Grey morning of weeping sky
After a cold bed, an empty room
Driving in the rain
Driving in the dark
Squint at the oncoming headlights
I saw a 45MPH sign and I wanted to keep going...
Keep driving through the dark and the cold and the wet
Forever perhaps
Everything is muted earth
Rivulets spill down tree trunks
And wind through the muddy driveway
It is winter
The quiet is me...

In two weeks I will be moving once again. Back to California where the nights are warm and the sky is always blue and the sun heats your bones. Not quite eight months in Oregon, that mystical place of hipsters and coffee houses, artists and rain; and all is changing again. I'll be sad to go (who isn't sad when they have to leave a place?), but the call of the southern coast and the prospect of a job I know I enjoy have tipped the scales. The world is open and beckoning, and adventures are as close as you make them. Been listening to the Kings of Convenience, a jazzy band from Norway who sound like Simon and Garfunkel, and Joanna Newsom, and trying to get a solid 8 hours a night. And I see the shape of a quiet future forming in the June Gloom over the sea.

I discovered this post in my drafts that I guess I never published. It was written while working at Kinko's in Ventura...I find it rather silly. I am very long ways from that time, but somehow it was only yesterday...

Careening carelessly along Monday morning freeways, bleary-eyed and happy at the prospect of coveted sleep...A forlorn Lucky smolders merrily between my lips as I smash the accelerator toward the dark, secret places under the dash in the Travelette. Did you know that a 1968 full-size truck will do 80mph in second gear? I love Internationals. Tired enough to feel very, very happy, and want to stay up forever...I admit I curled up behind a printer for about an hour and a half while Sweet-Cheeks (dont' ask, he's a Catholic) kept watch for the Melting Snowman who always shows up to work at 5:20am. Now that's absurd. So why am blogging right now instead of sleeping?

Today is very quiet and grey. Portland is a mysterious and melancholy place sometimes, filled with thoughtful clouds and plaintive raindrops. Everone here is hip but rootless, cool and interesting but strangely hopeless. Young and beautiful but losing that fragile grip of moral peace. I talked late into the night with my roommate Charles, musing over beers and guitar strings about childhood, vocations, loneliness and the basic human need to belong to somthing or someplace. Our generation is as rootless, restless and as lost as any has ever been it seems; we have no hometowns, no secure jobs, no clear vision of a future that includes anyting familiar. We cling to our scattered friends and memories, desparate for stabilty, left in the end with simply God and Hope and our own independence to get us by. Not that this is the worst situation we could be in...there is pride and trust that binds us in our travels and chance wanderings, like Dylan, Guthrie, Kerouac, Croce, G. Welch, and the rest, past and present. Folk music and thrift clothing, battered old cars and guitars remind us that we are truely American, for this is the American way---not those mid-century men devoid of passion and identity, with thier breadbox homes and corporate jobs, living without a face, no---Americans rode West and lived or died on their wagons, hopped trains or walked because there is dignity in the search for work, not in deflated, broken soup lines, hitchhiked and picked fruit so they could least say they were taking care of themselves. Independence is the core of the America soul, and it is a proud but lonely place. And now that I am a little older and soon to be married, community, Catholic community especially, is paramount. I think there will always be occasional times of loneliness and isolation, but I hope that my (soon to be) wife and I will be something steady, an island for each other and those we meet. It's okay to be lonely or moved by the various tragedies in life, but if relationships with God and loved ones, and charity for everyone we encounter are nurtured and culivated, nothing will be important in the end except perserverance in love and the peace Christ may spread through us.
There is no stopping my deep passion for so much of the music that is tied to the ragged youth of our times though...for all you who have loved Gillian Welch, Dylan or the Be Good Tanyas, I have a new artist for you: I randomly aquired this CD from an elf-shaped girl at a coffee house near where Anna lives; we asked her who was on the stereo and she gave us Joanna Newsom. If have not heard her yet you MUST. A funky, folky, harp-player from a NorCal mountain town with a bizarre voice and lovely melodies...click on her picture and listen to the music video on her website, she's quite something.

I stumbed across this little blurb on Wikipedia today while browsing the web in a coffee house in Portland. This spring I have left a short-lived romance with cigarettes behind me, but this still tickled me. In 1604, King James the 1st put forth this entertaining but rather compelling anti-smoking statement, (remember, this was before the invention of proper cigarettes):

Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossely mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the marks and notes of vanitie upon you: by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmefull to the brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.

The last sentence is the best!