Fall in May

~46~ The House of the Rising Raisins

Trigger Alert: Readers with Flashback issues should probably just skip ahead to chapter 50.

Oh mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Don't spend your life in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun
It's been the ruin of many a poor boy
Dear God, I know I was one...

House Of The Rising Sun ~ The Animals 

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Summer - June 12th (Mayday - 68 days away)

So three months ago, way back in the day before Mayday. 

It's my first night at the House of the Rising Raisins, stuck in the suck that is San Fall. The Raisins have finally laid down their weary little heads and tuned out for the night, leaving me to my own vices. I take a moment to sit still and try to find my zen. But my thoughts are too random and chaotic from the forced relocation of my existence, that I cannot think straight.

For the second time in my life, I feel like a total tourista. Just another hapless traveler, ignorant of local customs, hungry, thirsty, and more than a little weary of the hostile locals. Personally, I hate visiting distant and exotic lands like Northern California. Getting scammed by people with unpronounceable names speaking in tongues and contracting deadly diseases from their rainwater. I think of travel agents with the same degree of excitement as I think of morticians. If you have to go bro? Okay, I guess it's that time. But if you do not ...then naw not on that noise!

I should be way wiped out from the terror flight up from the south. But instead, I am wide awake staring around my father's old room at my memories. In the house, that he never lived in, in a room he never slept a night in. It's not even something cool like his ghost haunting me, no it's all the quiet that is killing me.

The deathly silence of San Fall is just another reminder that the ever-present background noise of my life is long gone. I never realized just how noisy the place I grew up in was until I lay on these mattresses under the window in not-my-father's old room.

At the beach the houses are stacked so close together, I can hear my neighbors take a shower. Not to mention, the constant cacophony of partying, banging, fighting, and music blaring that is life at the beach. Here in the crypt in which I sleep in now, no babies are crying, no dogs barking at harmonica playing transients, just walking down the alleys between bars to panhandle along their nightly quest for oblivion. 

There are no jets coming in off the ocean on their final landing at the plane station place. No helicopters overhead vibrating past on their way to another unnecessary shooting fatality or a freeway chase. No Harley's roaring own distant streets setting off a chorus of car alarms, just for the hell of it. No Swine sirens chasing the Harley's, with News helicopters in tow, just hoping for a fatal freeway chase ending in someone getting shot to death by the killer cops.

To me, San Fallcon has the feel of a really sad cemetery. A lonely place where no one ever comes to visit the beautiful bones. Just the profound sound of silence of the graveyard in the valley of death. Save for all those bugs making their bug noises in the dark. Probably just waiting for the next corpse to fall to the feast.

The only thing I can barely hear through the wide open window is the nighttime bugs bugging, like they own the place. Every now and then the distant whispers of water sprinklers breaking the law. It's California, so drought is always around with its water restrictions. So outlaw night watering is apparently the thing to do in San Fallcon. This being the very bottom of wine country the vines come first not the green grass.