You and me and rain on the roof

"Where'd you get the gun, John?"

Rain fell on Skagit Valley. 

It fell in sweeps and it fell in drones. It fell in unending cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. It fell on the dikes. It fell on the firs. It fell on the downcast necks of the mallards. 

And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem. 

This quote is the kind-of-a-thing that makes writers wanna give up forever. It's the feverish vision of a strange sort of man, half Byron, half Donald Duck (and half Betty Boop, probably, though we don't know where that half is stashed).

I was trying to find the whole quote, because I know it goes on and on. So I found my punky-smelling, beige-paged copy of Tom Robbins' classic Another Roadside Attraction, and began to dig. After getting lost in the story a few times, I gave up, but I did find this:

The afternoon sky looked like a brain. Moist Gray. Convoluted. A mad-scientist breeze probed at the brain, causing it to bob and quiver as if it were immersed in a tank of strange liquids. The Skagit Valley was the residue at the bottom of the tank. Toward dusk, the wind flagged, the big brain stiffened (mad doctor's experiment a failure), and ragged ribbons of Chinese mist unfurled in the valley. The blaring cries of. . . 

OH FOR GOD'S SAKE. Mercy. Mercy.

And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

This reminds me of nothing more than Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's a-gonna Fall: I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it/And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it. And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking/But I'll know my song well before I start singing. 

Why? Why all this? If you follow this strange, incoherent blog-about-nothing, you'll know about the cedar boughs outside my office window. They are vanes, omens, semaphores. They hang in three-dimensional layers, a sweet intimate bough that sweeps on my left side, a less-visible perpendicular wodge of green that doesn't want to talk to me, and behind all that, a backdrop of bush that just goes on and on.

We live in suburbia, but at night comes the trilling and squealing of shabby-looking pack animals, the kind that search around for garbage in the night. At first I thought I was going crazy with the sound. My husband, half-deef, couldn't even hear it. It was only much later that I found out what they were.

Anyway, this isn't about that.

Rain sweeps and drones in Vancouver, a close enough cousin to Skagit Valley to pass one of those primordial DNA tests (if only by a whisker). Yes. We have this too:

Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating.

Stop!

Pitiless, endless, suicidal, the rain takes up residence for some eight months of the year. No, twelve. Let's quit lying about this so we can go on living. As in northern Alberta, where I lived for many years, it can rain just like it can snow, any old time. In the middle of a grand day. It can split the merry blue sky like a railroad spike.

I like a storm. I love a storm when I am not in it. We don't get good hail around here (hail merry!), but in Alberta, once in a while a big satchelful of temporary diamonds would be dumped on the ground, and the air would hiss with ozone. The roof would thunder and dents would appear on the hoods of cars. Then a gleaming bounty lay on the ground, sublimating in sinuous vapors. Soon it'd just be that rice-paddy mush that's left over from a violent hunderstorm.

Here it's more temperate. Just a continuous pissing down on your dreams, a Monty Python foot crushing all ambition and hope.

I just realized something. Shakespeare bombed. He said something like, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", then goes on blathering about "the darling buds of May". Doesn't the idjit know when summer starts? There's a meteorologist on CTV news who knows better than that. And he's not the most celebrated writer who ever lived.

What's my point? Jesus! it's wet, and grey, and discouraging out there. I won't tell you what I've been going through with my work lately. It's the best of times, and the worst of times. Something spectacular might happen, but at the same time, it might be the end of everything.

Or, as usual, I will just be left hanging and face the same indifference, the averted face and cold shoulder, that my mother presented to me when I was born.

The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference.

The universe doesn't care. It's indifferent. But why do people have to be? 

And what about my mother? My mother.

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads. 

They might as well be dead. 

If the rain comes, if the rain comes. 

When the sun shines they slip into the shade 

(When the sun shines down.) 

And sip their lemonade. 

(When the sun shines down.) 

When the sun shines, when the sun shines. 

Rain, I don't mind. 

Shine, the weather's fine.

I can show you that when it starts to rain, 

(When the Rain comes down.) 

Everything's the same. 

(When the Rain comes down.) 

I can show you, I can show you. 

Rain, I don't mind. 

