First night in a new space

It’s funny calling a space that doesn’t smell like you home.

This apartment doesn’t smell like my home. It doesn’t smell like me. The air smells like someone else, like someone else’s home.

The cat is panicked. She doesn’t know what to think. She doesn’t want to be here. She doesn’t think this is some great adventure. Her mind is set to going home, to sleeping all day, slipping outside in the evening, and running the block all night.

She won’t eat. Her water is untouched. Genevieve paces the apartment once, then once again, then hides under the bed, perches by me in bed.

Adam and I have just moved into a new apartment together. Nothing is unpacked; the apartment is stacked with boxes and bags. Delivery pizza sits on the table. We have a DVD of “Are You Afraid of the Dark” playing on my laptop.

The front left of the couch lacks a foot and an abridged version of Gibson’s Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire currently supports it.

Exhausted from moving furniture all day, we plan to eat, move a few things out of boxes, then try to fall asleep if the cat doesn’t spend the entire night meowing, plaintive and afraid.

Moving days

I have keys to our new apartment and I’m looking around at the boxes and bags and piles of trash and plants and all the furniture and I am wondering how it all will fit in our new space. I am wondering how it all ever fit in the space I have. I wonder why I keep things that are broken, that I don’t use.

Adam and I are moving in together. We found this place not too far from where I am living now. It is small but not unaffordable. It’s on the MAX line and easy to get to. Several friends live nearby. It’s not modern and new but it’s not unlovely. It has potential.

I met the woman from the property management office today to sign the lease and pick up the keys. The place was very cold, but no one has lived in the space for months and the door was open. I have to tell myself it will be fine. The windows are new. The place doesn’t look drafty, but maybe I’m wrong.

The agent instructs me to look around the apartment and make a list of the condition of everything, which is standard but always seems slightly insane to me, as if I, the new tenant, should know everything that should or not should not be wrong or usual about the apartment, as if I can catch and record every detail of the apartment so that at some future I can say yes, but it’s always been like this.

She says to take pictures of everything.

The agent suddenly notices that the hatch to the attic is ajar. She tries the backdoor and it’s unlocked. She looks afraid and tells me she believes there may be a squatter up in the attic, that it often happens, that she will show a residence and find a squatter in the vacant unit. She looks nervous but continues to talk loudly, walking around the apartment. I am nervous at first, watching the hatch in the ceiling to the attic, but nothing changes, no one emerges, particularly not the face of Bob the Devil staring down at me like like he stared up at Laura Palmer’s mother. I try to act casual because I would prefer to finish discussing the apartment and leave so that the agent can call the police or the handyman or her muscle or whoever needs to come and ensure that no one is living in the attic.

I’d like to change my ways. This is a juncture in my life where I have to decide to stop saving everything. I don’t need every letter ever mailed to me. I don’t need the postcards on the fridge, the old printer printed photos family members have mailed me, drawings from my young cousins. I don’t need to keep wires to long lost electric blankets, and batteries, and bad earphones, all of which need to be promptly recycled. I don’t need a tiny plastic bag with the three left over cloves from some past baking experiment. These are all the dregs of my life, the detritus found in the back of drawers, the things I meant to throw away or recycle and pushed ever farther back into a drawer until they were forgotten.

The cat will no longer rule this block of North Albina. She’ll need an adjustment period, but at least we have both a front and back door egress to escape through in our new place. The block is tame, but the roads nearby are busy. I worry about raccoons; the neighbors with the birdhouse will worry about the cat.

I’ll have to leave for work a little earlier in the morning. Adam and I will have to be a little more conscious of each other’s space. I have to be neater, tidier. The cat won’t be able to sit in the window to be let in - I’ll have to remember to check for her at night. I’ll be farther from Red Fox - I won’t drink as much, I’ll save money, I’ll vacation in the spring.

Softly carbonated blue and mornings

Gray and light gray and blue. There’s a patch of white and yellow where the sun is already too high in the sky for it to be 7:30 in the morning. Here in Portland I see so little of the sun, its transverse short and hidden by the low stone wall of winter clouds.

I’ve been waking up so early recently. 6 am and my eyes will spring open, not gradually, and I think, I could go back to sleep, but I can’t. There’s no more sleep to be had. So I read. And I make coffee. I have a little breakfast. I shower and am still late to work.

