proteanme

A real summer adventure. Left the house at 9am and didn’t come back until 9pm. Spent a couple hours at the Oregon Country Fair. It’s one of the queerest non-queer events I’ve been to. I suspect I’d say the same thing if I went  to Burning Man. But I digress. RU and I took the longest way home, riding all these back roads, passing farmlands and vineyards and clumps of trees and cows and sheep eating up the grass in their pastures. We took a ferry across the Willamette, stopped at a roadside fruit stand and got organic blueberries, and had dinner at a taco truck in Woodburn where they make their tortillas by hand. I’m happy to be sun burnt and tired.

Real summer has finally showed up and we’re slated to get some pretty hot days here. Already, people are complaining about it, which I just don’t get. C’mon man, you can’t have summer without sweating, flip flops, bare skin, sticking to to your chair, sitting in front of a window fan and sleeping under only a single sheet, if that. I say bring it on, heat wave and all. For me these days are like a cute girl who comes late to a party, saddles up beside me and flirts shamelessly even though the host is about ready to kick us all out. I’m a fan of those kind of girls. They just make the world a whole lot more pleasant. So flirt with me all you want summer. Hell, tease me, even. I’m your guy. I fall for you every time.

“If you look at a national temperature map, it’s almost like we have become a separate continent,” said Hill, “because literally everybody else in the lower United States is in a different season than we are. I mean, it really is just absolutely nuts!”

Today is the longest day of the year and it’s also the longest grey day of the year. I would like to kick the weather in its teeth, if I could. The amazingly overcast, chilly and rainy days appear to be marching on, oblivious to our hopes and dreams of summer. Today I saw a women wearing a wool coat and a neck scarf. Sometimes I really hate this place.

Seriously, it is the Ides out here. We had 77% more rain than normal in May and that was after a record breaking 25 days of rain in April and I just read that the mother fucking rain is supposed to continue through the end of this week. Fuck this. Seriously. I was trying to be all Zen about it this morning, about how this is good practice and about how I’m creating my own suffering, but I don’t want to practice with this nuclear spring cloud cover and the constant precipitation. Jesus. Right now I can see a small stretch of blue sky and it makes me want to jump in my car, race to the airport and buy a ticket to take me to any where that’s sunny and hot. I heard a story on the radio a couple days ago about hay farmers and how this rain is wiping out their most lucrative harvest, which is usually around now, and I thought to myself you have to be a seriously Zen mo’ fo’ to farm. Zen with good sense of humor. And I’m not a farmer, you know what I mean? I’m a bitter midwestern expat who misses the fuck out of summertime.

My birthday’s coming up. That’s part of it. I think it’s rained on my birthday here the last three years in a row. I swear, just to spite me. It’s an insult to person born in the beginning of June to celebrate out here in the land of eternal spring, minus the good parts, like thunderstorms. Enough already. I had pool parties growing up. I caught fireflies on my birthday. Everyone wore shorts and sandals or t-shirts and flip flops when I had a party. When we weren’t outside running around we were sitting in front of a fan or inside with the AC on. We had to eat our ice cream before it melted.

Last week we had this arctic blast here, at least arctic for Portland. It was down in the low teens, which is the kind of weather that makes me want to cry when I’m riding my bike, especially into the wind. I rode one day; froze my hands and feet and my face went kinda numb. Thawing out at my desk, everything fucking hurt. Bad. I thought about the Donner party and was amazed that any of them ever made it out alive. I’d have cired myself to death and someone would have eaten me. I drove my car the rest of the week.

I woke today up to rain and temps in the low 40’s and was like helleluja Portland winter. Yes my feet were soaked, even with my booties on and yes, it took all day for my gloves to dry out, but I’ll take it.

Likely, I’ll be complaining about the rain in a week. That’s what we do here anyway. But I loved feeling like it was not a big deal to get on the saddle and brave the elements this morning.

Summer is on the wane.  It’s cool in the morning when I ride my bike to work. I swear it’s just on this side of crisp — not enough to wear a headband over my ears, but almost. And there’s dew. Dew covering windshields and hovering on top of stop signs. The kind of dew you see in autumn. And if I leave work much later then 6:30pm, I’m tempted to turn on my back blinker. Not because it’s dusk, but it’s close. The sunsets have been beautiful though. And I feel lucky to notice them, but they are coming too early. And that’s the problem.

I don’t miss winter out here. Sometimes I get a little wistful for the snow, but the feeling passes or I drive up to the mountain and get a fix. But I do miss a proper summer. One that begins before the days have peaked. A summer where the end of May and beginning of June are like the extended versions of good first dates, and the equinox marks the tipping point where you fall in love. But out here summer starts as the season’s beginning to wind down. You know it’s high summer in Portland when the days are actually growing shorter. It’s like falling in love with a girl who got accepted to grad school two months before you met and she’s leaving town in another two; there’s nothing you can do about it but be happy and sad at the same time.

It’s the indulgence I miss.  It’s how it feels like the volume is turned up on everything in the summer and not just the heat and the humidity, but how things are over the top, like everything that can get lush, get’s way lush, or it gets parched to hell. And how those kind of extremes have this hint of forever that’s not real, but you still feel like you’ve got all the time in the world.

That feeling gets under your skin, which is why county fairs are full of demolition derbies and amateur boxing matches and giant sized portions of deep fried foods and rides that scare the shit out of you and make you want to vomit. But everyone’s still standing in line to ride the tallest most bad ass roller coaster anyway. God I miss feeling that. Not that I ever stood in line to ride any roller coast. Not even something modest. I’m more a bumper car kinda guy, although every now and then I’ll tempt the fates with a ride on the Scrambler. Which is where I usually draw the line, except this one summer when I rode the double ferris wheel at the Indiana State Fair. The only thing I can say on my behalf is I was really high and I was really hot for this girl I was dating.

It’s the luxury of doing something that scares crap out of me and feeling like I didn’t waste any time. Because out here summer’s a fleeting thing, even if we had a 10 day heat wave in July, it still feels like playing catch up before it’s over.

It is a stunning day for late winter in Portland , all blue sky and sunshine. Sure there’s a little wind, but it’s not cold and mostly not noticeable if you’re not riding into it. It’s like the city is showing us a little thigh, reminding us why we love it so.

It’s funny how disinterested I am in the Hillary/Barak throw down, except I wanna beat McCain. In corresponding with Amos I realized I’m not at all into looking to a presidential candidate for a sense of hope, although I’m moved by how many folks are inspired by Obama. If anything I find more hope in them, than in him. But I’m also aware that with McCain in the race there’s a good chance that Oregon, with it’s fierce libertarian streak, is gonna be in play. So I’m publicly committing myself to working this fall for who ever gets the nod, Clinton or Obama .