It started that morning, a taste of rain, fresh and wet, in the air. Just a hint, just a touch. Then, at the train halt, waiting to come home, a thickness in the air. And a rolling peal of thunder. At home, the maple tree in the back whispered as occasional raindrops bounced off its leaves. I wandered back and forth, trying to find a spot that wasn't overshadowed by branches or eaves, vaguely frantic as the noise picked up. Yes, the noise said, it's raining. Four dry months, and it's raining. Ducking inside long enough to grab my keys and throw open the windows, I dropped myself into the front seat of the car and rolled down the windows. I could hear it spattering off the roof, thin sheet of metal overhead, and feel it on my arm. Two years here, and I'd never seen lightning. Now, here it was, a herald. September, it said, deep and low, September, and Summer's nearly over. Cool weather will come soon, thrum pitta pitta pitta. Then, it faded, just the occasional grumble of thunder and the damp spots on the ground as a reminder.
In honour of my admission at prolonged last that being in love is far less amusing than striking myself directly in the face with a cast-iron skillet, that having loved and lost is little to no consolation, I have steered my course toward the 'never having loved at all' camp, in hopes that I should find it less painful.

It will, in any case, have to be more productive than the current state of affairs, in which I focus an inordinate amount of time and energy into constant failure and making myself as miserable as possible through what I can only assume is deliberate malice on my part.

Now, I do not decry the entire condition of romance. Far from it. I've even seen results on occasion that I would consider pleasant. I applaud those lucky few. However. It's like sticking a fork in the toaster. There's them what can, and them what can't. Them what can gets toast. Them what can't had better learn to like traumatic shock or plain bread.

And as much as I love the smell of ozone in the morning, plain bread begins to look pretty damn attractive after a while. Unless you're gifted with super-heroic reserves of stubbornness and idiocy. And, as I can tell you from experience, even the most heroic idiot may eventually start to yearn for bread that doesn't melt butter.

It's not so much anguish and proper Gen-X Gothboi angst as fatigue. I get tired of wanting and being told it's not for me. I do not 'fall in love' well or easily--in fact, I can count on one hand the number of times it has happened. But I've become depressingly good at being attracted to people. The obvious solution is to stop. Alas, Neil, this means that your sister will never get the chance to politely reject me.

I continue to love--I have many friends, and I am ecstatic to have them, and love them dearly--but I renounce and sever any ties beyond that. Now. Having said that, I suspect that within a week I'll get a severe attack of moronity, probably meet my friend in Berkeley or something and fall completely into infatuation again.

If I do, don't bother to hand me the fucking skillet. I know right where it is, trust me.

I read in the paper today about a high school boy who had sewed his mouth shut. He took needle and embroidery floss and, with crude stitches, drawn his lips close. School officials, of course, took alarm. Once they had called for emergency medical and cut his threads, they asked him what he was thinking, how he could have done such a thing to himself.

He told them he was feeling depressed and didn't want to talk to anybody that day.

I understand the feeling.

There's something a little magical about the new train halt at Hayward Park. (Wayward Park, I keep thinking to myself.) Something just a little subversive, not like the forced magic in downtown Mountain View, on Castro Street at night, with the fae trees arching upward in crystalline reach. On one side of the grimy tracks is a Denny's and a Mighty K K-Mart store--two of the most impersonal businesses in the 'personal services' sector. On the other side is a string of auto shops, plumbing and electrical warehouses, cluttered back lots full of heavy equipment with mysterious purposes, empty cable spools, and one crotchety black dog. Dawg, rather. This part of San Mateo is a sort of industrial wasteland, the roadside awash in tyre-slaying detritus, with several on- and off-ramps for the highways that meet over head and push traffic here and there.

Running between the station and the dog (who lifts his head and barks suspiciously) is a drainage/runoff ditch--usually a cracked dusty gash, a wound in the ground with pools of sickly yellow-green along the bottom. Somebody had different ideas. I blame one of the construction crew, acting outside officially sanctioned duties. This stretch of ground is verdant, exploding with shin tickling swaths of grasses that embrace the ground. Sprinkled liberally through the grass is a myriad of wildflowers, in a mad variety of shapes and colours; bright red and yellow, lilac, royal blue, some poppies, some bells, and one ambitious tangled sprout with cheery orange blossoms that badly wants to be a bush.

