Organizing Rainstorms

“It was one of those mid-summer Sundays when everyone sits around saying,”I drank too much last night.” John Cheever

Saturday, I went for a walk around 5 am. I came across one of those little free library boxes; this one had a cupboard door with about 4 small round holes, revealing only a glimpse of the books inside. My natural inclination in any book setting is to organize or to yearn for organization, whether it is alphabetization or Dewey Decimal I am not particular, but this library box was not organized or curated in any logical manner.

No, this was little free library box was organized like someone had dumped their ex’s books into the box, shook it , pissed upon it, and left it to soak in the rain for a few months. Staring at me from inside the library box, among the waterlogged travel books, junk children’s books, and sordid supermarket novels, was a book called, “The Trip To Echo Springs— On Writing and Drinking” by Olivia Laing.

I had not seen nor heard of this book before, but something inside me compelled me to reach in and pick it up. It was in comparatively good shape, thankfully, as I am quite the snob when it comes to books and their condition. I’m the guy in the bookstore who reaches below the top book in the stack to find the newest looking book below. Deep down, surfaces matter.

In Echo Springs, Olivia Laing looks at six writers, all men and all alcoholics: John Cheever, Robert Carver, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, and John Berryman. The book is categorized as Biography/Memoir/Travel. I wonder what the travel part is, not registering the title The Trip to ….. There is a journey that is promised. Is that the drunk driving part? The book starts in 1973, Iowa City with a road trip of sorts, as John Cheever and Raymond Carver drive to the local state liquor store which is opening at 9 am. They are the first in the door to buy a half gallon of Scotch. You can tell this is set in the USA, as a half gallon of scotch would not even be available in Canada, certainly not for the price in Iowa City in 1973. In Canada we tax the hell out of sin. Sin taxes. On booze, weed, mushrooms even. Prostitution is not legal or we would tax that. The government runs legal betting now, whores cannot be far behind. And yet, no one thinks to license bike riders. But this is another rant.

“Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he damaged his sense of truth?”

This line is from the story The Swimmer, where Neddy Merrill, the perfect WASP name, begins to doubt his “command of time.” Command of time sounds like a good attribute to aspire to, sort of like controlling of your bowels in public is considered admirable.

The weather apps tell us to expect an “organized rainstorm” this next week, which is exactly the kind of meteorological poetry we have come to know and love. Like heat domes and atmospheric rivers. No one speaks of rain without poetry. Is this the west coast equivalent of a thousand words for snow? Did you hear they had tornados outside of Montreal this past week? Mon dieu!!!

Speaking of God Tricks or is that Stupid Human Tricks, how about the high levels of cocaine discovered in sharks off the coast of Brazil? Who would even consider testing sharks for levels of cocaine? Is that a thing now? Sharks doing coke? Obviously fish have dependency problems. Was it so long ago that we were testing tuna for mercury, yet now we test sharks for cocaine? Sorry Charlie.

What drew my attention was the word organized, and how it is being used in conjunction with the word rainstorm. Welcome to your new conspiracy- Who is organizing rainstorms?

No longer content with fighting umbrellas under the awnings, we are overcome with handwritten placards expounding on how the rights of rainstorms are being trampled.

Of course this begs the question—Who Controls Organized Rainstorm?

Can we blame the Russians or China? Trudeau? International Jewish Communist Bankers?

Has Joe Biden ever been seen in a rainstorm?

When will it all start to make sense, even in a failed memory/ damaged sense of truth kind of way?

Dense says Make Sense, Not War.

Yesterday, I found a book by Olivia Laing in a Library box. Today, I read a review of her latest book— The Gardens Against Time, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The reviewer was Manjula Martin, author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History.

One spark leads to another. Is there anything more viral than fire? The Last Fire Season is built on feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway’s concept of “staying with the trouble.” According to Martin, “It’s a simple but powerful concept: only by allowing oneself to exist within—to fully feel—the terror, sadness, and strange beauty of this moment in human time could one develop new ways to live through it.”

Cosmic coincidence or conspiracy? Last week, Big Weather organized the destruction of Jasper, Alberta by wildfire. Here is a rule for budding conspiracy theorists— attach the word Big to anything, and it becomes a conspiracy. I bought a shirt at the Gap yesterday. The label says it is The Big Shirt. Big Shirt controls fashion. Disagree? Fight me, as the kids say.

Donna J. Haraway, ( what is it with the middle J.? Donald J. Trump. Homer J. Simpson. Donna J. Haraway) identifies two common responses to climate change. First, we have the “Game-over people,” who have already given up, consigning themselves to the apocalypse dumpster fire. Then we have the “Technofixers,” who deny the crisis exists, all the while placing their bets on the Apoplectic Horse of the Apocalypse, the horse of nonexistent human efforts, hoping Big Tech and Big Science might solve the crisis. Big Science wants to cure climate change by building giant machines to suck CO2 from the atmosphere. As the BBC reported, ”Step back for a moment to 2021, to Squamish, British Columbia where, against a bucolic skyline of snowy mountains, the finishing touches are being put to a barn-sized device covered in blue tarpaulin. When it becomes operational in September, Carbon Engineering's prototype direct air capture (DAC) plant will begin scrubbing a tonne of CO2 from the air every year. It is a small start, and a somewhat larger plant in Texas is in the works, but this is the typical scale of a DAC plant today.”

"We have a climate change problem and it's caused by an excess of CO2," says Carbon Engineering chief executive Steve Oldham. "With DAC, you can remove any emission, anywhere, from any moment in time. It's very powerful tool to have."

Donna J. Haraway describes this kind of magical thinking as “The God Trick", which is about enacting "a conquering gaze from nowhere", which then enables “a perverse capacity […] to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power".

So in the space of 24 hours, the universe has sent me 3 new feminist authors, Olivia Laing, Manjula Martin and Donna J. Haraway. My Mother ( why does it always come back to my Mother?) defined the genders as this: Boys are simple. Girls are sneaky.

The Girl-Gods are the sneakiest. Also the smartest. Their God Tricks rule. The Girl-Gods listen to Chappell Roan and love Celine Dion, whose song at the opening Paris Olympics made me cry. That is what the Girl-Gods do. They make grown men cry.