Rainy Day

Just dump your buckets of precipitation already! Don't you hate it when dark clouds linger over you without letting their rain fall? It's like that friend who looks at you with a smug look that says "hey i have something i should tell you, but i'm not going to tell, just to make you mad." Awesome. Not awesome like God is awesome. Awesome like having a lot of homework right before you graduate. Awesome like persecution is awesome. Awesome that makes you stare into the most presentable orifice of the object and think, "Right now, i really wish you weren't here, but in a little while, i will be glad, so i'm gunna deal with it. I hope you're down with that."

In these last days, no lines stand out to me more than these from Eliot's Ash Wednesday:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

Come home. That's where the heart is. And if it's not, then you should look into finding one. (you mgiht be wondering what the antecedent of "one" is. Honestly, either of the possibilities are fine with me.)

What could i be doing more productive than this? Online witnessing maybe. Not much else. My efforts are really bearing much fruit. Juicy red ruby grapefruit so delicious that you scrape those last innards off the peel wall and slurp its bitterness down...down.

I have suffered from lack of writing creatively lately. Since that is the suffering i bring to you, rest assured that my life is quite peachy. Peaches so juicy---(just kidding haha). But mayeb i will leave you with a piece of my California trip essay i wrote last year (almost exactly a year ago...weird...make sure you catch the footnotes...the setting is white-water rafting in Colorado.)

My group of three teenagers, four old guys, and a guide comfortably fit on our big orange raft. Our guide’s name was Sarah, an outdoorsy-looking college girl who works full-time as an EMT. She goes to school somewhere south of wherever Glenwood Springs is[1]. Guiding tourists down treacherous rapids is just a side job. Only now do I realize that being an EMT is probably a job-requirement for these guides. At least I’d be safe if I flew out of the raft and cracked my skull on a chunk of granite.

I could go on to name the nine rapids[2] and describe how we got wet, but none of that compares with Colorado’s version of the Egyptian plagues. Mayflies. These little mini-moths were entertaining to say the least, terrifying to say the most. The first mayfly I saw had landed on the leg of my wetsuit. I hurriedly flicked him off and asked Sarah if they bit. She said no, and I believed her. Her tan face and straight set of slightly oversized teeth made her seem trustworthy. A few minutes later, we all had a dozen mayflies crawling around on us. An hour into the float, clouds of thousands engrossed rocks. The water was a flowing bed of mayflies. Many dive bombed the water in lemming fashion, never to fly in may again. Most stood on the water’s surface waiting to die. Some had the audacity to perform reproductive activity on my wetsuit. We had to enact revenge on these creatures somehow, so we ate them. I had never planned on eating them, but one of the sponsors asked if they were edible. Sarah didn’t say anything, so he ate one. After waiting a while to see if he died, four more guys ate one. I hesitated, but eventually my hate for those winged fiends[3] prevailed. I ate two, baby.

[1]I always hesitate to have a native describe their state’s geography to me. In this particular instance, Sarah named off some cities that I’m sure any first grade Coloradan would recognize. I just nodded and prepared my heart for Man Eater. I still have no idea where she goes to school.
[2]The senior guys had these babies memorized. The ones that stick out in my mind are appropriately named “man-eater” and “pinball”.
[3]Or was it peer pressure? I like to think that it was my hate.