Doomed and Flummoxed

The rain comes down.  And just as I write those words, a transformer across the street blows out with a boom and a flash.  Luckily, it is not the grid I am on.  That would be miserable.  That would be the end.

I stayed in as planned and beat the heat, but I never got the chance to sleep.  We made our first tuna kobachi at home today, a thick tuna steak that sliced like butter.  We improvised a bit, but it had the main ingredients.  Served in little mint green lacquered bamboo bowls with sake and beer and rice and a hotter than hot wasabi that Ili made from powder.

Ili was leaving to go to her sisters, but she didn't, and the afternoon wore on until it was too late to nap.  And when she was gone, I thought to take my cameras out for a little spin.  I put on my street clothes, and then. . . it began to rain.

I am doomed, I think.  I am not allowed to take pictures.  The whole conspires against it.  Everything I desire to photograph, I am told, is bad.  There is something wrong with my every impulse.  They are not creative--they are corrosive and corrupt.

One must choose between doing what one wants to do and giving in.  Why is it so easy to believe when we are told that we are full of demons?

So I am flummoxed.

The storm is great, full of thunder and flashes of lightning and opaque sheets of rain.  The plants are lapping it up, roots filling and pulsing water through the stems and leaves.  Oh, I know osmosis is not a pulsing, but I like to think they pump water and feel a strength from it.

And so night has come early and I'm alone.  I will watch some t.v. and read Donald Ray Pollock's new novel.  My friend C.C. is texting me pictures from the homeland--Ohio--of Sloppy Joes and Malted Milk Shakes.  He is living the dream, a Hillbilly Bourdain, of sorts.  He is taking photographs and writing stories.

The rain recedes but I am tense.  Something is needed, an opiate, perhaps, some gauzy veil to keep me from the world.

Anything. . . anything. . . .