proteanme

RU pointed out that my Ides of June title made no sense so I looked it up and apparently I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. I knew the Ides was the 15th of March and that Caesar was assassinated on that date and before he bit it, the soothsayer had warned him to beware of the Ides of March, but don’t ask me where I got the analogy to stormy weather. I must have pulled that right out of butt. That’s what you try too hard to be clever and the rain is turning your brain into mush.

Here are some jokes about rain in Portland.

• A newcomer to Portland arrives on a rainy day. He gets up the next day and it’s raining. It also rains the day after that, and the day after that. He goes out to lunch and sees a young kid and asks out of despair, “Hey kid, does it ever stop raining around here?” The kid says, “How do I know? I’m only 12.” “I can’t believe it,” said the tourist.  “I’ve been here in Portland an entire week and it’s done nothing but rain.  When do you have summer here?””Well, that’s hard to say,” replied the local.  “Last year, it was on a Wednesday.”
• It only rains twice a year in Portland: August through April and May through July.
  
• What do you call two straight days of rain in Portland? A weekend. 

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.

Today, I ran across this abstract painter I’d never heard of, Maria Elena Vierira da Silva. Here’s a whole slew of her work. She was the first woman to receive the French government’s Grand Prix National des Arts in 1966. She reminds me a little of Julie Mehretu, who was featured in the New Yorker this spring. Or Julie’s work reminds me of Maria’s. Either way, they both get at something that can’t be expressed in words, even something as elusive as poetry. It’s got to be experienced without language. It’s got to get to a place inside you without all the jargon.