As the sun sets in the evening, the day cools and a warm breeze tickles the grass and wakes the crickets and frogs. Between the two, the white noise they generate masks out any other noise barring the shriek of the train whistle and the occasional combined shout of the roller hockey players in the parking lot.

Addendum: Even magic dies. It's August, and the culvert is again dry and a uniform shade of dusty yellow-brown, choked with dead and crackling vegetation. Even Magic dies. But Magic also returns.

Empty miles spill out before me, vanishing into the dark as soon as they escape the narrow boundaries of the headlamps. A wan orange-yellow moon frowns down disparagingly from between two silent dead windmills on the hilltop. I turn away so she can't see that I'm crying. I don't know what I've done--I flatter myself and assume it's something /I've/ done, of course. At first I could pass it off as pre-occupation; being caught mid-project, the bustle of the room, a hostess in denouement clean up flurry. But it soon became evident that, while I was not being ignored, there was a distance prybarred between us--a disturbing chasm hewn out unexpectedly. And then an awkward goodbye, as she is forced to make contact with me during her escape before she can fling herself into her own emptiness. With the doppler fade of the engine, she's swallowed up by the night. And the empty miles spill out before me, vanishing into the dark.
"I don't think it's working," she said, "Do you?"
She asked as if it made a difference. Maybe to her it did.

When she wanted to talk, I'd expected a frank, uncomfortable talk about re-tinkering and fine-tuning the rules of the relationship. Another rough spot to be smoothed. So, as might be imagined, I was a little stunned. And now that's all I can manage. Stunned. I envy her a little, in a clinical and distant sense. She has regret, sadness, remorse.
I have 'stunned'.

I'm sure that sooner or later anguish will come and fill the emptiness soon enough, fear and pain and a few friends following along behind. I hope. There's always the nagging doubt that hides in the shadows. "What if nothing changes?" it whispers, voice like dry scales rubbing together, eyes shining like polished abyss, "What if you just keep on not feeling anything and this time it doesn't stop?"
Unpacking would shut the voice up for a while, tearing apart boxes and freeing the life I used to have from storage. A few hours later I found myself in front of a gathering of bottles of alcohol, fine liquor that I usually just admire as it sits in my pantry. Somehow I'd ended up on the floor, like a marionette whose master had wandered off.
One by one, I reached out and examined each bottle, turning it this way and that on the carpet, and then letting it fall. Then, the ritual complete, I surveyed the field of fallen soldiers. No, I didn't even have the interest, the energy, the capability to drink heavily.

And now I'm in the office, staring blankly at the CD collection. Something to make noise, to drown out the co-workers. Melissa makes me ache even when there's nothing wrong. But Joy Division would help me stay numb until I was in a better location for dealing with the aching. And then there's NIN. I flip the discs back and forth, not really looking at any of them, but pretending to be making a decision.
Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip.

