There is a Mexican guy at the Murray North Trax station that likes to burst out in song to his friends when he meets them. This has happened several times over the last few weeks, so I can only assume it is normal behavior for him. His friends and he talk along in Spanish quite amiably and he (and sometimes his friends) will cut out into song and back again. My Spanish, unfortunately, is not good enough to pick up on their particular dialect, but I have the sneaking suspicion their songs are bawdy.

I mistakenly left my Walkman at work today. I must admit the experience of the commute is tangibly different without my musical ear plugs. You have to listen to people, then, and the worrisome clank and creak of the train. You have to hear the ranters and the teenagers obsessed with some minutia of life or others, who, like the ranters, repeat their observations ceaselessly: "He's so weird, dude. He's so weird. Weird." Over and over and over like a mantra for understanding life and how people are weird--a means of convincing one's self that people are indeed weird.

Then there are the chirpy conversations between middle-aged people who are excited to be going downtown or to the football game. The chirpiness seems to be a aural cover for discomfort. You can read it in their body language. It is an adventure to take the train downtown--a strange break from suburban uniformity and relative cleanliness of solidly middle-class suburbia. The sites of industrial decay and the occasional derelict person sitting two seats back or out on the train platform seem to unnerve them. Chirpy conversations with peers assuages them well.

In the meantime I read an interesting literal translation of the Gilgamesh, thinking of Enkidu and how he became civilized in between the fragments.

At 4 or 5 this morning there was the most spectacular storm. Not only was it a downpour, but thunder and lightning played close overhead shaking the windows in their frames. All night whilst chewing the late-night fat on John and Kendra's porch with a view, we kept seeing the latent flash distant lightning. "Did you see that?" one of us would ask and the others would confirm that it was not some sleep-deprivation-induced illusion. We could not see the northern sky, but suspected that the storm must be brewing there since the sky to the west had a nearly unbroken view of the pale three-quarter moon and fast-fading Mars. At one point I said "That can't be heat lightning. We don't have heat lightning," interrupting a particularly interesting point that someone was making.

Our intermittent commentary on the continued until I left. At home the wind kicked up, the flashes grew more intense, and finally thunder and rain came. You have to hear thunder in a high mountain valley. On the plains the thunder seems to echo and roll. Here the thunder splits you a part and then comes back for more.