Thursday, October 16, 2008

the trail ended exactly two weeks ago

already i have developed habits and tendencies that identify me here in portland. i'm sitting in the library in a section of portland called "hollywood" as i type this. i usually jump on my bike every morning and pedal to a nearby library: the downtown central branch, the belmont branch, or now the hollywood branch. i sit in the library on my laptop for a few hours among the other crowds in queue to use the internet. the libraries here are packed; there are people here all day. no one in birmingham uses the libraries. i don't think people there even know where they are. here though, all the poor hopefuls looking for jobs crowd around terminals and mothers and fathers play with their children. and the downtown library here is amazing, filled with books that i would have had to request through interlibrary loan in birmingham. the other day i picked up a book about caravaggio published by MIT as an october book. it turned out to be a complete waste of my time as i am eternally disgusted with psychoanalytic methodologies. so i'm going to return that book and continue my avoidance of freud and lacan for a little longer.

anyway though, in the belmont library yesterday, sitting on the floor in front a shelf of fiction books by one of the two plugs in the entire building, forcing browsers to navigate around me, i suddenly see a new portland friend i've met nicolette. we greet each other and she says, "yeah, i heard you might be here." and i thought, so there's already wild gossip about me; i'm infamous already for sitting on the library floor on my laptop all day? another friend i've met here, josh, had told her she might find me there upon hearing that she was going. it's just remarkable that i've already become predictable here.

booth and i are having a party on saturday. and we have exactly five friends, so it should be a really big event.

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