kissing, and generally relishing each other’s presence while we can.  It will rain tomorrow and the next day, and with Cherry Valley’s elevation and the temperature it has been keeping to, we may just have a white Christmas.  That is rare around here, as rare as a friendship that has lasted lifetimes.

A first for me

I’ve always been a big proponent of Rain.  I love to listen to it, to walk in it, to drive in it.  I only wish I didn’t get so cold while enjoying this precipitation.  I don’t remember ever notliking Rain, but in ninth grade I came to regard Rain as my immortal sibling, a sister who visits on a whim and I am always glad to see.  Perhaps I’ll relate my revelatory vision of Rain on this blog sometime soon.

Suffice to say that I’ve never wished Rain away, nor asked her to come again some other day.  Until now.  I’ll turn 40 in a couple months, and as a mid-life crisis gift, my wife, Beth, promised not to freak out if I bought a motorcycle for the occasion.  I had planned on a nice BMW touring motorcycle, but a friend made an offer I could not refuse.

 (photograph compliments of http://www.motorcyclecruiser.com)

It needed some work (12000 mile servicing, new front brakes, new rear tire) so last week I towed it from my friend’s house to the local Kawasaki dealership.  I drove it home this past Tuesday evening, then Rain came to town.  I don’t doubt that she came to congratulate me on my long awaited purchase and impending geezer-hood.  I was pleased to see her this morning on the way to work and at lunch as I sat on the back patio of the hospital lab munching a ham and cheese sandwich.  I stopped at Trader Joe’s to buy wine and whisky for the Thanksgiving festivities and was blissfully caught in a torrential downpour.  Women, children, and grown men running for cover, the sacrilege of the umbrella, and all I wanted to do was spin in the parking lot like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. 

I arrived home, soaked to the skin from the walk from the street.  The women of the house (Beth, my mother, our friend Kathie) quickly put me to work.  I hung a shelf, cored apples, moved a turkey, washed dishes, took out the trash twice, vacuumed the house, all the while the great orange beast in the garage called my name.  I sat on it searching for wall anchors and screws, brushed the tailpipes and nudged a mirror retrieving the table leaf and extra chairs.  Rain said, “In due time, brother.  In due time.”  She knew the pull of mechanics, boys and their toys, and steered me in the selfless direction.  It is usually women that create the family gathering.  If it were up to men, we would likely order pizza then indulge in some male bonding ritual like riding motorcycles or football or action movies.

I strive to avoid acting according to stereotypes and cliches.  If football and pizza were outlawed tomorrow, I wouldn’t miss them.  Diehard could perish as long as Pride and Prejudiceremained (the English mini-series with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth).  But there’s something about a motorcycle, even a big orange one that I can barely ride, that sets me smiling like a schoolboy and wishing for the rain to subside.  My sister will return, but for now, let me pull on gloves and buckle a helmet.  I have a Mean Streak in the garage and that trumps turkey.

California Autumn, like love, comes in spurts

Rain came to Southern California.  Only for a day or two, yes, but she came: occluded skies, wet patios, variegated sunlight, and a shit-eating grin on my face.  Nothing puts me in a good mood like a cloudy day with the chance that Rain will visit.  As the weather pattern travels east and the clouds break up, the sun peeks through at times lighting only half of the world.  Bright, stark highlights on all western exposures contrasts with dark grey eastern countenances.  Jacob’s Ladder descends just past my chimney while low, leaden clouds cover Jepson Peak and Mt. San Gorgonio in a cottony shroud.

Half light, half dark.  I was born on the Vernal Equinox, a time of year when day and night are equal with the darkness decreasing and the light gaining in duration.  This description seems to characterize me at times, caught between the light and dark, forever on the edge of one thing or another.  I often feel like I walk a tightrope above a liminal space between two existences.  I try to remain connected to the one in which I was born, but on days like this I sense the Veil, the mystery beyond, and all the feline foreboding cannot abate my curiosity.

Human existence is an exercise in waiting.  I wait at the DMV, wait for my coffee to brew, wait for publishers’ yay or nay on my poems, wait to see what’s on the Other Side.  Tom Petty sings, “The waiting is the hardest part,” and he’s right.  Like Alexis, I wait trying to distract myself with anything to avoid thinking about what I’m waiting for.  Sitting in the rain helps, hoping for a personal cleansing that will provide a little clarity to my world view.  Failing that, reading is a great distraction and right now Yusef Komunyakaa is “Talking Dirty to the Gods.”  Thank you Rain.  Thank you Yusef.