April Showers

I listened to the hail lightly scratch against the bedroom window last night like a furtive, yet strangely persistent animal. It was that persistence that made me look out the open blinds and stare at the amazing amount of water falling in the cone of streetlights, but not anywhere else that my eyes could see. The flag at the post office blew in crazed, epileptic dance moves.

And sat and watched for awhile and thought about the Black Keys blues cover album that Nikki 2 K's lent me. I thought about staying awake for some hours, music in one ear, rain and hail in the other. I equated my life at the moment to lying in a fairly warm bed, dry and with the luxury of thinking about a blues cover album a friend had lent me, while just outside the world raged.

I tried to remember what it felt like in those moments when your life was in a bad place of desperation, when your mistakes manage throw a shadow on the better parts of life. I didn't want to remember the actual days, the actions, I wanted to remember the hollow vortex somewhere between your heart and stomach that drained your soul and left you gasping.

I realized that all the rumpled bedclothes and paid credit card bills, a job that's livable and pays more than the rent, a couple bucks tossed to the homeless guy outside the theater cannot be banked against never experiencing a moment of kick in the face desperation somewhere down the line. There's not a karma savings account that allows you to allay feeling the madness of bad things by paying it off with good deeds done. And then I realized I really didn't want to remember that either.

Sometimes the world's going to knock you around sugar pie. Sometimes that rain and hail is going to unmercifully slap around the tulips just opening up all over the city. And when you can count yourself as lucky enough to be inside when it comes, feel lucky.

It's that eternal yin and yang of living, it can't all be gravy and at times it's gonna hurt. But do the good times outweigh the bad? Fuck yes they do! You get blues covers albums and friends willing to share music that excites them, and you get laughter and beer and lovemaking and resounding shouts of 'yes!' to the heavens. You get those meals that make you curse every meal you've had before for not living up to that one, you get wine, you get Harold and Maude and T. Rex. You get handholding and people who will stand behind you and car rides where the music seems made for the landscape and you get tulips that still stand under the pouring rain and hail.