Wind

The winds, here again, rattling shingles and tossing garbage cans into the street. The winds, harbingers of change, nomads and poltergeists, gods and gremlins. The winds, hissing through dry leaves, through massive hardwood deciduous trees. The winds, camped outside the city rim last night in caravans, small fires encircled by music and twirling, maddening dances. The scent of ambergris burned to ash, patchouli in the creases of burnt umber skirts and pantaloons, home brewed spirits and crisply spiced stew.

Tomorrow, they would march through the pass together. Last night, hushed tones and slithering snickers, secrets and boastful challenges laid as foreshadows. Here, a djinn strokes his beard and leers at cloud maidens. There, a weasel god bends in impossible angles, each joint hung with bells. At nearly five hundred strong, each has a different desire, each has a duty and a station, each has waited for Selene to complete her open armed embrace and turn her back, for the sliver of Hecate’s team to warm in the stables. Sleep comes fitfully, last magicks are set, oathbinds are taken, and the sun crests over the Cascades to the sound of trumpets, drums, and dragons.

They will ride down onto the plains with war whoops and catcalls, with Romany lilts and wild, unhinged bravado. They will ride down onto the plains with unwavering purpose and will settle in to the hollows between stones, hover over reeds and fishes, perch in boughs and atop cornices. They will leap crevasses and with tiny precision, shake loose the seeds of dandelions, caress the feathers of sparrows, cool the tops of ladles.

Today, they make for Samhain, for the turning of the dark. Today, they make for the narrowing veil and all the spaces around it. In their charge, the land bows down. In their motion, the passing of promises. In their wake, stories lie like round shiny stones after the tide is gone.

Today, the winds here again, pressed against windows, slamming shutters, raising oceans and rivers. There is a blare and a rumble, serpentine tails and hooves.

Welcome to the Season of Mist and Bluster, Seattle.

Regular

There at the corner table I’m the last special, catfish on a bed of dirty rice. She sets it down and walks away from me, a little smile for the regular, a little wave from the kitchen. I’m on 45th between the bridged, overarching freeway and the packed squalor of the university’s avenue of bars, cheap boutiques and Indian food stalls. The pink, art deco neon of the Guild theatre smears against the window. Alterna-house music thumms and jangles from the speaker over the fresh pots of Vita.

She seats a couple next to me, an older pair who drink martinis while pouring over a map of highway 1 down to California. Occasionally they blurt out something about the merits of Mendicino as compared to Monterrey or the fastest way off the coast to Shasta. Across the aisle, two young women discuss two young men. An office worker sits at the three-seater bar in a skirt that doesn’t suit her and a face long from the day.

Last night’s fog had lifted by morning, and around me everyone is talking about the rain. Were we in Ohio, it would be a dirge for the end of summer or a lament for a lost weekend that I would be hearing. But this is Seattle. The mood is celebratory. Phrases like “was supposed to come two days ago and didn’t” and “I thought it would never get here” float through the restaurant. We all know, with a collective sigh of comfort and familiarity, that things are again how they are. It’s October and it’s raining.

After four non-contiguous years in the city, I’m finally getting it. It’s not that people endure the weather to remain here. It’s that the weather is being here. Seattle people, as often as they complain about the wet, adore every aspect of it. Ask any long-term resident what they think of the “bad” weather and they’ll just smile politely and shrug. There is no separating the North Country from the earth or the sky, unless your landscape is concrete, data ports, and glass. And really, there are many other places for you if that’s the case.

As the rain falls outside the window across the shallow sidewalks and butt gutters, I watch it as I have watched it before, tumbling over sleepy Wallingford in various states of slumber. This slowed procession of seasons breezes through wind chimes and the slush of traffic in droplets and in long grey lines. The rain takes hundreds of particular forms, each with its own weight, flavor, temperature and smell. It’s womblike, dark, wet, and earthy. It slides down one side of the mountains, sweeps through the valley, and careens off the other range in such a way that you can almost sense it drop, run, and lift.

It’s why I’m here, why many of us are here. This is a life that is chosen and chosen again. It’s probably why I love it so much.

This perception turns into a conversation with the waitress, another brief connection in a long string of restaurant industry workers. This one might last a few weeks or a few years. Her name is probably something “normal” sounding with an odd spelling, like Kathee or Corin, or maybe it’s something exotic like Singa or Renata, or maybe it’s down-home like Jennifer or Doreen. I’ve staked this place out now, become cozy with the tables, begun to recognize music styles, kept a mental record of appetizers I’ve been given (never the same twice). I’m on the verge of becoming a true regular again.

As the door to the outside inhales and exhales with the push and pull of soon-to-be-mittened hands on the knob, I realize that I’m about to write the second blog entry in recent weeks about restaurants. I seem to be back in my old life, frequenting favored spots with hardly a word, arriving and vanishing, attaching to the woodwork, watching and listening. This is a part of me that although I can’t say I like or dislike, is a natural, part of the interconnected whole of me.

It’s October and it’s raining.

It makes me tip higher than I would normally because of a renewed sense of home. I walk out and down the fall-laden Seattle backstreets as the lamplights flicker out in my passing. I turn towards the place where my filthy assistants await the meat-flavored tins of ash and organs.

Throughout the winter, I’ll probably take coffee here and wrap myself around Chodron or Stephenson, Hancock or Goldberg. Or maybe I’ll read comics and drink cola mixes on a Sunday morning. Whatever the case, I’ll be here every week, at least once. I never need a menu. Always the special for me, the special and water, hell drink for afters.

Table for one, and it’s great to see you again too.

Fire Goooood

When the burner caught on fire, I thought more about saving my vegetable soup than saving myself. And in that, I think is a hard fact about single life. The winning of small victories becomes the measuring points of weeks and months of living.

