Out

The superior feature of the evening out last night was getting to be outside all evening.

I didn’t have a roof over my head (except for about 15 minutes when I stopped into the deserted soccer bar off Aurora for a coke and a pee) for almost seven hours, from when I left Bothell after post-meeting libations with colleagues around 7:00 until I crept into my house at nearly 2:00

In the interim, I got to cross town east to west and north to south, wander around a beachfront while the quarter moon sank into the sound, scream as loud as I can in duet with a train roaring, clattering, and whistling by, climb the steep hill out of Carkeek Park twice, hone in on and meet up with a couple dozen cyclists in a supermarket parking lot, roll down a dark wooded trail behind and in front of others who shared the hilarity of not running off the path into a tree with me, stand around a hardwood fire that eventually burned as a hot as a blacksmith’s forge, talk my way out of trouble with a cranky security guard, dodge pushpins and bottle rockets launched from a homemade blowgun, and finally, before the night was done, pedal another fifteen miles by myself along my new favorite route in town, so that by the time I arrived at home, all I wanted to do was let my trousers wrinkle down upon my ankles and my shirt flutter atop it before lying prone upon by back and staring at the ceiling to recall the sights and sounds of the night, including crows silhouetted against the dying glow of the day, crackling embers and shiny faces, and one unopened PBR can left sitting on our backyard table, a mute but eloquent illustration of all that happened and didn’t in the out of doors I got to be in for all but an entire day’s worth of starry night.