I was reading a new blog today.  one that i stumbled on by accident…some things he said made me cry.  i’ll tell you about that later. 

i think his writing is…..well, i’ll tell you that later, too.

here’s a small sample of something he wrote.  what do you think?…..

I should have been from Seattle.

Starbucks, for starters.  And it’s not even that I love their coffee so much as the feeling I get when I’m in the store.  Shallow?  Maybe.  I guess the marketing works on me.  I walk into Starbucks and want to buy the biggest cup of hot steaming coffee they serve and stretch out on one of those brown leather couches and open a Jack London short story, or maybe Poe if it’s late fall.  I would want to be wearing this thick olive drab sweater that I have.  It’s my favorite sweater.  And the only thing that would make the scene better would be if I had a big black lab with me.  But I don’t think they let dogs into Starbucks.  Though I haven’t tried.  And I don’t have a black lab.  But if I did, his name would be Jack.

It’s also the music, lately, that makes me wish I was from Seattle.  Shawn McDonald.  I recognize something in the simple notes from his acoustic guitar and his raw voice with his raw lyrics.  There’s a familiarity in the honesty of the chords and the humility of the lines.  I like to hear his fingers slide over the strings and his voice crack when he pours his heart into that one line.  “I can-not do it all-a-lone.”   So not perfect.  But real.  I need real in my life right now.  Real is what speaks.  To me, anyway.  Man, we spend a lot of time pretending.  Pretending to be perfect.  I’m too tired to pretend.  Maybe it’s a phase.  Maybe I’ve turned a corner.

It’s also the rain, about Seattle.  Not the drowning downpour of a mid-summer thunderstorm.  That’s much too cleansing.  No, a persistent, cold, hard drizzle is what I mean.  The sky one gray, serene ceiling, hovering like a dark sheet spread over a canopy bed.  Clouds so low you feel like you might have to duck as you step outside. That kind of rain.   A rain that clings to you long after you’ve come back inside, that aches in your marrow long after your skin has dried.  A rain that stings your face; your cold, wet hands shoved deep in your pockets, and you breathe out and see your breath like a puff of smoke from an old man’s pipe, as he ponders where his days have gone.  A rain that feels like it cuts through you and you just can’t shake it.  It suits my mood recently, that kind of rain. 

There’s poetry, I think, in that kind of rain.