week in a flash (week 13)

1. Did I mention yet that I really hate packing?

2. With that said everything that can be packed at this point has been…that’s pretty much everything other than food I need for the rest of the week and all the stuff I’m keeping with me for the next four months.

3. By this time next week I’ll be in my new home, that ‘new home’ being the hotel kitchenette room I’ll be living in for the next four months.

4. Do you notice a trend of four months?  That’s because that is how long I have until I graduate college.

5. I swear I must be the only person on the planet who absolutely hates the Geico cavemen, I happen to think that the Gecko and their new series of commercials that start out “Can switching to Geico save you 15% or more…” and then ask a rhetorical question like “Does a former drill sargeant make a really terrible therapist?” (my favorite one).  Those are funny…the cavemen just irritate the hell out of me.

6. By this time next week I’ll also be one day away from starting school…or is it two?  Either way I’ll be starting school next week…

7. So, some bad news for those of you who saw my announcement a few weeks ago about my friend Noreaster and his storm stories series – it has been cancelled.  He’s going through a really rough time.  Please pray for him.

8. I am going to try to start posting on some songs that are important to me (I mentioned it a few weeks ago), I’ve compiled a list and I have enough to keep it up for a long time so that’ll start soon.

9. Although I love this “week-in-a-flash” and look forward to the songs I want you guys to know that most of this is just being done because I like blogging and I need to have something to keep me doing it for a while until (if) things settle down.  Eventually I’ll start posting stories and other such things again, for now though this is what I have.

10. Why did God create cockroaches?  Seriously, why?

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.