Portland

Rain.

That is all.

I'm convinced now that serial killers are not attracted to the Northwest. No, they're created by the conditions. Months of wind and rain? Even the sane begin wondering about sasquatch and UFOs. Grunge makes sense, goth makes sense. No one could find vampires sexy except in an environment where alabaster whiteness can fairly be described as a vibrant color.

Murder fantasies become just another way to break up the ennui of darkness. It's a credit to the people of the Northwest that so few go on killing rampages. Or maybe they're all cowards for not making their dreams a reality. Either way, humanity endures, even if it is only in the form of seasonal affective disorder.

Is there a connection between climate and serial killers? Wasn't Jack the Ripper the first well-known modern serial killer? London? Seems entirely predictable. What sort of madness compels a person to remain in such locales? Family, familiarity, livelihoods, lack of opportunities to migrate elsewhere, delusional beliefs that months of depressed aesthetic conditions are necessary for psychic colonics? Who knows, really, but if there are theories they've undoubtedly been created by poor souls gulping caffeine to stimulate some semblance of life energy while hunkered down in coffeeshops in Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver BC.

What else but murder would a person think about while walking for blocks with shoulders scrunched, head bowed low, and eyes focused on feet to avoid the pelting rains driven harder by unforgiving winds? Having to look up to avoid running over another person feels like a personal affront, "How dare you occupy the space in front of me! I'm walking here! You are too? In the opposite direction? I'm too fucking cold and tired to care what you're doing, to care what you think, to care how you feel, to care about you, to care. Just get out of my way." The rest of the day passes with imaginings of how a throat might be slit, how to dispose of the body, and where to hide the murder weapon. That's just everyday life in the Northwest.

On the flip side, I've seen acts of kindness create chain reactions of vomiting. Sitting by a window in a cafe one day, I watched a man on the sidewalk pick up a notebook dropped by a woman clad in black. As he ran to her and handed it back with a smile on his face, she looked at him with horror at first and then ... appreciation? ... before retching at his feet. Convulsive gagging. Pink and orange sludge on wet cement. Colorful, at least, and more beautiful than anything else within sight.

I think that was the reason so many other walkers and wanderers began to hurl not long after. And hurl they did. On both sides of the street. Men, women, and children. Old and young. White, Asian, and Latino. Each one of them puking different chunks of color. Lots of pinks, oranges, and greens. A few drab grays and opaque whites. I saw violet, ochre, and fuchsia from a middle-aged white man dressed like an insurance salesman. My first impression was that he had made a mistake, that he never should have become a salesman or an accountant, that his forte could never be business or engineering.

No, the man was meant to be an artist. It was so vibrantly evident in the colors he yacked, a rorschach that screamed "I am Day-Glo Van Gogh." His vomit, in particular, seemed to be a statement declaring that the drab shell encasing his being imprisoned a World of Oz so radically beautiful and wondrous that if ever exposed entirely would inspire a revolution against the grayness of reality.

When the retching finally subsided and the pukers peered about while groping with blind hands for walls or telephone poles to steady wobbly knees, I saw flickers of recognition, a growing sense of realization that each of them had been part of something unusually liberating. Up and down the streets there was evidence of divinity in regurgitated lumps of color, a rainbow of vomit publicly assembled to expose the hidden beauty within the depressed. I suppose anyone coming on the scene late could be forgiven for assuming they were witnessing gay pride flash mob performance art.

But at the very moment when any mind might have been ready and able to process what had happened, to analyze and interpret its meaning, or to begin the process of creating a mythology of what had occurred, the rains came hard for a few moments before coming down even harder. The clumps and splatters of colored mush thinned and washed away down the sidewalks, into cracks, over curbs, and into storm drains. Within minutes there was no evidence that anything had happened at all. Even the few who had begun to recover, to look around for eyes of others to share in a moment of recognition, quickly covered their heads with umbrellas, hoods, hats, newspapers, bags, or whatever else was in hand or available nearby. They darted into doorways, huddled under awnings, ran fast this way and that until each of them disappeared from sight.

I was the only person in the coffeeshop who had been watching the scene unfold outside, the only one who had seen the rainbow vomit celebration. No one on the street who participated remained in view any longer and not one of the actors entered through the door to escape the rain or to tell their story. In Portland, at least, random acts of kindness accompanied by spontaneous acts of spectacular reciprocation, rare and fleeting as sunshine in January, seem to occur only to demonstrate the revolutionary nature of color in monotonous environments.