They are victories that you set for yourself, achieve, record, and celebrate. Make a great pot of coffee? Clean the bathroom? Avoid the television in favor of reading? Those things can keep you going throughout innumerable bad moments. And while you can't share them with your friends without sounding like a 3 year old (I went potty today by myself!), they do somehow count towards something in your favor that you can hold in your palm as your curl in to sleep. And that’s a great comfort. They take on weight and meaning, and their absence sometimes elicits loss and depression. I can’t tell you how many nights I fell peacefully into slumber because I’d finished two loads of laundry minutes before. I can’t tell you how many nights I thought as the moon rose that I’d forgotten to sort my recyclables and how that affected my dreams.

Try to call your best friend at 1am and tell them “I matched my socks up and put them in a drawer”. No really, just try it. The glory of this will be lost on them. The cretins.

That soup was the product of an hour of preparation. Losing it was more than having to find something else to eat. It stood for a certain defeat over my day, the loss of a possible victory and achievement. And I couldn’t have that. But even more than this, the soup also stood for the easing of the need to determine dinner-time meals for the next three nights. It stood for routine.

Routine for a single person, or at least for me, is akin to ‘not having to think about shit’ and ‘not having to think about thinking about shit’. When you are the sole (and soul) motivator in your life, responsible for getting yourself out of bed, cleaning your own dishes, de-pooping the cats, finding, making and eating meals, or having the wherewithal to care about any of this, routine becomes your savior. Predeterminism is subscribed to, and you set about creating a forced fate and destiny for the wee you who believes so quaintly in free choice. Parking in the same spot not only alleviates the need to decide where to park, but also diffuses the effort it takes to realize that this is a thing you have to decide. “I have to decide where to park? And then I have to decide which brand of sprouts to buy? I have to do this every week of my life????” becomes “This is where I park and these are the sprouts I buy, and while I’m not having to think about those things, I’ll instead think about other things that mean more to me”.

I bring this up because in living alone, working from home, and dwelling in a city where few people know my name, and even fewer are available for lunches out, road trips, or quickly grabbed café sprawls, routine is sometimes all I seem to have. Unless I move myself into my car, turn the key, and proceed in some destination or put on my shoes and step out my door, it is just as easy to lie around in my own filth and draw the curtains. Nobody is going to know right now if my toilet seat is up or down just as nobody is going to know how much actual work went in to any of a large number of my projects tonight. Nobody is going to know that the cat fell asleep on my face at lunch and I slept with my leg in the air for an hour until we both jumped up with a start and went guiltily about our tasks.

I’ll go further. Unless somebody breaks down in their car outside my house and knocks to use the phone, it’s possible for me to go through a week straight without talking to another soul. It’s not only possible, it takes more than a modicum of effort to not have this happen. I self-start my own meditation, my own progress on artistic, spiritual and web projects, my own work schedule, my own allocated play time, my own psychotherapy, my own guilty pleasures, my own finances, chores, and even distractions. I change my own moods. My random inspirations above the weekly social foray come solely from emails, chat rooms, media, phone calls and encounters with strangers. I sleep alone in a big bed and set my bedtime or ignore my bedtime. I watch my weight and deal with my own sniffles. If I fall down, I help myself up. And for me, this is how it has been for more years than I can remember, briefly interrupted by spates of a more balanced and community-flavored existence. I have been alone, and often profoundly alone, for a very long time.

And that’s fine. I know this life and am very good at living it. I draw substance from silence and prefer absorption to expression. I like to watch. I hear things. And I know that this will pass as all things pass into something that is very likely to include more people, more conjoined responsibility and more spontaneous magic. Still, it’s also why I find myself reaching my hand into an open flame to move the soup pot aside with hardly a thought. I don’t even perceive of the fact that fire burns. I’m already thinking past that possibility to another outcome. What will I do without my soup? My soup is worth dying for because I’m not willing to upset the apple cart of my synaptical orchestra. The big brain has closed off all receptors.

I’m not sure what an orchestra would do with an apple cart, but there you go. I suppose musicians have to eat too.

My hand in the flame is a stark and powerful image to me. Because it shows me just how easy it is to get lost, how simple it becomes to not hold the present moment before you and instead avoid the present moment because the sheer presence of the present is overpowering. It shows me how even writing in this blog starts out as something fun and without rules and boundaries, and ends up being one of those small victories or small defeats (and how happy I am in writing it because I know it will count as a daily victory for Wednesday) and takes on a purpose, a structure and a themeology. It shows me how the big brain churns and rolls over wheat fields and field mice indiscriminately. It shows me how crucial is it for either other people to shake up your world regularly, or how crucial is it for you to detach from all your mechanisms, get naked and run around the block mentally and spiritually and live NOW.

The point to this is that a crow came to visit while I was on my way to the bank. He landed several feet from me on a street sign and leaned in as crows often do when they have something to say or pointedly not say. I planted my feet and looked at him. He rubbed his beak along the metal, fluffed himself up, and if a crow could smack his lips, shake his head and sigh, he did. There is something forgotten deep within me desperately trying to break up through the rafters and canvass to be free. He flew away. I held my stomach.

The point to this is that sparrows with twigs have been fluttering around the cracks in my apartment desperately seeking some way inside.

The point of this is that the house did not burn down and the soup was fantastic. It will feed me for several days and I won’t have to figure out what to eat. I’m going to post this blog and curl into sleep with it in my palm. And you know, as nice as all that makes me feel, I am seeing today at last that not only they, but the feeling of their victories, is illusion and trickery. It is a construct. I must disengage from it and from a dependence on it.

What really matters is the feeling of heat on my hand… and the fact that it wasn’t until I felt the heat, that I had something to write about again.