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Originally uploaded by Rachel Ariel.

Death Cab for Cutie in CSI tonight. Interesting, how popular culture has shifted from valuing the popular to valuing the unknown. Garden State launched the Shins from fairly successful but little known to much better known, and somewhat more succesful. The people who chose the music for Grey’s Anatomy are obsessed with Tegan and Sara. Apparently the OC can launch indie bands (watch out Stars). Is this where I saw “I liked unknown music before it was popular?” Is that too complicated a concept? The fact is, when I went to England (remember, where the Beatles were popular for some years before crossing the pond) in 1999, I went in to music stores and said “Give me something awesome that I won’t find in the US” or something to that effect. I came away with Stereophonics (they were popular here for about a second in 2000, they also recently showed up in some movie or tv show i saw recently), which was not quite what i was looking for, but close.

Anyway, it fascinates me.

Thinking back on my last post, I realize that not only have I not developed a habit of walking in the rain in any other place that I have lived, but I have not developed the habit of walking in any other place that I have lived.

Here, I walk for the sake of walking. I walk to clear my head, to remember my body, to remind myself that all I need to be elsewhere is the desire to move my body. I don’t need a car, or a train or an airplane. Just some shoes that will protect the bottom of my feet from the hazards of walking around a place where people discard the fragmants of their lives onto the side of the road.

I walk when I’m angry. I just walk out the door and go until I have sorted out the inside of my head well enough to want to go back, and then I walk a little further just to be sure, and then I turn around and walk back, usually a different route. My dad once said, when I was very young, that you should not retrace your steps on a walk, you should just go forward to get back where you came from (he said it in words that made sense to me as a child, but that was the gist of it) and that is a sentiment I have carried with me. Not that there are rules for taking a walk, but the idea of narrowness in simply turning around and going back the way you came.

I have a fantasy in which I pack a small back with a couple of changes of underwear and a couple of tee shirts and pairs of socks, and just start walking one day. Right now it’s the northwest that calls to me, but who knows what it may be on the day I start. Like the characters in the fantasy novels that carried me through adolesence, I will just start walking. Perhaps I will create a quest for myself, perhaps the journey itself is all that I need. L and I used to dream of walking to Alaska. Maybe someday we will do it. Just… start walking.

I did walk some in Greensboro, especially in the woods, but there is something incredibly depressing about walking in tamed wilderness. I guess when comparing the Guilford woods to Rocky Mountain National Park there will be a bit of a disconnect. I didn’t walk the streets because Greensboro obviously has no value for its pedestrian traffic. Sidewalks were an afterthuoght, and drivers seemed oblivious to the world outside their steel casings. But i did walk, occasionally in Greensboro.

I walked some in Israel, if for no other reason than that it was my only option. I swore that I wouldn’t ride buses, and I didn’t have a car, and at some point cabs just became, unreasonable. But walking was rarely an enjoyable experience in Israel. It was the way to get from one place to another. Thats a lie. I walked aimlessly on the beach, and through both Tel Aviv and Haifa. But I did not walk aimlessly around Jerusalem. It made me nervous, and I felt intimidated by the neighborhood in which I lived. I suppose that’s very little excuse, in the long term, since I try not to live a frightened life. But it seemed like common sense at the time.

In Viginia I didn’t walk because there was no place to walk. No sidewalks, and careering cars. And it was so hot. So goddamn hot all of the time. L told me that she used to go into DC to walk around, but we never did that. With grad school on the horizon I look forward to living in actual DC and walking around there.

Whenever I would drive back from the East Coast I would wait anxiously for the first glimpse of the mountains. They look like low clouds on the horizon at first. And they get bigger and bigger. And I take a moment to look at them, as their full scale finally hits me, and wonder what it must have been like for the early pioneers who went west, in their covered wagons and on horseback, or simply on foot. I think about the Native Americans who traversed the land for generations leaving barely a mark upon it. And I am intensely jealous that I will never get to walk, leaving barely a trace, upon this land, to be able to honestly wonder if I am the only person to have looked at a particular tree, or stepped on a particular patch of ground.

It seems that our movements are scripted, as much as we work to defy them.

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Originally uploaded by Rachel Ariel.

Currently Listening to:”Summertime” Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

I had forgotten how that line pulls at my soul every time I hear it. I don’t care if it’s Ella, Louis, Janis, or Me First. Something about the necessary mournfulness, the wrenching truth of that one sentiment. I’ve got nothin’ to prove to you, this is just the way it is.

Summer isn’t here yet. But spring, well spring is underway. They’ve predicted the first thunderstorm for today. I doubt it will come to pass, but god knows I love a thunderstorm. In no other place that I’ve lived, have I developed the tendency to walk around in the pouring rain.

But Denver.

Denver, I could walk your streets in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain, th ebitter cold or the blistering summer sun. And I have. Oh baby, I have. And I have found nothing quite so sweet as being soaking wet from a late spring thunderstorm. Not running, or even going somewhere. Just wandering around in the rain. The last time I did it was the summer before I left for Israel. A late night storm, I walked out of the house into the rain and walked in a spiral aruond my house. For an hour or more. I was drenched by the time I decided to go home. I tried to find an old post about it, but have failed… for now.

Enjoy the Daffodils

Currently Listening: “Choo Choo Ch’boogie” Louis Jordan

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Originally uploaded by Rachel Ariel.

I’ve been cleaning a lot. Getting ready for Leise to move in, trying to shed some of the detritus from the life of a packrat. My problem is paper. I keep scraps with sentimental value, I keep bills and copies of bills, statements and applications. And books. So many books. I don’t get rid of the books, not because I think I will reread them (with so many books in the world that I haven’t already read, it seems… wasteful to re read any but the most exceptional of books) but because someday I may want to have them. Someday I may have a child who loves Star Wars, or murder mysteries. And god knows I won’t be able to replenish my collection of The Cat Who… books, or Star Wars novels as cheaply as I purchased them for in the first place. I bought most of them used… something I so rarely do anymore. I wonder why…? What little piece of me has bought into the idea that I need for something to be *new*? I love the smell of old books, I love the different, older covers, I love the different consistencies of the paper. I keep thinking perhaps I will set my books free… utilize bookcrossing.com but then again… no one really seems to take that particularlu seriously. Alas. The individual sheets of paper can be discarded, shredded and recycled. On Sunday I threw out a scrap of paper with an old love’s e mail address and the name from which he derived it written on it. A small memento from the days just after I realized how unreachable he was to me. A message carried to three different states, and across half a country, used as a bookmark, and then merely kept for the sake of keeping it. And now, it’s trash, under day old coffee grounds and cat litter.

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Originally uploaded by Rachel Ariel.

I bought four CDs today. I mention this only because two of them contain the words “el oso” in them. A brief amazon search has shown only seven cds that they carry with the words “el oso” involved in them. Unimportant, just interesting to me.

I also bought the Misfits CD “Famous Monsters”. Looking over the liner notes takes me straight back to senior year of high school. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. “If I cut off your arms and I cut off your legs, would you still love me anyways?”

Hilarity ensued. It’s good to remember sometimes, that high school really wasn’t all bad. Just mostly bad (like mostly dead).