In the past it has always been hard to wake up in the winter, wake up into the dark still, up out of bed in to that morning air that always the frostiest. Morning cold is always the worst cold. People talk about the comforts they like most in the winter, the things they depend on to propel them through these chilly mornings: slippers, carpeted floors, the heater in the bathroom, the automatic setting on the coffee maker. The northern hemisphere is focused on Christmas and the promise of heated floors for everyone.

It’s actually not that cold this morning. There’s something spring-like about the weather: wet and chilly but not frigid, the morning blue and green. It’s just the Pacific Northwest. Even with global warming, the Pacific Northwest is just like this, the weather unpredictable at times, and some days are mysteriously lovely and springlike even when your brain tells you it’s Christmas and it should be snowing.

When I woke up, I stared out the window through the laced and crisscrossed blue black fingers of the cedar outside my window. Dark against the ambient morning blue, watching it wave, framed by the window, I often find myself expecting some mysterious shadowbox play to begin, its characters rising up out of the dark lines of those branches.

I felt like a kid. I felt like it was spring, and I felt that giddiness that you sometimes feel on spring mornings. It’s a very particular feeling that I associate with some very particular morning when I was seventeen. I can’t remember that morning anymore but I can feel it, right there on the edge of memory. A day that I can never recall but have almost remembered on so many days of my life so that I remember the almost remembering more than I can remember that exact day in my youth. It’s like the bubbling and popping of the brain on Zoloft when everything feels connected in an unspecified, fuzzy, carbonated way.

It’s just a little taste, a little tease. We’ll have some good days, some warm days in February. And we will have a lot of rain. It’ll rain until July. It will rain today and get a bit blustery and it will feel like winter again when we go out of the house to get our errands done. But I’ll find this day again, in late May or June, when the crocuses are blooming and the garden can’t wait for summer, and I’ll remember that I always already almost have remembered this memory before.

Sites for meditation, sites for living, sites for having stuff

A friend years ago had a crush on this girl named Stephanie. I was seventeen at the time and Stephanie was twenty-two, and although both my friend and I felt very mature, I could still tell there was something very different about this twenty-two year old’s life. I thought my friend’s crush on this woman was a little ridiculous - a little too earnest considering the situation. Stephanie did not really seem interested in dating my friend. Stephanie confessed she was having a difficult time with her own relationship. Stephanie had a job other than going to school everyday. So I couldn’t worry that much about my friend’s infatuation with this woman; my friend’s constant pining and concern about what Stephanie thought about her.

I was not impressed by Stephanie. I thought she probably did not return any of my friend’s affection, that perhaps she was even annoyed by it, but tried to protect my friend from any heartbreak even when I thought it would probably be best for everyone if she just came out and said, you’re sixteen and it’s just not going to happen.

However Stephanie’s apartment always impressed me. Its aesthetic affects me still. The apartment was always clean. Small, its walls were white and unpainted. The hardwood floors were a light, honey colored brown. Worn down, they could have used some refinishing. Stephanie owned very little furniture and there were very few decorations. There was a couch, a chair, and a bed with a white cover. She’d hung no paintings on the walls, but there were a few plants set around the apartment, healthy and green, tendrils rappelling down from the top shelf to collect the light from a window overlooking downtown Birmingham.

I always knew that my apartment needed to look like this: simple, white, and clean. 

It never has.

I have too many things. Even now as I look around I see things that I should get rid of. Treasures on tables that I should clear to feel happier, calmer. These things come to me unbidden and I can’t escape them. At work, I have a stuffed monkey and a small spongy purple alien on my desk, gifts from coworkers. And because they’re gifts I can’t get rid of them. They just sit there taking up space and staring at me as I stare at my computer screen. But even the thought of dumping them or stuffing them in a drawer makes me sad, as if the secret world of things had desires and needs for attention and love like animals in a shelter.

I don’t make a lot of trash at all, which sometimes becomes a problem when something starts to stink though the trash bag isn’t a quarter full. But there’s still too much. And there’s still too much stuff here. Just things. Just too many things in my apartment. But I never know what to give or throw away.

