Magic melancholy

It's ridiculously late and I'm sitting up in one of those wonderful melancholy moods that goes well with a pot of tea and badly with liquor.

The chores are done and I've got the very strange mixture of Chris Botti, the refreshingly angry new Dixie Chicks release, old Dave Matthews Band songs from the '90s, MSTRKRFT (a song that seems like a redux of a 70s disco ditty) and a world music combo called Willie and Lobo. Last night the new ITunes free downloads and some new releases came out, so XieXie got her groove on!

The music brings on what I think of as the most typical Portland mood, the one that goes best with rain and sitting alone in coffee houses -- an achy regret of grey skies, old memories, future angst and an inner lining of guilty pleasure. Perhaps I've grown so used to the seasonally-produced mood that now that the rain has slowed down, I needed to create it for myself.

My memories are going back to a younger self when I was a park ranger in Colorado, of loving the wrong man at the wrong time, moonlight drives across mesa tops in the Southwest to parties at remote, brilliantly lit, packed-to-the-rafter trailers where I didn't need the tequila to dance like there was no tomorrow. And, on the way home, a quick-silvery mountain lion leaped across the road...