I'd Rather Be Fishing

Naturally, no sooner did I blog about the spectacular weather than did it immediately take a turn for the absurd. Incredible winds kicked up and blew constantly for three or four days straight: I would hear it moaning outside at night, picking up bicycles and tossing them contemptuously into trees. Then it died down abruptly at about 3:47 yesterday afternoon, and I sat in a cafe by the river and watched, incredulous, as hail the size of Skittles fell out of a clear, sunny sky. My weather desktop widget is ominiously suggesting snow flurries Monday and Tuesday.

I am not amused.

Fortunately, I'm going to Poland on Thursday with my excellent Polish friend Piotr, Sarah (I know, but she's Piotr's friend too, so what can I do?), and Piotr's irritating friend Mohammed. Doubtless there will be hilarity, surreal experiences, pictures, wry observations, and the like when I return. Perhaps I'll get drunk on cheap zubrovka, get into a bar fight with dock workers in Gdansk, and wake up sometime later in Bratislava with an elaborate tattoo.
Speaking of zubrovka! There is no excuse to ever drink any other kind of vodka. As proof of this, I urge you to read W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which features a character renowned for his impeccable taste in all things and who loves zubrovka most of all. Verily, there is no vodka but Polish vodka, and zubrovka is its prophet.

Anyway, it's good that I'm getting out of here for a while. Perhaps due to the unnatural enforcement of the school system's rhythm on my life, I tend to conceive of seasons rather backwards. Autumn for me has always been the time for falling in love, for conceiving of great ventures, for hard work and brilliant intellectual construction. It is the time when all of the necessary arrangements for the year have been made, and there is nothing left but to reap the rewards. As it gets colder, I tend to get increasingly cerebral and esoteric, feeling downright Bolshevik as I stump around through crunching snow, my breath streaming out behind me, wearing a large coat and thinking heavy thoughts--at least until I get fed up with the monotony and vanish suddenly to parts unknown. Spring, however, feels like death to me. It is the time of things coming to an end, of loss and departure, of stress and broken promises. It is the herald of the long, grinding, oppressive summer months (thank you, unspeakable climate of Sacramento!) which I tend to associate with hard work on the one hand, languishing boredom on the other, and the looming worry of making arrangements for the next year.

So, what with this fitful advent of spring to the Frozen North, do you know what I desperately want to do? I'll tell you.
I want to take out an enormous college loan and instead of using it to write silly research papers (which I and my instructors will immediately--and rightly-- forget) use it to fake my own death, change my name, and buy a lavishly appointed Westsail 32--a fine craft, built like a tank and seaworthy as all hell, fairly slow but a strong runner with a good wind, and the most comfortable interior of any ship her size. Plenty of room for a formidable library. And instead of reading Barry Buzan's Security: A New Framework for Analysis (the point of this book: if people think valuable things are threatened, they will try to protect them...goddamn genius, this chap), I would rather run before the trade winds from San Francisco to Hawaii to the Federated States of Micronesia, and there to sit on a calm, quiet, crystal-clear lagoon, drinking ice cold beer and fishing. Every now and then, I'd venture into a small, ramshackle town to purchase more beer and munchies, using the stone currency they have there.

I'm in that sort of mood. I want to just disappear off the face of the world for a while, to spend a lot of time getting a permanent tan and learning some bizarre language from South Pacific natives. I want to go fishing. I want to turn up ten years later at a high school reunion, covered in strange tribal tattoos, perhaps having been made their chief, and to explain quite honestly that I'd spent the last decade as a pirate.

Considering, though, that I have no idea how to sail, know nothing about sailing laws, don't know where to buy a sailboat, have no money, and would probably fall overboard and die immediately, it's probably a good thing all around that I'm going to Poland instead. Catch y'all when I get back.

What I'm Reading
Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy: Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East.