@dlowan,
I'm remembering sensations. Splinterless rough of redwood bark. Salt spray in nostril. Crash of surf, roller coaster screams admixed with crashing Pacific waves drifting through the 8 by 12 inch window of the sleeping loft over the kitchen.
I'm drinking Tres Picos garnacha no. First sip, fragrant. Second sip, too damn sweet. Should've opened the gold old reliable Italian table red that the local store imports cases of every few months. Should've bought another bottle of the Malbec, which started rough but lasted well.
I'm watching the movie Traffic for the first time it was in the theaters at the end of the last milennium. Remembering that each locale is painted with its own grain and color palate -- coarse and amber in Mexico, blue and smooth in DC, TV realism with wide range of contrast in San Diego.
Seabright Brewery was beautiful when I was 22. Go and sit on the patio over a pitcher of agave wine margarita or this-or-that local hoppy brew, the brie and roasted garlic (like, really roasted, fresh out of the oven, hot and ready to be squeezed in yogurt-gooeyness out of tough skin over the crusty Italian bread from Alfaro's bakery, also local, but they wouldn't hire me to drive their truck because they knew I'd be good for 6 months' work, tops), sit eating and getting drunk -- part of this time I was on crutches because I had a hairline fracture in the lateral malleolus or somesuch of my tibia, stupid hungover work mistake, so crippled and drunk in the barely-warm central Californian sun -- my buddy Mike (who lives back in the Sierras now, luck bastard/pobrecito) grinding through the gears on my truck on the way there and back --
(the high school girl in the movie is learning to freebase like Breuer's wife was when I drove her down to the Beach Flats to score and she'd toss me a short eighth as payment my God what a terrible mother she was and the boy wondering at press-up pushing western fence lizards in the tall grass behind the Barn Theater)
I miss the smell of salt water evaporate in my nose. It's 12 degrees here and I'm conditioned now to think it's warm ...it'snotcoldifyoursnotdoesn'tfreeze... but there's beauty too in the great misty plumes billowing from the two (not one, but two) coal-fired power plants I can see from the top of the hill over the two cemeteries (one Catholic, one Protestant, the latter wooded and attractive, the former bare and plain, in a wonder of ironic aproposity) a block away.
But the people here are good. Real, good people. When I fled Chicago those years ago I went back to the woman I still consider my mentor -- she'd been a lesbian theater director in Greece in the 60s (where women were sub-****, and where she'd drowned a litter of abandoned kittens with her own hands), had been in a mental institution, had been through some serious, serious **** and was still in some serious, serious **** and saw me fit to impart some wisdom to, which was flattering, and a burden -- when I fled Chicago, and said the city just wasn't good, she'd said, "The people are too real, aren't they?"
And she was right, in her way. But she was there chain smoking a room away from her mother, who'd lost her mind when her husband was ripped from his wheelchair and beaten to death by the lunatic that the soft-hearted/soft-headed upstairs neighbor had been letting sleep on the balcony, and her own child had been lost to her old lover because no-gay-rights legal code gave her no visistation rights to the daughter she'd adopted with her partner ---- she couldn't take "real" people then, either, and that was her wisdom, to be able to cut through her own **** AND your own **** and give you a glimpse of the big picture as it would look to a trucker from Peoria or just some guy whose diet was 83% backyard garden yams... and let you know that she was as beaten by it as you were.
When Traffic came out, I was thinking Don Cheadle was pretty damn good. Not so sure any more. But he was funny in Boogie Nights. Heh heh, Buck.
The trouble, I think, is not that we're both lost. It's that somewhere along the way she'd managed to convince herself that we weren't, and took a dead-end path, and now she's figuring out that she's got to turn around and find another way out. Thing is, I didn't follow her down that particular path, and I don't know if she's going to back up to where she left the trail we were both on, or will look for another way out. Time will tell...
