Dark

I like my coffee dark. Hip baristas have tried to school me over the years about the inverse ratio of caffeine level (lighter more, darker less), but I just smile and stick to the dark. In a seasonally affective sense, dark is distressing, though I am realizing this may be a line I have bought from my own mind about the way things are. Rape is less of a concern than it was, a perk of aging I suppose, though the younger woman inside still runs the show, so we never find ourselves between parked cars and bushes on a dark sidewalk. My mother -in-law once asked me why runners run in the street in the dark and I answered, its the rapists.

Dark O'Clock is the best time to rise out of bed, once having completed the screaming argument in your mind with the more sensible half of your being. Early morning hours are less busy on call, for some reason, than late night hours, and the dark makes being up, the only one up, not even the dog is up (!),  a clandestine act. Woods in the dark can be navigated by head lamp and dog with a flashing light on collar. If the dark is also foggy, headlamps are less helpful but the effect is like falling into a Sherlock Holmes novel, if he wrote about the dark, misty redwood forest instead of the Baskerville moors.

What scares me most in the dark is the automobiles, and when I ride my bike home from work with lights blooming out of every part of my bodily person, even then the cars act like I am the devil itself. How dare I ride my bike in the bike lane fully lighted in reflective clothing while signaling every turn after a hard day at work when it is dark and they just want to get home while playing that game of "how many points do you get for scaring the shit out of a tired doctor on a bicycle." Or how many points for a runner who is in the middle of the cross walk and fully lit, in the luminary sense people, because in the dark a zooming right hook turn into a crosswalk is fully acceptable maybe because no one can see you, sort of like when a toddler closes their eyes and the world that baffles them so disappears conveniently and truly.

When it is dark it is hard to maintain a fast pace for fear of tripping on some small crack in the sidewalk, some stone in the trail, and it forces you to slow down which is at once frustrating and pleasant. Training headlamp at sidewalk or trail, darkness is somewhat defeated but it will always prevail against the non-nocturnal human eyeball. I wonder if being blind is like running in the dark or if being blind is not so much darkness as much as a whole new way to see the world.

Any dog in the dark looks like the cast of a Stephen King novel.  Seen in the distance, they are only eyes, two embers bouncing up and down, and dark calculations of the mind take place, to determine if the unknown factor ahead is a raccoon or a lion or a labrador retriever. The time I surprised a raccoon and it surprised me on Old Arcata Road we both jumped in tandem and that was the one and only time I danced in the dark with a member of genus Procyon.

In the power outages, at least five of my patients fell in the dark. Pacific Gas & Electric thought they were saving people but we forget our vulnerability as creatures of the light, quite at mercy to the unflouresced night trip to the commode or refrigerator, stray shoes or cords on the floor melting into the darkness so they can grab our feet and fling us onto our face, forcing us to kiss the very earth while we fumble for the lifeline which we probably left hanging on the kitchen chair instead of wearing because who wants to wear a lifeline to bed.

And as we approach the shortest day of the year, which always confused me as a child because are not all days 24 hours?, we hunger for the day after that when the bookends of darkness start to slowly inch apart thus leaving more room to add our daytime stories to the collection. My child in prison sits in a dark cell day and night because society has decided prisoners do not deserve windows or vitamin D. Vitamin D requires the sun to make its chemical appearance, like a magic trick of science,it is and the supplement makers of the world are so grateful for the dark so they can charge us all millions of dollars to buy our sunshine vitamin in a plastic bottle which will later clog the ocean and lead us all into the darkness of an inhabitable planet, though first it will choke a sea turtle or dolphin, and at least we have stronger bones and happier affects in the process.

I do not like it when I am running the bay trail in the dark, the one by the highway, and some guy on a bike with an unleashed dog comes slowly toward me and I have three options: keep my cool and put those keys between my 2nd and 3rd finger to jab him if needed, dive into the icy bay, or dive onto highway 101 into the traffic parade of cranky drivers. Thus far, the dark trail riders and their dogs have posed no real threat, so maybe the real problem is the dark recesses of my mind where all the lore about a woman alone at night sits to remind me of my lack of power. Why should the spin of the planet so spin our psyches, why should dark and light be the binary of boogey men and beauty, why should we not rejoice in the stars and the quiet that night brings? It is this or that, them and us, good and bad, dark and light, he and she thinking that makes us all feel we have a grip on reality.  Not all light in the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to the human eye, so maybe the darkness is light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second and the bulk of the light in our universe is invisible to us, so we call it dark.

Like dark coffee, it holds secrets that we cannot fathom, pearls that were our father's eyes, rich and strange, and it is a place where we can plagiarize tales and poetry to the glow of our own souls, scared and thrilled and serene and often asleep where we dream of the next voyage and the voyages of the day before.