13th
The Penultimate Sonoma Blog Entry
“The fire in our throats will beckon the thaw.”
So the Sonoma is in its last 24 hours. I lived, I loved, I lost, and I learned- the personal growth I’ve experienced has been tremendous; coming here as a jaded urban-dwelling hipster and leaving as a level-headed well rounded REAL PERSON.
Sonoma is one of those certain quaint small towns that adorn the front of glossy as station postcards that seem to capture a fleeting yet timeless portrait of a fragment of time that seems to be deep within your memory even though you’ve never been there. You know the people, the places, the sights and scents, although the experience is altogether foreign to your smog-blunted senses. Fast and free, yet repressed and reserved; Sonoma is both the open road with scenery and sky flying by you and the backwoods trail that meanders along the stream that one constantly stops to contemplate the dapple of sunlight and the gather and flow of water over stones worn round by time and weather.
Blood and bone and skin and stone- that is the essence of the small American town. As Steinbeck and his canine companion Charlie observed:
“The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.”
This child of the concrete jungle has been reborn into the countryside but he finds himself maturing at an alarmingly rapid pace and once again yearning for the lights and bathroom tugjobs that only the cold city streets can offer. The honest people of the small town place their work-worn hands in my mine and all I can offer in return is a cynical jest- the smirking sneer of the urban sophisticate that reduces their small town optimism to a quivering mass of useless flesh.
So I leave Sonoma, both in spite of it and in love with it.
Kill noise. End Transmission.
