January in Cleveland

There is, or there was, or there will be a full moon, I can't keep track, but the moon has been huge and sitting heavy on the clouds. The lake tides have been unnaturally high all week. That's not actual, that's a metaphor. People have been tapping on the glass. Also a metaphor.

So of course we tapped back, and they tapped back, and it became a game, and then a code, and then we all went outside. I'm not good with codes. I need things spelled out, in black and white large clear font, with footnotes. I have just started wandering around blissfully self involved, ignoring the tapping, letting others figure it all out. There are all sorts of emotions swimming behind my eyes, and I don't give a crap. I spend my mornings wishing for bread to dip into tea, that's how weird things have been lately. It's probably because I've started reading again, it makes me a weirdo.

In celebration, January became a month of sobriety and sunshine. It's not January I'm worried about, it's all those other months waiting in the wings. February. March. They are using January to soften us up. We melted like margarine at first but I want to be wrapped up and protected now, I want to sleep in warm places, with warm things. This weather sets off sprinkled pricklings in my spine of storms to come. It is beautiful and calm and threatening. How unprepared I am, to be put away for winter.

Between the sunshine and the deadlines and the full moon, I feel like this year is going to take forever and a week. We were all quiet that day, and I think we were all tired.

Rules for Living in the Snowbound State

There is no better cure for that horrible moment when your online music station starts playing Heart, and you start singing along, than to immediately quickly without hesitation play some George Michael. George Michael's Greatest Hits is almost always a good idea, it's that strong shot of Goldschlager you used to do in the basement of the old Grid, because you were underage, it had gold in it, and you hadn't developed your hatred of cinnamon yet.

I'm extremely tired. I went to sleep full of eggnog that various lawyers fed me like candy, and woke up two hours later, not hungover but vaguely broken. Disassociated. Full of things left to say, but there's the rub in waking up sometimes by yourself. My muscles ache now, in that warm exhausted way, when every small direction you stretch - your ribs, your neck, your eyelids even burn slowly. It's that vulnerable time when any classic pop song is going to win, and loads of other things that are bad for you. We're so sensitive in the winter here, easily disappointed, easily excited. Then by March we'll be regular stone profiles, done with all this shit. Oh and then Spring. I can imagine the Spring light if I close my eyes really tight. It's under the ice. The ice even smells like it.

It was so cold outside today the hairs on the back of my neck frosted over. We got out of the car and were instantly hit by a wall of frozen air. We walked to the rocks, and in five minutes our noses were red. In another five, my fingers could no longer work the camera. Ten, we were falling asleep. Fifteen, we were snow zombies, stumbling on the ice, giddily taking bad pictures of each other. Twenty and there were no longer two girls on the beach, but two silent huddled things, trying to find the car like bats, with echolocation.

There were sentries every where on the lake shore, watching and waiting. The annual appearance of the sentries means we're no longer in control. Instead this giant slow body of water is taking over, burying us alive. You have to fight back or it won't respect you. It's hard to fight something so harsh and gorgeous, enormous and heavy. It takes intent.

After all, we're the least affected, really. We're the lucky ones, with thumbs and coats and scarfs and heated cars to escape to. If we just keep moving, the ice won't get us.

All these dead monsters got swept out by the ice, whales and snakes and giant rotting trunks of man eating sturgeon. Winter is when the Lake cleans itself, I think. Exfoliates it's evils. Walking along around the carcasses, it's like that really cool dream you had when you were a kid, and you were St. George fighting the dragons, but the dragons were all dead to begin with, buried under continental drift. See, they stopped moving. This is the lesson today.

All roads going to the Lake are ice. All roads away from the Lake are ice. All paths to the water are now designed to kill you by an apathetic titan. You are so fucked. But the ships are still coming through. The ships always come through. They are tanks and siege engines and monstrous mountain dogs. The ships are amazing; never give up, never back down, never stop bringing the coal and the salt and the rock. God, that's hot.

And there's this creeping deadly advancing growth of water, water desperately crawling out of it's bed, reaching for dry land. It's an invasion by something that thinks it belongs here more than us.

Steel yourself by any means necessary. Food, drink, sex, whatever it is that keeps you agitated and keeps your vibrations from syncing up with the rest of the world. You have to stay on a different frequency from the Lake.









More photos from Snow Day 2010

Seriously, sturgeon scare the crap out of me

In the early grey morning, the fisherman unloaded his gear on the shore of The Great Lake. He set a bucket of minnows at his side, unfolded the old camping chair, and settled in with his pole for a quiet morning. The jagged break wall was empty. In the not so far distance, the city was only barely awake. It was damp and chilly in the spray of the waves, and he pulled his hooded sweatshirt close around his neck.

There are things to think about and things to not think about, as you sit on slick rocks and stare ahead but not behind you. The fisherman thought about his job, his yard work, this girl he knew when he was about 25. The waves curled quietly towards him, and away again. The perpetual October clouds stubbornly refused to let the sun break.

A man walked towards him on the break wall, and stood about 50 feet away, looking out at the lake. The fisherman noticed him, and took stock. No fishing equipment, no chair. The stranger was young, and made no movement to acknowledge him. Just stood there, staring at the water.

Our man became uneasy. There was no else at the shore, no other fishermen, which was to be expected in late October, early morning, before morning. Days like this had no morning. He tried to ignore his silent companion, and concentrate on the slight movements of the pole, being sucked in and out. He tried to think about that girl again. She had dirty blonde hair, and had danced at the bar to Bon Jovi. He had liked her then, drank with her. He couldn’t remember her name, which bothered him. Fifteen years? 20 years. He took a drink from his thermos, and remembered the way she had clutched at his neck, making out in his Buick at 3 am. Was it Heather? Crystal? She had stopped coming to the bar suddenly, and people had talked about a boyfriend, a pregnancy, probation? Years before he had met Whitney, and before the kids and the house in Brookpark. Whitney had liked to come with him to the lake when they first met. How excited she had been to catch her first fish. But then work came, and the boy, and now she merely nodded at him and went back to sleep when he woke up on Sundays morning and took out the tackle box. He thought about taking them out for breakfast when he got back. He would take them to IHOP, she loved the stuffed French toast.

When he turned to look again, the man was gone. He had left as silently as he had come. The fisherman glanced up and down the path, but there was no sign of him. He buried his hands in the sweatshirt.

Suddenly the pole went slack. He reeled it up, expected that the line had been caught in the rocks, and took out his pocket knife to cut it off. What a bitch, to lose that hook. But when he pulled it up, the line was broken, it slipped out of the waves like floss.

Underneath the waves, a dark shape moved.