Shine, the weather's fine.

Can you hear me, that when it rains and shines, 

(When it Rains and shines.) 

It's just a state of mind? 

(When it Rains and shines)

Can you hear me, can you hear me? 

sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht fI. 

(Rain) 

niaR. 

(Rain) 

enihsnuS.

Vacation from hell: can you top this?

(Please note: I lay no claim to this, except to say it's freakin' great. I include a link to the original piece at the end. Maybe this is not the way to do it. Probably not. But it's not going viral, folks, I'm lucky to get 18 views some days, and 16 of them are mine, so I hope I can "quote" this without getting into trouble. Anyway, it kicks ass.)

Greetings from Hell (A.K.A. Maui)

Grant Lawrence — Westender

  

Maui in December: Sounds awesome, right? But if it’s your friend / co-worker / neighbour / frienemy who’s taking the holiday, and boasting nonstop about it on social media while you shiver here in Vancouver, it can be more than a little annoying.

Well, here’s the flipside, for those of you with a taste for some sweet schadenfreude. Imagine, if you will, saving up for a Maui vacation for two years, booking the trip back in January, and making it extra special by taking three generations of family.

Now imagine being woken up by your jetlagged kids at 5:20am Hawaii time, then pulling back the curtains on the lanai to groggily stare out at palm trees bending in hurricane-force winds against a charcoal sky as sheets of rain pelt the windows. Then pretend you’re Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when it happens the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that.

If you can conjure such a thing, you’ll have a pretty good feel for our recent family vacation. Go ahead and revel in our bank-breaking sogginess, but you have to admit: There’s something downright cruel about Vancouverites spending thousands of dollars to fly 4,356 kilometres to escape the rain, only to arrive to much more of it.

Hey, we made the best of it. What choice did we have? Stay in the hotel room all day? I did that on a vacation in the Dominican Republic when, again, it rained the whole time. I ended up watching a five-day-marathon of Little House on the Prairie in Spanish.

The hot tub at our hotel was still fun in the rain. We even met someone in the tub who voted for Trump. She was very anti-Obama, saying, “Who is Obama, anyway? I mean, where does he even come from?” My wife responded, “Um… Hawaii, actually,” which was followed by the Trump supporter’s stunned silence.

Just as the weather was finally starting to clear up, a middle-aged couple from Minnesota arrived in the suite above us. Oddly, they kept their curtains drawn tight all day, emerging only at night. They were loud talkers, but we didn’t think much of it – that is, until the man, who resembled cartoonist Robert Crumb, got absolutely and repeatedly wasted. Drunk as a skunk, he’d slur abusive remarks at his wife at the top of his lungs, then beg for sex and “a baby,” all the while flicking his Marlboro butts down onto our lanai (in a non-smoking resort). His lunatic ravings and smashing and banging went on all night long, which thoroughly freaked us out: I barricaded the doors and my 11-year-old nephew cried. It was like a cross between National Lampoon’s Vacation and Cape Fear. When the couple finally checked out a few days later (after repeated run-ins with security), we were shocked to learn they were on their honeymoon.

My sister finally had enough of it, treating her family to a one-night stay in a big, fancy resort a little further south, in what is typically the sunnier part of Maui. Except it poured there, too, and the hotel’s deluxe pool was closed due to a Code Brown (that’s resort-speak for a kid taking a dump in the pool.) But their room had a lovely view of a gigantic construction site.

We did eventually manage to capture the “Aloha spirit” of the islands, and it was the time spent with each other that mattered most: snorkeling with my 15-year-old nephew, a sunset dinner with Mom, watching the cousins play in the sand, and hearing my 11-month-old daughter say “Mama” for the first time. All that, and listening to my three-year-old yelling, “It’s raining AGAIN?”

http://www.westender.com/news-issues/vancouver-shakedown/greetings-from-hell-a-k-a-maui-1.4327072

CODA. Do YOU have a vacation-from-hell story you'd like to see on this very blog? Didn't think so. I mean, if you have one, please send it to me, but somehow it doesn't seem likely. I don't get much response to this blog, though I am grateful for every scrap I get. No, I mean it!

