Minneapolis, Minnesota, Morning, 03/05/2022

 Rain that falls,

straight down

When even your

windows stay dry

Dry & safe

but distant and uninvolved

A strange miracle

I can't listen with the window open, it lets in all the other ambient sounds – tires and wheels and roads and soft traffic – which can occasionally be quite beautiful, but in instances like this, it drowns out the dribbled rain drops, and the best sound becomes background to background.

When I watch the stoplights, the scene of the whole evening can be changed based on brightness of whichever light is glistened at the time. Green, which is almost like white to me, makes a warm almost soft vanilla ice cream soup hue to the lights homes streets sidewalk and grasses. Always all the best whenever the roads are empty – no one's coming – and it feels green light in every direction only for me because no one driving tonight is using this intersection at the moment, so it's a possibility, an openness that only I see. Welcoming only for me.

Red is even more full of life. In rain like this, it gives everything that vivacious blood life excitement, a gripping elan, it reveals the energy and excitement that waits in everything. Everything.

There's incredible unity at a red stoplight, for an incredible moment. There's that breathy pause before the green. When both lights are red, one lane waits and one lane knows the waiting is about to end. But what is that cross-graph point – when one's excitement is lulling and one's motivation is rising – that intersection, where both parties know exactly how the other one feels, or felt, or is going to feel. It's an immense, indisputable unavoidable sympathy, if even for an infinitesimal and unknowable instant, to all parties involved. The Great Leveling. The Swing Swang. The First Shall Be Last & The Last Shall Be First. The Great Pendulum Rubber Band, The Expand & Contract. The move from one to the other. And Back Again.

The green light could never do that, could never bring about a peace of that magnitude. There's absolutely no overlap of two greens – at least there better not be – even for a picosecond (the yellow, the referee, the second banana, sees to that; forever disparaged, but without him the whole thing falls apart). And Green can think he gets all the excitement and fame. And he is important, but not as much as he thinks he is. He's a flash in the pan, he's a Johnny Come Lately. He's all surprise. He's all shock. He's certainly no slouch, but the red light's where the suspense is, where the action waits to happen, where it can be drunk much more deeply than instant gratification. Life happens far more at red lights than at green.