Notes From Sea Level, The Saga Continues

Enjoying my coffee and brioche this morning in the apartment, and I have the sneaky suspicion that Mom and God got together this morning and made a funny--it's supposed to be raining and IT'S FULL FUCKING SUN. We are supposed to be knee deep in the rainy season here in NorCal, and I'm looking out the living room picture window and easily spotting SHADOWS.

Sigh.

No matter. This morning I will be catching up on the pages again, honing my skills with some writing exercises, and if these two jokesters want to keep up the burning ball of fire into the afternoon, my plan is to bundle up well and hop on the N for the beach. I'll show them. I'll even take the John Denver song "Calypso" with me and let the wind burn a brand of spray into me. Maybe I'll even take Melville.

That would be a good pet name, don'tcha think? Melville the Corgi dog. 'Tis a thought. Thoughts like that flick in and out of me like a serpent's tongue.

A couple of years back I started marking blog entries with NFSL, or Notes From Sea Level, 'cause I sit at it. Well, sort of--Kirkham is up the hill from sea level, but a couple of hundred feet might as well be sea level. (At least I'm not in N'awlins--that would be NFBSL.) Notes written from sea level don't seem so exotic in the flats of Northwest Ohio (can't get no flatter), but this close to where sand meets water lends a certain percarious inpermanence, as Joan Didion has written of California. We're all sitting out here in Oz waiting for a stimulus package, an earthquake, or a tsunami. Something's gotta give, sooner or later.

I didn't come out here because the state is geologically daring. MS did, but I didn't. He continues to be jealous that I've experienced about ten quakes to his one. He continues to be jealous that I was here when Angel Island burned down. He was the one who was "coming home" by coming out here, while his sister was "coming home" by hanging out with her brother. I have had a torrid love affair with this wild state, but I wouldn't recommend this bad-ass boyfriend to other girls. But sometimes I look across the vista at this bad-ass boyfriend and have to wanly smile. California's got me. I'm sunk.

And there continue to be notes from sea level, closer to it than I have ever lived to it in my lifetime.