There’s always more to get rid of and there’s more to buy. We all have those mental lists of things that we would like, things that would make our lives easier. I dream of new speakers and a new pannier for my bicycle. I need a spray bottle to keep some of the plants moist and a shoe rack to organize the space by the door. I want to finish building this small aquarium to fill with duckweed and Marimo moss balls. I have no idea where I would even put it. There is no more room left for plants. There’s no room for anything. And I don’t need more things. I need fewer.

I saw an advertisement for Amazon’s “Cyber Monday” specials and clicked on the link. I don’t think I knew just what to expect and most of it was uninspiring, the odds and ends of Americana. A thermos. A trampoline. A sale on fleece tops. A set of golf clubs made from plush material for infants. These are the things we could do without, the things we could buy for ourselves when we need them, on a whim, in the grocery store. There are no dreams behind these gifts. They don’t need to be on sale. They are novelties and trivialities.

And then there was the best, most bizarre item being offered up on sale on Amazon’s Cyber Monday. I said, which of these things is not like the others? It’s billed as a “Meditation Grotto of Sorrento.” Within a faux envelope of rock “carved” with roses, a statue of Jesus frowns out, the sacred heart aflame in his chest, his upturned palms punctured and bleeding. 

In the photo it looks as if the statue could be fairly large standing on this lawn, but at thirty-six inches tall, the statue actually seems awkwardly sized, as least to be out in a great open space like this. The seller describes the piece as a, “timeless, European-style grotto… [a] "destination spot" for meditation.” It’s always nice to be able to bring a little bit of classic European meditation inspiration to the United States. I can’t find any reference to a Grotto of Sorrento like this actually existing in Europe.

If I had a lawn, what would be in it? How much more crap would I have? Lawn gnomes and those shiny balls on pedestals. Cheap water fountains lined in black plastic with koi fish swimming for raccoons to eat. A garden overrun with herbs and flowers and plants growing tangle that discourages tending. A compost heap smelly and overflowing. A resin Jesus tucked away by some tree near a concrete bench. You know, for meditation.

The meaning of life

E. O. Wilson has completely disappointed me in the end.

Entering college, freshmen were asked to read his book The Future of Life, which I thought would be a horrible, sentimental, general plea for saving the environment, a book which can do no one any good because despite how fascinating animals can be, depictions of our vastly differing biomes here on Earth inspire no one to rush out and give up electricity and modern convenience and renounce their cars. Instead, Wilson’s The Future of Life gave us the facts. He gave us facts that as an 18 year old I didn’t understand we could quantify, facts that we had only hoped at and facts that were dismally depressing about the state of our environment. It was inspiring, interesting, clear, well-written. I have recommended it to numerous friends over the years.

A Harvard entomologist and world-renowned ecologist, Wilson is a pretty smart guy. He knows a lot, and importantly he can synthesize and coalesce a lot of technical information into very clear writing. However having just finished reading his most recent book, The Meaning of Human Existence, I would have to say that Wilson’s ability to integrate information and ideas seems not to extend past any discipline that ends with ology.

Throughout the book, Wilson vaguely encourages the humanities, not for any great contribution they have made to human existence but because they represent this particular human condition of bungling through reality with our particular senses and emotions. He notes several times, in fact, that religion and philosophy (which he seems to conflate) sought to explain the universe at one point when there were no structures for scientific study, but now seem to consist of nothing but dogma.

Wilson believes science explains everything. That all we need to know about the universe, about our minds, can be and will be eventually be determined by science. He writes, “The self-contained worldview of the humanities describes the human condition - but not why it is the one thing and not another. The scientific worldview is vastly larger. It encompasses the meaning of human existence - the general principles of the human condition, where the species fits in the Universe, and why it exists in the first place.” He’s right - the humanities and science do have different goals and means of investigation and purviews. And I think he’s right that human existence has been molded by the physical world, by evolution, by the universe, but I’m not sure a study of the physical world, of the universe necessarily points back to human existence.

Here’s the deal, I think science is fascinating. And more than fascinating, I think it’s important work. Our scientific exploration of the natural world is the key to understanding where humans came from, how and why we act in particular ways, how our planet fits into the universe, how medicine can cure ills, and one day how to effectively use resources not only to prevent destroying the planet but perhaps also to equalize the human condition and reduce suffering. But even if neurobiology and cognitive science can one day show that our human quest for meaning in life is located in a certain connection of neurons, a trait related to a particular gene, what then does that say? Science cannot describe how we exist - it can just describe the material conditions of the universe.

