Last night, before the rains came, I ventured outside my house. Not another night thinking about the laundry I wasn't going to do, or watching How I Met Your Mother. I'd already worked too long, setting up build workflows in Github for design tokens. I still can't believe how much Android depends on the Java programming language. How much Java still depends on XML files. But this isn't a newsletter about software engineering, but poetry.
There's a local writing community here which I've never tapped into. The main reason I rejoined Facebook after ten years is because all the most up-to-date information about this mysterious aforementioned community seems to be trapped on that godforsaken hell site. There was an event scheduled for last night. I spent most of the day talking myself out of it, until finally stepped outside the door and went.
Writing 15-minute poems from a prompt, sitting at picnic tables with strangers, is not the most comfortable experience for me. But there was beer and writers got a discount.
The prompts were themed around Halloween and October. The monster inside you. One dark poem, the other on the lighter side. Pretty sure what I wrote was trash, but the people I sat with were lovely and it felt nice to get out of the house.
Rain in Santa Barbara always feels like the end of the world. I'm not sure California drivers understand what hydroplaning is or how have any prior experience driving on ice. News and social media are worried about mud slides from the burn scars. I've seen a lot of evacuation notices, mostly in the LA area.
Then again, everything right now feels like the end of the world.