My own vacation from hell came after the worst bout of flu I had ever experienced. I woke up in the night with such a high fever that I was afraid I would die. I had to crawl to the bathroom on my hands and knees to get the thermometer. My temperature was just under 105 degrees. The thermometer felt hot, like it had been dipped in boiling water. I kept thinking, bizarrely, of those cartoons where the mercury climbs and climbs until it bursts out the end.

I crawled into a tub full of cold water, afraid I would have convulsions. My husband was out of town and couldn't help me. I was just barely recovered - still felt shaky and had lost ten pounds - when it was time to go on our deluxe dream vacation to Hawaii - yes, Hawaii!, but everyone said, don't worry, you'll be fine once you get there.

I was not fine once I got there. At all. I was in agonizing pain all night, every night, for reasons I could not fathom, and barely slept. My legs felt like they were stuck in a fire. When someone describes a pain as "searing", I know just what that means. They jerked and twitched incessantly, and hurt insanely no matter what I did: heat, cold, moving, not moving, drugs, not drugs. All we had was Tylenol, and it didn't even put a dent in the pain.

Desperate for relief and sleep, I went to clinic after clinic, and they said helpful things like, "Just stretch your legs out like this. No?"  My husband went out in the middle of the night, lied in an Emergency room and said he needed codeine for his old football injury. They gave it to him. (This was a long time ago.)

The codeine also didn't put a dent in the pain. Towards dawn, the agony would fade to jelly-kneed weakness, but I still couldn't sleep. At all. I couldn't nap. I could barely walk. I was fried.

That was my holiday. I vaguely remember listening to Hawaiian public radio while lying in a codeine stupor. Finally we found a real doctor who said, "This isn't flu. I don't know what it is. You picked up a virus somewhere, a bad one. Maybe on the plane. Your immune system was wiped out, so it got its hooks in you." Or words to that effect.

By then it was time to go home, and I did not see how I would survive the flight, cope with the airport, or any of it. The real doctor gave me some drugs, something like oxycodone, and I took half a tablet and went into a coma. My husband had to push me in a wheelchair at the airport, and help me on to the plane like an invalid.

But I remember that the weather was nice.

Coda to the coda. I did go to my doctor after the trip to try to find out what the fuck happened to me. She said she didn't know what it was either. Ah, medicine! How is it that I keep hearing about all these modern miracles, such as head transplants (which are now a reality: so please, PLEASE can I have a new head now?), when doctors seem to do nothing except frown and say, "Uhmmmm -"

But something very weird happened. I was supposed to give a urine sample, a useless thing they do to keep patients busy and make it seem as if something is happening, and I was utterly shocked. My pee sample was dark brown. It looked like sludge. I asked my doctor about it and she said it was "normal". But what sort of tests did they do? This wasn't excess creatinine, folks, it was some sort of curse-of-the-volcano thing. It was a question left hanging. I never had anything like that happen to me again.

One of those bored/boring days

   

I never do this, I mean make gifs out of still photos, mainly because this is the slowest speed I can display them in. But I've found a whole lot of interesting cloud formation pics - I told you it was a bored, boring day, a relentlessly dark Vancouver-rainish day when I don't want to get out of my fleece nightie and knee socks EVER (and might not, though I am not sick).

I have seen blobs of rainbow in Hawaii, while driving down the road from Hana, and I actually thought I was seeing things because I didn't think rainbows "came" that way. These were strange globes of colour that seemed to be snagged between bright cumulus clouds. A little rain was falling from somewhere. Some of the rainbow blobs appeared to be sitting on the ground, or perhaps on the side of the mountain. It was weird. Now I know a whole lot of things are possible, though I refuse to go into meteorological explanations as to what's happening when you see a funny-looking cloud.

I should do a bunch of these, why not? It's raining too hard to go out.

The Beatles - Rain (turn up the volume)

If the rain comes

Rain fell on Skagit Valley.
It fell in sweeps and it fell in drones. It fell in unending cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. It fell on the dikes. It fell on the firs. It fell on the downcast necks of the mallards.
And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.
This quote is the kind-of-a-thing that makes writers wanna give up forever. It's the feverish vision of a strange sort of man, half Byron, half Donald Duck (and half Betty Boop, probably, though we don't know where that half is stashed).

