the cool of the day

The weekend felt longer than it was, scored random swank at garage sales in Lakewood, attempted to jump a friend's dead battery to find out later that it was just a dead car, stood outside in a suburban parking lot in the rain marveling at the kindness of strangers, before heading back to the neighborhood for a book discussion on Cannery Row which was good times all around, since I've loved Steinbeck since my teens and getting to have unpretentious and smart conversations about books is always welcome in my world.

The Saturday heat wasn't so much out of character, just the feeling of sun and concrete is overwhelming, but I walked the dog I was watching down to the lake where I waded into the who-knows-what water up to my ankles and she immersed herself when she wasn't trying to roll in the dead fish on the beach or make friends with the pit bulls tied to the tree. It feels too warm to cook sometimes, so I drink lemonade and glass after glass of water and pore through the pile of library booksale paperbacks, filling in all the blanks of my book collection with Kafka, Orwell, Huxley (the current state of affairs has made my political sentiments more dystopian by the day), fragments of Sappho, sundry epic poetry. The cat curls up on the couch and looks on with green eyes.

Sunday morning it is warm, and we're all tired, and the humidity messes with the tuning pegs and pickups of our instruments, I don't get the crunch I want, but I'm too slackerly to tweak the knobs too much and instead ponder thoughts and feelings and human frailties, thankful that any butterflies of feelings have long flown away. We celebrate a birthday at my parents' and I hang out with my younger cousins, talk politics with the bro-in-law, and gardens with the uncles as we celebrate the coming rain until I realize I've left the windows open.

Nothing's damaged, I walk the dog through the darkening streets in the cool of the day, thinking about edens, since everything feels like it's growing, the blue water in the distance, the swirl Van Gogh sky, the flecks of lightning insect sparkle on the grass, and the children riding tricycles on broken pavement. Her neighbors are drinking beer and showing off their guns. The house is finally cooled and I curl up with F. Scott Fitzgerald and defer the phone calls needing to be returned another day. I feel like I'm in love with summer rain like few other things.

nowhere fast

It feels like May outside, and I drop off my car, noticing that the gas prices keep rising and remembering what life was like before transportation. I got my license late in life, only when I really had to, since the bus line only went so far and my idealistic dreams died in the wake of student loans and other adult-world concerns that didn't preclude me from getting rides from other people with bigger carbon footprints.

I've realized recently that I've forgotten what it's like to be car-less, to set aside a block of time to do things, to slow down one's pace. There's a restless part within my soul that's been there as long as I was old enough to wander, when I'd spend my teens ambling through Parmastan on trips to the library, the goodwill, and the record store, those days and nights when I just had to get out of my dorm room or apartment and go somewhere, seeking small shards of the sublime in the most mundane of surroundings that suddenly became more beautiful or interesting and kept my sanity on the days when I felt like I was cracking up.

When one walks and actually looks, there is way more to see than what's passed at 25 miles an hour. The shadowy desolate figurines in a shop window, the way the light falls across an empty storefront, green-eyed cats staring out the windows of basement apartments, the five-minute dramas of cigarette breaks outside of corner stores. There are others out too, and I find that I avoid eye contact much more than I used to, but my eyes eternally thirsty take in every small detail of these familiar streets on the way to the library or the drugstore as if I'm seeing them for the first time.


Some who lived in supposedly better times would say my generation goes nowhere and does nothing, because we're too busy being on the Internet, and while I think I might be one of the last cohorts of kids who played outside unsupervised for hours on a regular basis, building forts in trees and riding my bike up to the pool in cutoffs and swimsuit without much fear of abduction, I think our lack of movement has something to do with technology but also more to do with the lack of economic power that previous generations took for granted. We have to find our beauty here, in case we never get to see elsewhere.

I get the feeling that if one looked into the past, for everyone who took to the open road and started fresh, there were others who had neither the means nor the lack of ties that make it easy or desirable to do so. The mythos of new beginnings is a microcosm of manifest destiny dressed in the garb of rebellion, of trust fund kids and people with nothing to lose, while others of us cling to our roots and branch out towards the sun when we can.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

pedestrianity

It was still warm enough last night that I could walk and despite losing some cash between my apartment and the drugstore, it was so liberating to not feel trapped within my walls come sunset. While others are talking about the end of the world, this is feeling like a new beginning.
I grew accustomed to walking, not having a car for so long, and weekends in my teens were spent wandering through Parmastan, pilgrimaging to the record store, the Goodwill, and the library, or down to Timeless to get new bass strings and wish I had the money for the vintage Gibson SG on the wall.

In college it was getting out of my dorm room to walk through the empty streets of Kent past the house parties and barfights to clear my head and ponder and soak in the way the street lights glowed golden after sunset, swing on the playground swings or when the church was open, to go sit in the sanctuary and just be still. Most of the crimes in the town back then involved underage drinking or the kinds of things that happen at places I didn't go to anyway, so I moved with relative impunity, at all hours of the night. It's said that bad things happen at that time, and they probably do sometimes, but those hours under the moonlight and the streetlights and the neon have always been when I've had the best conversations and felt most alive. This thing I dearly love to do that others find strange. At least I'm not the only one.

Upon moving out, I found Lakewood perfect for these sojourns too, enough people on the street all the time, at the bars and the pizza parlors, hanging out at the record stores, sitting on the balconies overlooking the main drag. When I moved to the Almost-Hood last year, I loved wandering through there in the summers when I lived with roommates and such, but found living alone extremely isolating, as certain streets at all times, and most places after sunset, felt like no-go areas and it killed me to drive one or two blocks over to hang out with some friends or see a band, because of the drugs and the prostitution and the drama that could go down. What's the point of having everything nearby if Cinderella's going to turn into a pumpkin by midnight?

It never occurred to me that this act of wandering with some purpose not so much of destination but observation had a precedent, though I make no pretense towards originality. But my fellow peon, with his Francophile leanings and recommendations of sundry literature inevitably led to my discovery of the concept of flaneur, which resonated strongly, that while I don't do the pleasure-seeking more akin to Baudelaire, the restless spirit, the insatiable need to observe and understand the workings of the urban space and to be inspired creatively, that I understand even if it seems strange to those who don't do these things.

And while I've done these solo so often, having another companion for these journeys brings its own pleasures, to share the sights, to see what I might have missed, the conversations that ensue, the moments of silence, of shared camaraderie, the occasional sense of awe, and the knowing that the laughter will bubble up at the same time. These are the souls that I know are kindred, because they understand.

Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs
Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos
Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing
White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word
But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile