Alone in the Dark

Alone in the Dark.

The phrase has been bouncing around in my head for weeks.  I saw it on a sign and it just stuck in my head.  It seems especially appropriate right now as I stand on my porch smoking my favorite; Romeo y Julieta.  Alone.  Dark.  A bolt of lightning suddenly lights up the night and for a second it’s almost like daylight.  So it’s not completely dark.  I take another drag and pull my leather jacket close.  It’s starting to get cold but I don’t want to go inside.  Another flash of lightning lights up the world and I can see the shape of the clouds as they roll across the sky.  The storms here are different from what I’m used to, there’s no wind, no rain, just lightning and thunder.  And even though it feels chilly to me I know the temperature is pushing 70, 75 degrees Fahrenheit.  Still, I’ve managed to fall in love with this place.  It has a certain charm, the baked brown earth, the tall cacti, the lizards, spiders, scorpions and birds.  I moved here for school, to get an art degree, the ultimate “what-are-you-going-to-do-with-that?” degree.  The saguaros captured my artist’s heart, the rest of the place took the rest of me captive.  Now I’m here, alone in the dark.  No friends or lovers to speak of, at least not human ones, for the desert has become my lover, the flora and fauna, my friends.  Another serpentine stream of lightning separates the sky for a moment and the thunder growls along after it.  In that instant I can see some of the native inhabitants scurrying for cover in fear of the rain that will never come.  In many ways they are as alone as I am and as much in the dark.  One of my old friends used to joke that she always expected that some day I’d mysteriously disappear and become a wolf or a saguaro or something like that.  I’ve always thought it would be more likely for one of those things to become human because they seem so much more alive than some people I know.  And when I’m out in the middle of the desert I can feel a pulse thrumming through everything, a heartbeat of existence.   There is so much life out here.  I’m amazed by how much is out here and thriving in the seemingly dead desert.  I take another drag.  The lightning brings another flash of daylight and an empty threat of rain.

Alone.  But satisfied.  In the not-quite Dark.

An evening and a cigarillo

So I’m sitting out on my porch, smoking a cigarillo and reading Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl” and feeling very cool and peaceful and writer-y.  It occurs to me that every once in a while I need to step outside and let my problems and my mind drift away with the smoke from my cigarillo.  I like feeling as though I’m a part of the world; the wind rushes by, the branches creak, the cars drive by, people come home full of their day, a few cats dash by and the clouds drift away.  I take a drag of my cigarillo and hear the paper wrapped around the tobacco burn softly and then slowly blow the smoke out of my mouth.  The bluish smoke dances away on the wind and around me because the wind can’t seem to decide which way to go.  I read another line from Ginsberg’s “Howl” – “…who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, / who were expelled from the academies for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull…” and smile.  He is crazy weird, but I like him.  Given the fact that he was a Beat poet and a druggie and literally crazy ( he was institutionalized once) it seems appropriate to be sitting on my porch in 50 degree weather with no shoes on in my lounge clothes with my leather jacket on and my feet propped up on my other desk chair underneath the glow of my porch light, smoking my cigarillo and observing the world through half-closed eyes while reading him.

I feel very Zen.

and then I crash.