I do not believe we should all be scientists. I don’t think we all want to be. Some of us want to explore in different ways. And though I believe scientific discovery is vital, we lived, unhappily or not, for millennia without the knowledge we have today. Modern medicine has been lifesaving, but a new, thinner computer we could live without if we needed to. Every human should be able to think like a scientist, should be able to think critically and understand modern methods and theories and knowledge. We should be able to reflect on science in the humanities, just as science historically has been influenced by philosophy and art. I do not think that perfect scientific knowledge is the only end goal of human existence nor do I believe that it will solve all our problems.

This book was an apologia for E. O. Wilson. As an early contributor to the evolutionary theory of inclusive fitness, decades later he now conclusively puts that theory to rest. And this book contains some remarkable connections described in well-written, easily digestible form concerning the human condition, human behavior, human evolution, and the social nature of several species on Earth. This book is a justification of a man's life's work. The one thing Wilson does not do is provide us something new here. He doesn't address our needs and projections and desires and lives as human beings. He doesn't address our drive for meaning and fulfillment. And while he does explicate how we fit into a larger picture of the Earth and the universe, he does not address the meaning of human existence.

Certain days have their own music

There are certain perfect things that could have happened and this was one: Mike, the owner of the Red Fox, took and break from the bar and sat down with us. I introduced him to my friend Booth and told him that Booth had been playing music, that he had produced an album in the past few years, and that we had been talking about musicians who care so much about their music, their sound, that they work and work and work, and tinker forever, and it becomes so hard to put out an album, to produce something full and you just want to scream, put it all out there, play it, and come back to all the details.

Mike launched into to all the details. He talked about sound equipment and we talked about musicians. We talked about how sometimes it’s worth coming in to a recording session and knowing what has to be done and know that it has to be in a certain time. Sometimes it’s not worth the technological advantage we have to be able to record and manipulate and lay tracks and edit tracks and snip and cut until the final most perfect sound can be produced. Sometimes music can perfectly be a recording of musicians playing music in a room. 

Adam and I woke up with music in our heads that morning. The neighbor who lives above me was loudly playing some record at 9:30 in the morning, the bass and guitar and drums transmitted down through the skin of the floor. We had stayed up late, our waking difficult, the pressure behind our eyes deep, and our moods delicate in those first few minutes. But we soon accepted the rhythms and vibrations; I had never heard any other sounds coming from his apartment and I couldn’t fault him for his suddenly and early decision to listen now.

We woke up and got coffee, the bleariness from our eyes quickly fading. We went grocery shopping and biked around the neighborhood, the weather warm for one last dry weekend in October. And everything just seemed really lovely.

I met Ryan that afternoon for a drink at Red Fox. The afternoon clouds lovely soft and modulated pastel in the sunset. We had seen some really beautiful sunsets this past month, already missing the color in anticipation of the coming months of rain here in Portland.

Ryan left and I stayed over at Red Fox, reading until Booth met me. It seems like there have been so many albums released lately that have excited me. Aphex Twin and Thom Yorke and Caribou. Doesn't it seem like a return to the days when people still cared about listening to albums?

Sometimes it’s nice to just catch up, talk about music. We talked about how he makes music; about his plans for a new album. And I walked away energized, like there was so much to do, so much that could be done.

Flight times

A little lift and the earth made two curvatures away from me. The ground beneath me tilted up and then back and sharply down; the sky above paralleled this parabola but with the movement of the plane, the angle and trajectory of the clouds contrasted sharply with the sky’s rocky companion. And my palms began to sweat, yet I was fine.

Sometimes, actually all the time, most of the time, hopefully, for those of us who aren’t neurotic, we don’t even consider the times our deaths are close, our lives immediately more tenuous. Because really, our deaths are always with us, hidden inside every moment, every sudden derrame cerebral, every hidden black widow spider, every gas leak, every car crash, every random mugging on the street.

