Oh man oh man it is morning at night or maybe night at morning. It's a thunderstorm downtown. It's so dark it's like night, with lightning that lights up the sky that's so dark it's like night. And the rain is so powerful and it's coming down, just falling down out of the sky like an infinite small waterfall.
But it's so dark the lights in the restaurants make them look so inviting, like refuges from the storm. But there's so much power, and electricity, and energy in the air space that it's impossible not to pick up some of it through my lightning rods like fingers, ears, and elbows. So I don't understand the few people walking around who look like the living, walking, dead. Morning at night. People are huddled under the eaves of churches, waiting until there's less incredible rain in those incredible clouds that's really just one cloud, sitting below the sky but above the buildings, covering the whole city, one giant, charcoal cloud.
I sat in the car with my mom. She pulled over even though we were downtown, and not on the highway. And we had a "moment" or at least I did in my head. With the rain beating the windshield and roof of the car, LOUD, we listened to Frank Sinatra on her old person AM radio station. We sat there craning our necks to look out the windshield at the buildings and the lightning through the rain. The buildings which define our city, which, in part defines us, listening to the music of her childhood, now with her own child, more or less grown, in the same city as her childhood, sharing experiences that maybe have not changed that much, in the car, in the pounding rain in the same old dirty, sick, dirty, terminally ill city, not dead but dying, a city in a hospital on support, with funding tubes in its arms, a reality morphine drip to squeeze when things get too ugly.
It's clearing up now. Things are getting brighter. More people are out. It feels like a catharsis after a powerful experience. It feels like laying in bed after you've had sex. The energy and electricity are gone from the air, replaced by calm nothing.
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