Raindrops and Myths
8-25-03
It's drizzling rain outside my window. I can hear it as I lay in bed. I've lived in Arizona my entire life. I love the monsoon season. I heard about a mythological city called Seattle where it rains forever. Eric told me about Seattle once. He told me you could just walk from coffee shop to coffee shop all day long, watching the rain, listening to grunge rock. I like that. I wish a place like that existed. I would spend the rest of my life inside coffee shops, writing bad poetry and short stories about the rain. I'd use the rain as an analogy for everything; beauty, love, suffering, hatred, salad, monkeys, I wouldn't care. Just as long as I could write about the rain. Maybe I would learn acoustic guitar. I'd sit in coffee shops, and watch the rain, and play bad grunge music to my bad poetry, and it would be lovely. Sometimes I would paint. I wouldn't try to paint the rain though. I don't think I could use my art for that, there would be too much pressure for it to have to actually look like rain. I would try to capture the rain in other things though. I would try to capture the "inner raindrops." I don't know what that means. I like the monsoon season though. A lot of people complain about the humidity. I guess I do too sometimes. I go through deodorant like it was candy. Not in the same way that I go through candy, just at the same rate. I don't digest it or anything weird like that. I just use a lot of it. I try to catch myself when I'm complaining about the humidity, because it sounds like I'm annoyed at the rain. I could never be annoyed at rain. It's beautiful. The other day I was watching three of my friends, and they were sitting on a park bench in the middle of a monsoon, screaming into the rain, letting it soak them completely. Each of them had their arms around the others shoulders, and they were alternating between laughing and yelling into the rain. It was awesome to watch. I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately. It goes really well with the rain. After church yesterday, I was trying to meet Benji and Susan at the 5 and Diner. Benji gave me directions. He said it was somewhere on Speedway, and I went up and down Speedway twice and I couldn't find it. I finally found the yellow pages and discovered that there wasn't a 5 and Diner on Speedway. I was disappointed. Maybe there is a 5 and Diner on a Speedway in Seattle. I don't know. I enjoyed it though, because I was driving in this heavy rain, and the radio station was playing Operation Ivy and the Suicide Machines, and all sorts of punk and ska that I never hear the radio play. I set the volume at full blast, and I drove through the rain for an hour. I finally ended up sitting in my bed with my favorite jacket on, eating left-over Chinese food, listening to an Indie band called Bright Eyes, and editing a poem I wrote about the death of Achilles. I'm trying to write a postmodern version of the Odyssey, where Odysseus starts to doubt the wisdom of the gods, and then he becomes an existentialist. He just keeps denying that the gods exist despite everything that is happening, because he can't see them or touch them, but mostly he just can't understand them. I've been thinking a lot about how people pass over the Greek myths and comedies and tragedies, and how much they have shaped modern thought, and about how much people are missing because they don't think that myths are relevant. Maybe that's true. I don't know. I just love the characters. How they can be so screwed up, and yet still do something heroic and good before they fade away in to the night. There is a beauty to that which kind of feels like the beauty of the rain. I don't know what that means. But I just love that three men can sit on a park bench in the middle of a monsoon and laugh and scream into the rain. That there can still be beauty and adventure in the middle of suffering. I guess I'm still trying to capture the "inner raindrops". . . Still searching for Seattle. Maybe I can find the 5 and Diner after all. I don't know. |
