What I do when I'm down:

I go to the library.


And take pictures of books.


Also read.




I drive a long way to somewhere else, have coffee. Read.


Walk in the rain. By the river. Take pictures.


Happy to be not in my town for a minute.

All in all, it was a good day. I read Alex Phillips's Crash Dome, most of Dawn Paul's The Country of Loneliness, and some of Sara Marcus's Girls to the Front: True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. One comment for each. A. Alex Phillips rides into (almost entirely appropriately) weird territory here, talking the problem of accurately assessing reality and coming to terms with various ends of the world; the language was not always as beautiful as I wanted it to be, but I loved 90% of the book. B. It is brave to name a book the anything of Loneliness (thanks to Radclyffe Hall); the structure of the book is well done, something to learn from, as is the fictionalizing of the life of a family member. C. On Marcus: Read this book. I'm taking my time with it, so you'll have to get your own copy.

Composition Book Clouds

I always marvel when the air is so clear that from certain places I can see mountains all around--the Cascades to the east, the Olympics to the west and the smaller blue bumps of foothills and the San Juan Islands. Often it is near sunset when I notice this, the low angle of light baking the Cascades in a pink alpenglow--a term I learned just after moving here (and just as Voltaire said if god did not exist we would have to invent him, I would have to invent a word for this effect if one didn't already exist).

Today the cloud cover is thick, pretty with striations, stripes of darker and lighter clouds. So like lined paper I put down my book and the words exist there in negative.

The rain stopped. It was brief and hard. Sharp, big drops--all of it unusual for here. Like a regular spring storm elsewhere. We don't get those. I can't see anything of the peaks, the ragged mountains, but the smooth ridge of Lummi Island radiates with purplish hue, the light just right that everything there has such clarity. I feel I can see individual trees and the spaces between them, and the small stretches where the slope's so great nothing but rock and dirt will hold.

And across the bay to the peninsula, the monopalette of gray shades is broken by a flash of bright green as just a bit of light rips through.

I like this place. It's like no other.