He'd set his alarm for half an hour earlier than he had to. At first, this drove me mad. I'd leap out of bed, adrenalin raging, already running on my last-minute schedule that allowed me the maximum sleep time every night, and he'd blink lazily and follow me around the room with his eyes, sprawled across the bed and looking amused. Eventually I'd grab a pillow and beat him until we were both laughing.
After a few months, though, I found myself falling into his schedule. It was inevitable, really. So every morning we'd lie there for half an hour, curled up together and enjoying the start of the day. The snooze alarm didn't go off every nine minutes to remind us to hurry up, and there was never any suggestion that we should be doing anything else to move along the schedule. It was a sort of magic, and it set the tone for the rest of the day-less frantic, less frenetic, more focused.
"Sensei," I murmured to him one morning, an arm draped over his shoulder, "I really like this-the quiet time in the morning. I think it's improved my work in the dojo too."
And he just rolled over, smiling that cryptic smile of his, and kissed me. "I know," was all he said.
He always knew. And even if he didn't, he had some wonderful story that was just as good, if not better. I once complained sleepily that the cel-phone reception in his house was dismal. "Hmmm," he said thoughtfully, which was the prelude to his fictions. "That's because the house is insulated with lead. I think the architect was more concerned with Superman than inclement weather."
I laughed, but he was just getting warmed up. "It's one of the problems with buying a second-hand evil supervillain's hideout. Like the great big red self-destruct button in the middle of the living room. I finally had to try and turn it into a coffee table."
His voice during this half hour was always deep, soft and just a little sleepy-maybe a little delicate, too, as if he didn't want to break the spell by being too excited about anything.
"I lost a few paperboys to the Laser Defence System. The sharks in the swimming pool in the back yard were pretty neat, though. And I could feed them the bodies of co-workers who pissed me off."
"I'm going to get a pillow and beat you with it if you don't stop."
"I know."
Stupid from the heat and fatigue, I shuffled through the rapidly darkening streets. The bus had, as was its wont, utterly failed to arrive, and I had finally surrendered myself to the prospect of hiking the few miles home.
The hot streets reached up through my boots and burned the soles of my feet at every step, but I found that keeping to the grass soothed them just a little. The tactic of searching for grass to walk on led me to wander crookedly along unfamiliar streets. In the box-like suburban structure of the neighbourhood, I could not actually get /lost/, but I was uncertain where I was when I glanced across a parking lot and saw a stream of traffic.
El Camino, I thought, El Dorado and nearly home. In the centre of the driveway to the parking lot, splashed by a streetlight, a sign reading 'Permit Parking Only' jutted up out of the asphalt. What I failed to notice was its brother, lurking in the shadow to one side, which sternly said 'No Trespassing or Loitering'. Mother Mary intercede, for I was about to enter the Imperial Forbidden City of the Sunnyvale Police Department.
There was one car in the entire lot that wasn't parked and empty, and my path took me straight toward it. In retrospect, I know this had to look threatening. At the time, I was just suspicious that something beyond neighbourly interest caused the officer to slip around behind his car, placing it between he and me, and ask if he could be any service. I pointed over my shoulder, back the way I'd come, and then waved at ECR and said something about a short cut.
"Didn't you see the sign?" he asked, a bit confused and suspicious.
I smiled and nodded cheerily (if tiredly) and said the worst three words I could have, aside from 'I hate cops'. "Permit Parking Only."
For the next twenty minutes, Officer Intrepid and I played 'getting to know you'. He was polite. I was polite. Neither of us made any sudden moves. My single faux pas was putting my hand in my pocket. A back-up patrol car arrived, and the other officer lurked nervously inside it until eventually he was waved away.
As I said, I was stupid with the heat, so when he asked me "Have you ever been arrested?" I had to just bite my tongue and shake my head and try not to tell him about the thirty-two 8x10" colour glossy photographs with the circles and the arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what it was.
My answers had been slow and halting as I tried to respond to his further questions, I'd moved a week ago and didn't know my home phone number, I mis-remembered where I was coming from, so he thought I was on drugs anyway. Arlo Guthrie would only have cemented this opinion.
Not until I had my hands behind my back, both thumbs in his firm grip as he patted me down thoroughly with the other hand (after politely requesting permission) did I realise how furious I was. Quick on the heels of that thought was the knowledge of what a poor time it was to realise this. I may have tensed briefly, but he had the good manners to pretend not to notice.
We finished, and he warned me not to let him catch me wandering around the Forbidden City in a drugged stupor again, and then sent me back the way I'd come. I was nearly out of the parking lot, looking for the 'No Trespassing' sign I'd heard so much about, when a sedan pulled up out of the dark and somebody inside trained a halogen-coated piece of the sun on me.