It’s funny how we have this idea of the TSA security checks as stressful because it’s true. This agent is sweet as he says hello to the pre-scheduled passengers. That agent is reticent, quiet, unresponsive as she checks our boarding passes against our IDs. That one is a little tired and monotone as she reminds everyone to take off their belts, their shoes. I come out past the small-millimeter wave scanner, putting my arms down, the agent barking, okay, this way, and struggling to rapidly put away my computer, put my shoes back on, sling my belt around my waist, and I realize that my heart is beating a little quickly, that I’m a little nervous, that there’s no reason to rush. Everything is fine and really I’m haven’t done anything. I was prepared for the flight; I didn’t bring bottles of liquids; there’s nothing to explain. There’s no reason to worry.

Adam and I drank a bloody mary. It was ten in the morning and this was the beginning of our very short vacation to San Francisco. But really, you know me. I’d drink a bloody mary on any morning, any morning that I didn’t have to be responsible, to report to someone else. And then the flight was delayed: it was fleet week in San Francisco and there was an air show and President Obama had landed at the airport and everything was to be delayed by two hours. It was literally President Obama’s fault that our flight had been delayed.

Michael, the flight attendant, hands us free drinks “on Obama” and asks if my boyfriend and I “going home.”

There are times I become worried, even at home. I don’t lock the door when I step out to get coffee across the street then worry that some stranger has slipped inside the apartment in my absence. I worry that the cat will be run over. I worry that I’ve left the stove on, though I haven’t used it in days, and that the building will go up while I’m at work. A couple got mugged the other day down on Mississippi Avenue and maybe I’m next, maybe I’ll have been listening to music with John at his house late one night and on my walk down someone will take advantage of the hour and my inebriation.

The waiting, the sitting is hard enough, but it’s the constant state of tension that really gets to me while traveling. The tension between gravity and motion that one can distract oneself from but which stays just there at the edge of consciousness. The tension between here and there, between leaving and not yet arriving, heightens one’s sense of vulnerability. I hate to think about what I would leave behind if my life just ended. Suspended in that fluid state I have time to think about how fragile every moment is, how fragile my existence is, particularly as this suspension squeezes through wind and clouds and place and time 30,000 feet over the planet.

How do you stop though? How can you refuse to take this flight, to forego biking to work, to stop leaving the house? I just have to take another sip, wipe the sweat of my palms on my jeans, and beginning writing. The two hours of this flight will pass and we will arrive into another movement, a travel across a city, a difference experience, world without end.

Six years in the sunset

He said, “I don’t approve of this.”

He was looking at the fox head mounted on the wall above him, its tiny dark eyes fiercely looking down at us.

A lot of foxes, painted, drawn, photographed, can be found on the walls here at the Red Fox.

I agreed with the stranger, ahead of me in line for the single restroom in the bar, and added that I didn't think the owners hunted and stuffed this head themselves. They don’t seem like the types. It was probably gifted to them.

From across the bar I heard, “And this is white tea!”

A bartender, a big man, tall, tough but never threatening, showed a bag of tea to his boss. They held their noses to a bag of dried leaves.

During the summer almost everyone crams into the tiny patio to share their drinks. The booths extend down one side of the park. A tin roof protects the patrons from whatever rain there may be in a later season and what bright light it can shield from us now. We spend afternoons watching the sun patiently set behind the West Hills, beautiful sunsets painful in our squinting eyes.

When I first moved here, is this what I thought Portland would be like, almost pastoral as much as a city can be. Visitors sometimes complain about suburban Portland can be, and though I never think of it as suburban, it does have a completely different energy than other cities even here on the West Coast.

At six years, I don’t count the days until I have lived here another year.

When I moved here I could not imagine how much my life would change. Today I’m prone to worry how much my life would change. And it will. It all will.

When I moved into the neighborhood, Mississippi Avenue was a still a quaint street with some cool bars, a few coffeeshops, a restaurant or two. Today its blocks and blocks of boutiques and condos and construction. There are two new tea shops. The neighborhood made a store change its insensitive name. The patios at Bar Bar and Prost and Moloko brim every night with loud, drunk, young men and women, bridge and tunnel clientele I can only imagine.

There’s always Red Fox. Everyday I can drink on short patio at Red Fox where one bartender studied linguistics in college and that guy just finished building a banjo and this other one collects vintage detritus. He handed me a paper page torn from an old magazine, an advertisement for Columbia Music House promising me twelve free CDs. And we remembered and looked through the listings and said, Whoever bought this CD? and Wow, I remember when this was popular.

