Tuesday, June 30, 2009

I am, I am Superman

I shared this already today with two people who I thought might appreciate it, but I'm putting it up here because I can't stop watching it. This 1980s home video, made by some pre-teens prior to the advent of YouTube and digital cameras, is set to a great REM cover of "Superman" - a song that was one of my favorites back then. It captures a certain spirit of the ephemeral that I don't want to pin down with words, I just want to watch.

Rainy June.

From Mansfield
I love thunder that shakes the house and makes the cat nervously seek me out for safety's sake.

Outwardly I agree with the gripers in order to seem the pleasant conversationalist. "Damn rain! Just when you think it can't get any wetter! Everything's waterlogged! Is it ever gonna be summer?" Inwardly though, I'm feeling as if I'd like to give them a tour of how amazing the cloud formations have been this spring and early summer. I want to describe to them what I've learned, just by observation of my own garden, about the weird and wonderful lives of snails and slugs - where they lay their eggs, what flowers they like to eat, which ones they stay away from, how you can wage war on them and still find them fascinating. I want to talk to the weather-complainers about how the strawberries have changed over the past weeks due to an excessive amount of water. I want to share with them the humor in watching from the window as my middle-aged neighbors literally run for cover, high-tailin' it like I've never seen them do - the man in a just-home-from-work pair of charcoal gray dress pants and cobalt blue button down - "as the clouds rip open and the rain pours through a gaping wound" (to spontaneously steal from the U2 lyric). Their black lab, who they were dutifully out walking around the yard, merely saunters back to the house with a slow tail-wag, as raindrops the size of nickles pelt straight down from the sky.

A lot of people are pissed about how rainy it has been this June. Of course, a lot of people are pissed about the weather no matter what it is. I find that both so human and so humorous.

I'd like to hope that maybe it's just a cover - bitching about the weather. Small talk. A way to empty the weight of silence between strangers. Maybe other people are, like me, secretly hoping for and reveling in the next big crack of thunder. They are doubting that they'll see hail of any size as threatened in the severe weather warning on weather.com but hoping that they will, It would be comforting to imagine that all the weather nay-sayers might be observing nature's response to so much water and so little sun and learning a little in the process, just like me.

It's so un-cool to be amenable to whatever the weather offers. Being publicly content with bad weather is an instant conversation killer.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Scattered thoughts

I have been feeling a deep pull to write something, but the truth is that my thoughts are too scattered and varied to sum-up into a compact blog post. I am continually stymied by attempting to choose a starting point.

My thoughts these days cover the gamut from: what it means to become "friends" with someone (how it develops, how it lasts, how it ebbs and flows, how email and internet affect friendships, how they vanish or resume and what it is that makes someone a friend v. just an acquaintance or colleague), to the wonders of watching insect ecosystems happen right in my yard and then destroying them, to losing any disgust inherent in squashing a slug with my bare fingers in order to protect my veggie and flower plants, to pondering what happens to my intellectual pursuits when I suddenly lose almost all my solitary time but to a job that I actually love; a job that pays me one third what my "real" job pays but where I work 10 times as hard and gain about that much more satisfaction from my efforts.

That was an insanely long sentence and full of grammatical errors. Oh well. Such is my brain...it don't care none 'bout them thar grammar rules 'n such, just thinks thoughts in a messy sorta way. Ain't it purty?

Maybe I can tackle some of these thoughts and feelings individually and have a sudden burst of blog productivity. Perhaps just cracking the shell is enough to let the inside goo run out and spread into a form of some sort. Or maybe these moments will pass and these thoughts will be forever lost to my subconscious mind, dredged up only for strange, incoherent dreams and random melancholy feelings of nostalgia.