RainWe have had our first big storms this year, later than usual and quite cold. Of all the noises at night that could wake a person up, between the blaring car alarm or the dizzying siren, the cough of a lover or the shout of a drunk, it is only the pittering and pattering of hefty-sized rain droplets pummelling against the too-thin glass windows, with their decaying wooden encasements adding to the jingle a nice reverberation, it is only this sound that wakes one with delight rather than pain. Even more so if the petrified hail enters the picture, as it did just the other night. The sound grew louder and louder, from a few falling bits to many millions, and the louder it started to bang against the windows the more frequent it became too until everything grew so polyphonic that I had to get out of bed, with both cats in tow, to peek out the window: as expected there was the pelting rain coming in at a nice angle thanks to the wind but accompanying it was a blanket of white on the ground! San Francisco, and San Franciscans, are not equipped for such beauty! It forces us into ecstatic revery way too easily. What a sound, though.
The rain at night, especially the first memorable storm of the season, always calls to my mind a tiny little story that my friend Neal wrote for the literary magazine we used to make back in high school (More on the history of this dead-end publication to come.) This particular piece was from the fourth issue we made, in the winter of 1999. We had made the first two almost back to back in 1998, gave up for a spell, then made issue three after I had a bad trip to the dentist and was very novacained and vicodinned, and issue four was more like a "b-sides and singles collection" culled from the rejects of the past three issues. It was the most special, though, to me and had the smallest edition (we only printed 20 or 25, and hardly gave any of them away - despite our efforts, friends widely rejected them!) Neal took his half and hand painted every cover, then wrapped them in beautiful vellum and painted more atop that while I took my half and took photographs for each special copy with each future owner in mind. We used to write them all by hand, ala Cometbus and Ken Shipley's old 'zines, and issue four was the last before switching to the ease of the computer. We were at the dawn of the year 2000, I was about to graduate high school and Neal was about to drop out of college for a semester. While none of these details matter to anyone but me, I feel they deserve at least some light and maybe some of today's rain. His story stuck with me, and for almost ten years now I think of it during each storm. Reading it later on, after having imagined it and pieced it together from memory, always produces a strange feeling. The writing is decent for what it was, hardly worth much but packed with personal ephemera, perhaps. I had reproduced the piece here, verbatim, and after leaving it for a day to sit and stew, coming back to it I found it had started to stink instead. I guess it didn't start to stink, it's been dead for near a decade now and corpses that old just dry up, but my impression of it (this evening as opposed to yesterday morning) grew dim.
That, even that, reminds me of the rain though --- the way it changes the world. That dry pile of dirt, when wettened, starts to spread and bubble and change much in the same way a remembered bit of personal writing does. Time, that great killer and curer, has replaced what were once admirable feelings drummed up during youth with these now remote feelings of the adult variety. How did you view the rain as a child? How do you view it now? A hinderance in the way of your work-commute? A reason to build a fort out of cardboard in the creek beside your house?
Rain, that is the main point though - I think the little story, as uneventful as it is, and as "angsty" as it could be read, there is a really nice point: Storms always make us want to cuddle, and with the rain is always a precipitous feeling of sadness. Yes, common in poems since the dawn of language: Sun and Rain, the ever contrasting symbols for happiness and sadness. The run on that runs on to the end of that second paragraph, while not amazing, it does capture what someone felt at some point in time. Rain makes a lot of people feel this way; self-pitying, dried up, burnt out, in need of extra coddling. Maybe that is why I remember this one stupid little piece of writing by this old friend - it carries inside it a tiny little self portrait which in turn prompts the reader to address his own portrait (either as a clumsy teenager or as an embarrassed adult.) What is funny is that when I found this story so that I could re-type it, there was included between the pages a loose-leaf sheet of lined paper that must have been pulled from one of my own old diaries, written about the subject of Sun and how often people advise glum people to cheer up simply because that Sun happens to be shining:
June is here and someone told me that it's summer now and wanted me to get happy about it, I said I had been trying to tell myself that same exact thing for the past week and only sometimes would it work and force my stupid body onto my bicycle to pedal around the town and to the places that remain. June is here, and isn't that just so goddamn wonderful? Sun and sheets crisp ready to sleep. Always ready to sleep.
And at night she wakes up and thinks about things. She comes into the bed and sits at the edge and faces me and stares and I tell her to go to sleep, that its dark and it is time to sleep but she still sits up instead. She's a good cat, and like a good cat she won't listen to me when I want her to do something - a good cat is like that and she is the best and even if I want her to sleep she will defy me just to defy me and isn't that a lot like my defiance against the sun when June is here and someone tells me to be happy because of it? It is sometimes enough just to trust that it is nice outside without having to see it, and the cat knows this and behaves like this. We're a sad couple.
These thoughts make me feel not so alone, these soothe my eyes, not so burning now. Why are tears hot? What part of the body warms them up, and why do those ducts see fit to push the liquid out so hot on my cheeks? Organic chemistry is strange, I don't understand one bit of it. I guess they are better warm, ice cold wouldn't feel as good. Blood, though, feels cold when it comes out. Hot as it is blue beneath the air, then when turning red on the skin it is cold -
(the page is torn here, and the fragment ends. June, 2000)
If Sun is always a reason to leave, it is nice to have Rain as a reason to stay inside. Rain Checks are the best kinds of checks in the whole entire world, it is the only time when someone gives you nothing and you feel better than if they would have given you something.