But if Ryan were to leave Portland, if Mikiel or I were to move out from our apartment building, would I hold office hours (those hours after work) at Red Fox as often? I might find a new bar. I buy cheap wine to eat with my meals instead, watching documentaries on Netflix before reading a little and turning out the light.

The nights are cold now this week and it smells like fall when I wake up, the windows open, the apartment a mixture of damp earth, fir trees, coffee, and the lilies Adam gave me. Soon enough it will be raining in Portland, Oregon again, but the patio is covered at Red Fox.

Long trip; long odds

My sister left this evening from Birmingham, driving with our cousin’s fiancee to Tampa, a ten hour road trip to visit our madre who has recently moved to Florida. It’s a long drive, especially with a very young woman my sister only knows casually though my cousin. And then there’s Tampa. And madre. And who knows what they’ll find on the way as the foothills of the Appalachians around Birmingham flatten out around Montgomery to fall flat to the coast, where they will leave behind the trees and green for the Serengeti of coastal Florida.

I wish I were my making this trip with my sister. We need to have a long road trip like this together, especially if it’s to visit madre in her new home of Tampa, Florida. We need to explore that city together, to sit on the beach and make snide remarks about Florida, sidelong remarks that might puzzle our madre even as she pretends she has heard nothing.

My sister, Evian, has had long week. She’s fretted about a “friend date” as she calls it with a man we befriended years ago when I still lived in Birmingham. Not even a date, my sister just wanted to meet new people in Birmingham, make new connections, but she found the spectre of the rendez-vous with a near stranger overwhelming. Understandably, I should say.

I found myself recently in a group who started joking about how absurd it would be for young gentiles to try their luck on JDate, the Jewish dating website. They imagined awkward questions like, “So Jesus… Is he just some hot guy on a cross, or is he… your savior?” I stopped listening and my mind started to think about how in Islamic tradition Jesus is not the messiah but he is considered a prophet. And then I thought about the upcoming Ramadan holiday. I thought about the Muslim students in my boyfriend’s class who would be fasting.

The group had moved on from dating services to celebrity gossip and I knew that none of my thoughts would be interesting if shared. They wanted jokes and dirt and scandal and another drink. Often I want to talk about China and language and novels and the news when everyone else’s head is moving another way. Which doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like the company I find myself with, but it does mean that sometimes hanging out with some people at certain times isn’t as interesting or as fun as it can be for other people in the group.

Forging relationships, meeting new friends, can be difficult. Meetings between new friends require a great amount of concentration; one has to adjust to the mannerisms and speech and energy and interests of another person. One must defer to them; one must hear them and respond. Simultaneously one must not come across as too proud or cocky or sad or lame or boring or neurotic or judgmental. The pas de deux is difficult but sometimes it’s the only way to move forward.

Like my sister, I also find social engagements nerve-racking, energy-sapping, and awkward. And I feel many people feel the same way when first meeting a new person. There are those of us in the world who may be socially apt, who may find any social situation effortless, but I think for the bulk of us, it can be trying. We ease into friendships.

And to avoid loneliness, we just have to do it. We have to say hello.  We have to say excuse me, do you mind if I ask what you are reading? We have to say, could I buy you a drink? We have to put up with the awkwardness. And boringness. And insecurity.

I'm always grateful for the friendship I have with my sister. It's easy. When last in Birmingham, we drank margaritas together and watched tv and played with the dog. Simple, not boring. I miss her all the time. But now we need to start planning that road trip: Birmingham to Tampa, all the way down the Florida coast. All the way to the beach, to more margaritas and sunshine and private jokes and hours of all our favorite tunes.

How not to be angry

You tell me.

I feel angry all the time recently. I feel angry about the cars that cut me off while I am biking. I feel angry about men or women who say, “Uh-huh” when I say thank you or when they bump into me and I say “Thank you.”

It kills me when someone asks for my opinion, I give it, and then they start an argument. It’s worse when they say I am argumentative because I have defended myself.

People are absolutely ridiculous when they defend derogatory words, like “tranny,” while still pretending to support the “LGTBQ community.”

I find myself upset when a friend asks me why I wasn’t at a party, why I didn’t stay later than 3 in the morning, that he would have loved to see me there later, that it was charming to see my boyfriend there.

