As you might have read by now, I'm back in Tacoma, soaking up a sense of home. It comes from strange reminders: jagged sidewalks, old rents now being gutted, renamed grocery stores, microbrews, MSM - my favorite deli, and the Turkish(?) cashier who knows how to get straight to business... of salami?

For those of you who haven't experienced Tacoma, this could just as well be a reminder of any suburban place that thinks highly of itself, and yet we forgive it. Or, as Keith so eloquently puts it: "Tacoma has a hard-on for gentrification."

I also mention it all for you, Ken, among others, who are refugees from our collegiate home.

But the most explicit token of this place is the intermittent north face of North America's most tempermental volcano, sometimes known as Tahoma, more often by Rainier. It uncloaks itself from the Tacoma white sky every so often and you have to wonder just how our speck lives appear to this far-seeing anger-management magma nutcase. In NYC there are people with bad manners; nature has been subdued. Here in the northwest, we can barely mask the fact that we've got it the other way around; we're congenial to each other precisely because nature runs rampant. We're all in thiis lava flow together (and we can barely get our sidewalks done right before the rebellious chestnut tree eat them for breakfast).

In Aotearoa (NZ), there is the creation myth of sky father and earth mother. They made love for aeons, until eventually one of their sons separated them and created the biosphere of life we've come to know and enjoy. Well, it struck me, while racing down I-5, that if that were to be the case, what are mountains anyway? One part "earth", sure, but certainly a good deal "sky" as well. So we must look at these looming majesties as exactly what they are:

Arguments.

That's right. Arguments between our mother and father gods. Keith and I talked it over, and we've decided that, wherever gods hang out in places too ethereal to be called "cloud mansions" they lead the good life. But even loving couples on Earth have spats - thus why not the gods? I declare that mountains must be manifestations of the important arguments, where earth mother holds her ground so strongly that she makes mountains.

Keith asked, "So you're saying Mount Rainier could be.... the dishes??"

Admittedly, arguments aren't all bad. They force groundway on our relationships with each other when more civil means fail. Like war, they are politics by other means, I suppose. Should be embarked upon only when entirely necessary. And this is why many Tacoma citizens are peace-loving folk. They may argue over the dishes, but they certainly hope the gods don't.

"Exactly. And Everest is probably about money, since money always creates other problems, thus the Himalayas."

We carried on this way, determining that the Andes were probably about sexual issues, of such a consequence that the entire culture of the continent was affected. We figured out the Alps but I can't remember what it was. Perhaps the Adirondacks, once as high as the Himalayas, are a problem now more or less resolved, as in that popcorn binging that sky father looked down upon so much, but which earth mother has now grown out of anyway.

In any case, where I was going with this was that it's good to be here again, in a land where a three year old sings "This Land is Your Land" and has been accidentally taught that the word for the neighbor's Mercedes SUV is not "car" but "useless". Imagine that: "Daddy, a useless just drove by." It's great.

This is some of the zeitgeist of Tacoma. I hope you can now see it in detail.

I'm done. Stick a fork in me.

P.S. If you're wondering what I was up to yesterday, Keith and I spontaneously did a photo-scavenger hunt for alphabet letters.

Now, I shall let my guest editor have his way with the entry...

[editor's note]: In such a situation as this--being allowed not only an editorial opportunity, but encouraged to make additional commentary--one would want to speak volumes of the author, note their most recent achievements, and tell the tale of when we shared a beer at a dive bar in New Zealand.

-Keith