I was trying to find the whole quote, because I know it goes on. So I found my punky-smelling, beige-paged copy of Tom Robbins' classic Another Roadside Attraction, and began to dig.

Because I haven't even had my breakfast yet, for pity's sake, I gave up, but I did find this:

The afternoon sky looked like a brain. Moist Gray. Convoluted. A mad-scientist breeze probed at the brain, causing it to bob and quiver as if it were immersed in a tank of strange liquids. The Skagit Valley was the residue at the bottom of the tank. Toward dusk, the wind flagged, the big brain stiffened (mad doctor's experiment a failure), and ragged ribbons of Chinese mist unfurled in the valley. The blaring cries of. . .
OH FOR GOD'S SAKE. Mercy. Mercy.

And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

This reminds me of nothing more than Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's a-gonna Fall: I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it/And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it. And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking/But I'll know my song well before I start singing.
Why? Why all this? If you read this strange, incoherent blog at all (and who does? I often feel I am shouting into the abyss, and I am beginning to realize that my chronic failure as a writer is a sign of an intractible Fate), you'll know about the cedar boughs outside my office window. They are vanes, omens, semaphores. They hang in three-dimensional layers, a sweet intimate bough that sweeps on my left side, a less-visible perpendicular wodge of green that doesn't want to talk to me, and behind all that, a backdrop of bush that just goes on and on.

We live in suburbia, but at night comes the trilling and squealing of shabby-looking pack animals, the kind that search around for garbage in the night. At first I thought I was going crazy with the sound. My husband, half-deef, couldn't even hear it. It was only much later that I found out what they were.

Anyway, this isn't about that.

Rain sweeps and drones in Vancouver, a close enough cousin to Skagit Valley to pass one of those primordial DNA tests (if only by a whisker). Yes. We have this too:

Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating.

Stop!

Pitiless, endless, suicidal, the rain takes up residence for some eight months of the year. No, twelve. Let's quit lying about this so we can go on living. As in northern Alberta, where I lived for many years, it can rain just like it can snow, any old time. In the middle of a grand day. It can split the merry blue sky like a railroad spike.

I like a storm. I love a storm when I am not in it. We don't get good hail around here (hail merry!), but in Alberta, once in a while a big satchelful of temporary diamonds would be dumped on the ground, and the air would hiss with ozone. The roof would thunder and dents would appear on the hoods of cars. Then a gleaming bounty lay on the ground, sublimating in sinuous vapors. Soon it'd just be that rice-paddy mush that's left over from a violent hunderstorm.

Here it's more temperate. Just a continuous pissing down on your dreams, a Monty Python foot crushing all ambition and hope.

I just realized something. Shakespeare bombed. He said something like, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", then goes on blathering about "the darling buds of May". Doesn't the idjit know when summer starts? There's a meteorologist on CTV news who knows better than that. And he's not the most celebrated writer who ever lived.

What's my point? Jesus! it's wet, and grey, and discouraging out there. I won't tell you what I've been going through with my work lately. It's the best of times, and the worst of times. Something spectacular might happen, but at the same time, it might be the end of everything.

Or, as usual, I will just be left hanging and face the same indifference, the averted face and cold shoulder, that my mother presented to me when I was born.

The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference.

The universe doesn't care. It's indifferent. But why do people have to be?
And what about my mother? My mother.

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads.
They might as well be dead.
If the rain comes, if the rain comes.
When the sun shines they slip into the shade
(When the sun shines down.)
And sip their lemonade.
(When the sun shines down.)
When the sun shines, when the sun shines.
Rain, I don't mind.
Shine, the world looks fine.
I can show you that when it starts to rain,
(When the Rain comes down.)
Everything's the same.
(When the Rain comes down.)
I can show you, I can show you.
Rain, I don't mind.
Shine, the world looks fine.
Can you hear me, that when it rains and shines,
(When it Rains and shines.)
It's just a state of mind?
(When it rains and shines.)
Can you hear me, can you hear me?
If the rain comes they run and hide their heads.
sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht fI.
(Rain)
niaR.
(Rain)
enihsnuS.