memories and thoughts.

Just...babbling.

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Sunsets. this one night in san diego, when i was 17, i took my dog for a walk. we had canyons near our house, so i took him for a walk there. looked a lot like steppe-land. grasslands.

it was summer, so the grass was long and yellow, and the hills rolled and tumbled down from black mtn, which is this 1000-ft tall "mountain" in the area. not big, but you grow to like the way it looks. but anyway, there's this sorta frontier there at the edge of the canyon.

there's Del Mar on the west near the sea, and Penasquitos, where i live, inland, and canyon in between. so there's this squiggly line where the houses end and the canyons begin, and all the way at the horizon you can see del mar, and beyond, the sea. so that's what it looks like, this line of houses and then just open canyon. and the farther into the canyon you go the less you can see the houses until eventually you see nothing but canyons, some stands of eucalyptus trees, some parts where the grass grows green, and in the ravines, little streams.

(or actually, they were mud. but there were still reeds)

that night, there were these clouds in the sky. streaking out of the west in long strips. and when the sun set, they went red. and the whole. fucking. sky was on fire.

i'd never seen anything like it, and i haven't since. i've seen sunsets were half the sky was red - that happens a lot. but not when there was red all the way into the eastern horizon. and it was right before a storm, right? and in san diego the storms roll out of the east. so you followed these streaking clouds east, and there were these huge, huge round thunderheads sitting there

and there was me and my dog beneath this incredible sky. in the middle of this canyon. silence and birdsong all around.

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When i was in fifth grade i knew this chick named carole. she had greasy black hair and a really raucous laugh. i didn't like her. once we were on the playground crawling through a tunnel in the jungle gym, or something like that, and i had the bad luck to be behind her. her underwear had a big yellow stain on it.

since she was the first girl other than my sister whose underwear i'd seen, it put me off the idea for a long time.

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When i was maybe eight, my dad took me for a hike. it started out with this trail winding up the side of a mountain, and the pebbles were loose. there was no handrail to the right; the left was the rock face of the cliff; the path seemed about a foot wide to me. i slipped and fell and i was dead certain i was going to die. but i didn't.

when i got to the top of that mountain, the trail wound into the forest and it was damp and dark and peaceful and earthy-smelling, but i kept wondering where the cliff went. it didn't make sense to me then, that half the world could be a cliff one minute and not the next. it makes sense now, of course. we simply passed through the summit.

*

Heh. once, in kindergarten, this kid reached for the scissors i wanted, so without a thought i sank my teeth into his arm. he howled. i was immensely proud of myself, especially since i could see the marks from my teeth in his forearm.

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I've been so high/I've been so down

Up to the sky/Down to the ground.

It doesn't sound like Madonna. But it's so. SO. heartbreakingly beautiful. such a great song. i love it so much. it reminds me of...oh...shadows in blue and green and shades of pale...slow-motion waterfalls that are water, but more like sheets of fabric. not silk, not that smooth. something a little coarser, with texture. linen? is that what it's called? it reminds me of looking back through that waterfall after you've died at the world you've left behind. and it reminds me of some last dance with a lover while your world goes gray and you lose yourself. and it reminds me of making love beneath the northern lights while the world burns away to ash, somewhere.

it's a fascinating song. it's called Paradise.

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Las Vegas.

it's kinda sad. i'm always disappointed by Vegas. i love driving there over the desert. all the white heat and the asphalt and stuff? and i always love Vegas when i'm leaving and i look back and it's all glittering and blatantly artificial. but then when i'm in it, i HATE it.

i think it's because i love the idea of las vegas. imagine - a city almost completely devoted to the vice of gambling, with prostitution walking side by side along with stage magic, exotic animals, and the ever-pervasive dry heat of the desert. Las Vegas. this completely man-made city of sin rising out of the desert, all glitz and glitter and gambling and whoring. it's attractive in a gaudy, perverse, wicked way. it sounds sandy, stifling hot, crackling and blistering with electricity and neon lights and desert heat. it sounds corrupt. it sounds like the electric serpent east of eden.

eden would be california.

but then you get there. and there's a billion other tourists just like you, with their Illinois plates and their station wagons full of luggage and crying babies, wandering around clutching their children's hands and telling them not to get lost, stealing peeks at the Hustler magazines in the newstands as they pass. looking for the fabled city of sin.

but it's not there.

it's not there.

it's overrun by tourists looking for it, and it's lost in its own glitz and hype. and really, it's sad. it's a mirage. you can only see it when you're outside, and dreaming, and it disappears when you get there. all you have left is an empty wallet.

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It rains so much in the Bay that i had dreams that the world was flooding, just like Noah's Ark. i remember looking out the window and seeing rain pouring down so thick it was hard to see through it. i remember it at night, looking out at the ivy dark green and soaked and wet, pounded in a monsoon-sized rainstorm, listening to the thunder boom once before the sky cracked open.

i remember it during the day, even better. it was like a haze. i remember the mist pouring over the mountaintops and tendriling between the eucalyptus at the summits of those mountain ranges. and the way the trees looked, especially the cherry trees in spring when the blossoms were this shocking, vulnerable pink against the dark, dark, dark brown of the wet, slick bark. and how the ones with greenery seemed so much more vibrantly green because it was humid and the sky was dark. and the bay in the distance, when it began to rain and the water falling made the sea ripple in millions of tiny places, and made it seem shimmering silver to me far away.

sometimes i think i love San Francisco all the more because i'm not in it, because when i go to the east bay i see it from afar, lit from behind by the setting sun which makes the fog rolling in under the silhouetted Golden Gate Bridge glow luminously silver-white. and the city is white, too, at times like that...glowing white, but also backlit.

but it's not like las vegas. i love it just as much when i'm in it. driving into it, there's nothing like seeing that great city rear up before you on the Bay Bridge, or appear out of nowhere around the mountain. or, even, taking the BART up and suddenly rising out in the midst of the pigeons and the people and the towering, towering skyscrapers.

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i don't have anything else to say tonight. except that sometimes when i'm awake in the middle of the night looking out at the world that's all quiet and dark, i really love everything.