It has rained every day but one so far this May. Craziness. Sometimes I wake up to sunshine, but when I rush out into the day, it clouds up again. There have been some amazing rains, though - Yesterday Aaron and I hit a downpour in the Nisqually River Valley that made us almost blind. We had to slow to 35 on I-5. There have been tornados and thunderstorms this spring! That never happens in the Pacific Northwest. It is so green here, grey and green. Sometimes it feels more like this land is a part of Alaska and British Columbia than the lower 48. THe days are 14 hours of ambiant grey light. The temperature is 57 degrees, exactly the average temperature of the Earth.
The rivers are a swollen rush of green-blue water that is only a little warmer than the glaciers that they pour off of. The mountains are haunted places where it feels wierd to be a human.More often than not I sleep til noon with Aaron just because the rain pounding against the tin roof just makes us so sleepy. I try to imagine what a week of straight sunny seventies feels like and draw a blank.
I have been saturating my self with fresh squeezed fruit and vegetable juice. Smoothies for breakfast and lunch - miso soup for dinner. Aaron is on a complete juice fast. He won't eat anything for another 10 days. I just don't have the self control for that. Especially working in the restaurant where I am tempted constantly with crab dip, coconut prawns, ling cod with creamy dill sauce, steamers, tempura halibut, calamari, and on and on. The food is so good.
Hey all. Thanks for all the advice. Its a funny group of advice, but it all seems to fit. Since I last wrote, I have been running around with Aaron, helping him celebrate his graduation. Now he is leaving at dawn to go to Lake Tahoe with his folks. He, his brother, mom, dad, and his brother's kid are all driving down there in the Cadillac Escalade to go gambling. I am going to stay here and ground out at my cabin and maybe go hiking (if I can afford it, gas is a buck and a quarter a gallon here - thank goddess that the saab gets a good 30 mpg).
But it has been a good week, sometimes the sun manages to peek through the clouds for a moment. The Northwest is funny like that - it is full on summer here, the trees are all leafed out, the peonies are blooming etc, but it is only 10 degrees warmer than January, and only slightly less rainy, but give it a couple of weeks and it will stop raining and not rain til October. Wierd.
I am coming home in August. If my silly sister would tell me when she is going to get married, then I could schedule things around her wedding, but otherwise sometime in August or early September you all will be seeing me. The drawback is that I am not coming home for the holidays. I am going someplace warm instead. I am sick of being cold.
The upside of my two job craziness is the produce stand. I eat the greenest, ripest, softest avocados, the sweetest artichokes, juciest strawberries, and yummiest mangoes everyday. For free. Yummmmm.
Yeah so I am on the upside of my bi-polar swing. I thought that I was going to freak at work tonight because I have PMS and the other bussers were slacking and all the guests were PITAS (pains-in-the-ass) tonight but then I stole outside and smoked a bowl and then everything was ok. My good manager even gave me a rootbeer float. Yee Haw.
But fuck all this shit man, we weren't made to work for other people like that. Life is about something other than making money and spending it. Its about more than war too and all that fucked up shit that you see on the news each night.
Most of the shit I hear everyday makes me more and more ashamed of my country. Makes me afraid of the concequences for our actions. All of it. I am sorry that we have become what we have become and I am thinking that life is not meant to be lived the way it is and everybody knows that. Another world is possible. Unfortunatly, I feel that had I not gone to college, then I would not have to live in the world as I do. It feels too much like a cage to me, I hav ebills to pay and I can pay them, but then I can not get the tatoos I want (because they would be on my forearm and I wear a short sleeved shirt at work.)
Anyhow I am getting brain numbmess from this computer so I am going to be gone now.
All that I can think about right now is that I spend way too much time in town lately. And not enough time in the woods. Work is one reason, but the other is that my lover is a town-boy. It is almost impossible to get Aaron up in the morning to go hiking with me, or anything for that matter. I think in the year we have spent together, he has spent less than twenty nights at my house. It is such a crux because we get along so well. But it is killing me to spend time here in this stuffy town house and all the ammenities in the world won't make up for it.
So what to do? True, he is graduating from college on Saturday, and may have more time to be with me, but I fear not. I fear that college has just been a cover up for the real problem which is: though we are compatable emotionally, our true desires for living are not. I have become more like him that he has become like me and I don't like it.
True, my restaurant-job is neccessary if I am going to pay back my student loans. But what would give to never have gone to school at all. I wish I were free like I would be if I hadn't. Zero is freedom. It is not wealth that I wish for, it is just not to be so fucking in debt that I have to work for the next twenty years of my life to pay it back. It is a fucking prison sentence and it is pushed upon the youth of the day like liberation. Go to college. Its a fucking rip-off unless you are priveledged and upper class.
Then I work at the job-I-love selling fruit at the produce stand. Somehow I have begun working 11 hour days four or five days a week. It makes my Wednesday-Thursday weekend so precious to me. And here I sit typing at Aaron's computer while he sleeps off a hangover. Knowing that I have to work all fucking day tomorrow and so restless and discontent.
But I have a plan. Pause a miniute here while I quote the song that just drifted into my head by John Lennon: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans..." but this is my plan. Work the summer away at both jobs, pay off my car (at least), try to save money to run away (I mean travel) in the winter. Spend time hiking and dwelling at my house even if it comes at the expense of my relationship with Aaron. I really don't belong here. I must vacate this place.
I have always been wise to the fact that consumer-Amerika is driven by the desire to fill the hollow bourne of the soullessness inherent in a 40 hour work week.