The story always changes when you’re in it, when shivering the side of your vehicle as you’re crossing a bridge upper deck, watching 30-ft traffic signs side to side or just nervously navigating a neighborhood with night falling and time running out on a shift. When life is a movie, it’s not the plot that’s the problem. It’s the scenery.
There’s rain again, tomorrow and tomorrow, and there’s no census to capture every drop that flies past my window at work or that lands on the patio bannister or the roof at home. But I’ll see some of them again, maybe over by the greenway in the creek, or in the mist in highway lanes. Maybe they’ll see me too.
Ten years to make, and still right on time, resonant in multiple directions, turning the faces on the street not far from the theater in bright sunlight suddenly suspect, if not all too susceptible.
Sun and rain tried trading places, trickling down at odd times today, with just enough energy to get in each other’s way, showcase the other’s work while stealing the spotlight. Fair amounts are due to linger through next Sunday’s larger deluge.
I got up early, hoping to beat the rush at the first of the day’s rains. There was enough time for me to make it to the donut shop over in Noe Valley and back before starting my shift. Empty streets were empty all the way through the Mission and uphill, the car windshield got lightly spritzed and the shop clerk was generous.
It wasn’t a dream, but it had its own logic: memory playing back on a loop, narrative laying out battles between good and evil with high stakes; familiar faces not met in person in months or even years, changed by time or age or the perspective of light moving on a large screen before a roomful of people who knew or didn’t know exactly how it all went down.
You undo the work you watched someone set up because it was done wrong, but neither you nor the person doing it at the time knew that. It’s not even you undoing the work, because you’re hiring someone else and it’s been overseen anew this time. Anyhow, it’s done now, with some promising stripped back version awaiting your hands. Did I say your hands? Ah, well.
I don’t mind being in motion. I don’t mind stopping. But in between, all the little making of decisions, the fine tuning and steering, the built-in transactions it takes to toggle between states of being, that’s what distracts and drains and does me right in.
Errand after errand, marveling at random religious proselytizers, spices and beverages that changed history, timing on traffic lights thrown off by median mendicants, immobile and immobilized shanties along roadways, towels for pets, toys for other pets, a little drycleaning and a lot of time to contemplate and condense rocketry and relationships into song.
Some reading, some music, an exterior jaunt weighed and deliberated over before being rejected, with a split between recent comedians and old talk show segments, made up most of the day. The cat and I left each other alone, me to my language drill and her to her bird watching, and the world outside and the weather overhead to a day’s distant indifference.