"Excuse me, sir, but didn't you see the sign?"
I was in the middle of the insane throes of moving-and-not-looking-for-work which led me to resume my more nocturnal habits. This is why I was skulking around the living room in the quiet hours when I heard The Noise.
We had squirrels that would race back and forth across the roof like neighbourhood children doped up on Hallowe'en candy. This was not that sort of noise. There's a dog next door who very cheerfully greets me when I drag the garbage can to the kerb for pick up. Neither was it that sort of noise.
There was a cracking, a squealing, and a thump. It was a very deliberate series of noises, and it was followed by a valiant splash. Now, these sorts of noises are not welcome ones when you're alone in a house full of boxes in the middle of the night. One might, given a certain amount of liberty, even call them startling. And I was startled. Traditional images, the empty-eyed transient with a thick glass bottle, the ethically-impaired young gangers with crow bars, stocking caps and huge pants, the gaunt sociopath with a hunting knife and a compulsive need to taste blood, these all flicked through my head as I moved toward the large glass patio door and the living room light silhouetted me starkly to anybody out there.
I flicked on the backyard light and there in the dull yellow glare were three raccoons--one floundering about in the pool, and two waiting anxiously at the side for him. Now, keep in mind that I'd never seen anything bigger than squirrels and ravens in this yard. We were in the middle of Sunnyvale. But there they were, big as life and staring at me guiltily. Or at least the two on shore were. The third was trying to find his way out of the pool. It was kind of like the Discovery Channel, but with an increased possibility of getting rabies.
Once the others decided I wasn't going to throw anything or do something rash like actually open the door, they set about their business again. This was when I realised that their business was apparently beating the crap out of this third coon. My guess was that they'd backed him out onto a branch of the pine tree that overhung the pool until it gave and dropped him. Now they were clawing at him and screeching indignantly as he tried to find a spot where he could climb out.
Instinctively, I got my back up and felt I had to jump in and defend the underdog. This is, for some strange reason, where my sympathies lie. (Fight the power and all that.) But then I thought for a moment. Raccoons have been taking care of themselves for a long time, and there's no reason to think that my meddling in their internal affairs was going to help. Besides, maybe he did something to deserve it. Like saying 'all your base are belong to us' one too many times or leaving his god damn dirty dishes in the sink for weeks.
So I paused there uncertainly until finally they settled the matter firmly and decisively when I saw the soggy exhausted coon stop paddling for a moment and sink under the water. Even if I *could* sit and watch him drown or go somewhere else and not watch him drown, which I didn't think I really could because I'm a big softie, *I'd* be the one who had to fish him out of the pool. And there was no way I wanted to see that on my to-do list the next day.
So I threw open the sliding door, the rattle of the sticky tracks getting their attention nicely, and told them to move their furry executioner asses into somebody else's yard or I'd kick them into the pool too. They both came to the conclusion that this would be a fine time to investigate the possibility of finishing this business elsewhere, and scuttled up over the fence. After finally managing to pitch himself up onto the cement, the third one eyed me dubiously and then splashed off through the side yard where the afore-mentioned dog cheerfully greeted him from the other yard.
I didn't see any of them return that night, so I can only assume they concluded matters satisfactorily.
There's a supermarket near where I live now, at the tail end of a strip mall with a liquor store, Mexican restaurant, hole in the wall pizza joint, dingy video store and a few other shop fronts. For quite some time, I thought it was called 'Mercado del Value' which sounded wonderfully... There is an indescribable quality about this place which I cannot find a small collection of words to wrap around. Later, when I discovered it was actually the 'Mercado del Valle' I really wished the original name had stuck.
The stock is a curious mix of standard stores (tinned sphagetti-o's, twelve packs of toilet tissue) asian specialty stores (six kinds of instant noodle packets, shrimp chips) and Mexican specialty stores (tamarind candy and mexican limes).
The freezer has been broken since I moved, its carcass sprawled along the length of the aisle, and its replacement lurks in the middle of the causeway, sullenly waiting for its space to open up. The butcher has no shrink-wrapped styrofoam, and instead he puts a plastic bag in a plastic bag and then knots the top. There is an element of the place that reminds me of an open air market in the Durango area, something less refined, something more exotic.
I have no idea right now how to conclude this, but I've wanted to put this down 'on paper' for months and decided this was the time.
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