2003-08-08 - 1:51 a.m.

So Sunday was a wash. The Roommate and I walked to Davis, and after we had completed our predetermined tasks, the sky just opened up, and we got beyond water-logged. Waiting for a quick bus home, no less, when the previous day we chanced a downpour and won ourselves a walk all the way to Lexington.

But you gotta get drenched at least once a summer. You just gotta. I remember a while back, getting soaked with my dear friend H., back when she lived in Brighton (which she insisted was actually Allston), coming outta Urban Renewals (which, by the way, proudly proclaims that its customers prefer low prices to dressing rooms).

That was fun.

This time, with the Roommate, I pretended to be annoyed by the rain, wait, actually I was annoyed with those endless sheets of rain, but I pretended to be moreso for the Roommate�s amusement. Annoying, true, and this is coming four days removed it, but it was absolutely amazing to feel it hammering that hard, with that thunder and lightning element of danger, playing marco-polo blindly nearby.

Such rain, and I felt lucky to get it, �cause it doesn�t happen very often--being so trapped by it, and it was nice to share it with the Roommate.

So a couple of days ago I was leaving work, heading for the train station, crossing State and Congress, which I�ve done about seventeen million times since September of 1997, and it was raining.

Now I consider myself a conscientious pedestrian. I don�t run into traffic. If I decide to cross against the traffic red light, I do it like a baserunner--wait �till I one-hundred-percent know I�ll make it, and then be quick about it. Nobody inconvenienced. (I hate when I judge it right but a little close, and then some stumbling moron hesitates five seconds and then decides to follow me across the street.)

This time, it was raining a little, and as I got to the second pedestrian island before it�s all City Hall and no more stopping for cars, I decided to wait for the traffic light to turn from yellow to red, �cause there was a car approaching from awhile back that I thought might try to run it. As the light turned red, the car was still about 100 feet back, so I start to cross, and the driver guns it to stop short for the red as I�m crossing. Just to see me scamper to safety? I guess.

I turned to give the driver a dirty look, and he was laughing right at me, no mistake about it, and that�s according to the part of my brain that usually says you�re just being paranoid. Dude. That got me pissed off. Fucking asshole. I�m pissed thinking about it.

So I flicked my cigarette butt at his windshield, and, career smoker that I am, I have good aim. Were there no windshield, I would have hit him in the face.

Then I hightailed it to the train station, wishing I was smoking a cigarette.

Whenever I listen to the Softies I always picture them in the Pacific Northwest (where I�ve never been) in a three-story house with a patch of unmanaged grass outside and that smells nice like cooking, with maybe a grandma smoking Dorals in what used to be a living room on the first floor, and they�re upstairs, listening to records playing through big old fuzzy speakers that long ago played Glen Campbell, and most recently blared Hendrix for an older brother that went away to college, and they�re two friends upstairs with posters on the wall of bands I�ve never heard of but I�d like to, just drawing on their jeans and on fresh-cut construction paper hearts. It�s raining cold outside, but they�re cozy with sweaters and baseboard heat.

I remember when I was a kid, living in Jamaica Plain, my favorite thing on the planet was to getting off from school on a Friday and renting a Nintendo game for the weekend at Videosmith--I only got video games on my birthday and on Christmas, but I was allowed to rent one most Fridays. I�d think all week about what game I wanted to get. I�d make extensive lists, in case my top fifteen choices all happened to be rented out--each week a list that rivaled the Order of Presidential Succession.

Man, that was great. I wish I was doing that right now. Maybe there was some weekend homework, but I didn�t have to go to school to do it. And I didn�t have to worry about the extra money I wouldn�t be making if I didn�t go to school on Saturday.

Friday had more meaning then.

One Friday, I got off the bus two stops early in a rainstorm, rented my video game (Ultima, maybe? Before I got it as a birthday gift?). And walked back home with it, down Centre Street, before it became trendy but of course I didn�t know that back then. Hurrying. Feeling as free as a kid that likes school, but not that much, can feel on a Friday where the school days are dwindling, with a recyclable bag wrapped three times around a cartridge guaranteed to provide two mornings and three afternoons of happiness and graphics and some frustration and some joy and a reluctant return and no late fees.