Drugs and the importance we place on them as mind-opening, as subversive, as something one has to do to be interesting makes me angry.

And it makes me angry when people on drugs think they are being conversational, or clever, or funny when they make non-sensical remarks or sounds or motions when they are high. Boring, I just want to start screaming THAT WASN’T A PLAY ON WORDS, THAT WASN’T CLEVER, AND YOU ARE NOT FUNNY. These remarks are pertinent for people who are not high, who don’t do drugs, too.

I am angry when people don’t walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk even when they see that the sidewalk is full of people walking in both directions and bikes and trying to get by them.

I find it disgusting when people try to quote Foucault or Marx and get it all wrong but pretend they are telling a TRUTH. Don’t even talk to me about the people who still have an interest in Freud. And on the other hand, I find myself ruffled that people would completely dismiss some thought or opinion or feedback just because a speaker invokes a philosopher.

I’m irked when a person believes they are producing something better than other people we know and yet they’re just deluded, narcissistic, and hypocritical. Your party isn’t better. Your art isn’t revolutionary.

I’m hurt when I share an idea and someone ridicules it, or becomes short with me about it, or will not begin to consider it and brainstorm with me, but rather shoots it down, dismisses it immediately, and I’m left thinking its better to always keep my mouth shout.

Here’s the thing: all these things are minor things, issues to be shrugged off and forgotten. We’re all busy, our minds occupied on other issues, on other projects. We don’t fully consider what we’re saying; an off-hand remark or response, something insignificant to one person can take on a completely different, more significant meaning for someone else. And all of these issues, all these things I’ve listed above, I know logically I have committed these crimes. I have been inconsiderate. I have made others angry. I have made other people feel like shit. And I know I have to you forgive and you have to forget and we all have to get over it and get over ourselves and just move on.

But right now, I just can’t. It’s just anger. And I can sit down and relax. I can meditate. I can have a drink. But I just feel more anger. I think this will pass but in the meantime, it just seems like there is nothing I can do right now. It’s a quagmire and I’m pissy.

Pax Perpetua

Ryan said, “Do you need a crystal?”

I didn’t think I needed a crystal. I didn’t know what a crystal would do for me.

Ryan rummaged around his pocket for a second; he held out his fist to me. The little rock he dropped in my hand was weightless, so tiny. It seemed orange but also purple and I thought for a second it might be amethyst. He told me it had broken off from one of his crystals and that I could keep it.

The day cleared up on the drive to the coast. Light blue skies, the atmosphere hazy, and fat, lazy clouds with flat bottoms settled firmly in the sky. Warm, I left my jacket in the car when we stopped in Corvallis for lunch.

There have been days when I have left work in the afternoon exhausted. So I would stop by Red Fox for a drink. Whiskeysodabitters. The bartenders there don’t even ask me anymore because they already know.

Ryan and I sit on the patio, our office hours we call them.

We just bitch and bitch. And rant. Then we laugh a little bit.

This week Ryan paced the patio. I’d had never seen him so anxious.

I told Ryan I was packing for the coast. “Toothbrush? Check. Ring of protection? Check. Emergency flask? Check.”

“Did you remember to bring your crystal?”

Yes, I carried the little crystal bud in my pocket. I had discovered it to be more translucent with white scratches and flaws than colored as I had first thought.

Signs warn drivers to slow down to 30 miles per hour before turns that fold quickly in upon themselves, that wrap around the feet of hills. The land falls away past the road, and every once in a while I see a creek burying itself in a ravine to the other side.

I rested my head for a second in the back seat, but then, “There it is!” We were tumbling down the last hills of the Coastal Range toward that flat gray slate, the ocean.

We found the lodge south past a town call Yachats; it looked a little Bates Motel like. Two low buildings, flat gray faded with white trim, a lawn away from the beach. No signal on my mobile phone. No phone in the room to call for help. A poor wifi connection that was absolutely useless. The place was tidy though.

A loud booming, paced, sounded from around the rocks, the unknown rumble of destruction interrupting from the movie theater next door. It caused a primordial fear; a fear activated in a deep cluster of neurons, never to be revealed and identified and dissected. White spray jumped from the chasm and I did not dare get closer to the edge, to walk farther past the rock wall to discover the source of this sound.

Devil’s Churn at high tide, the water surged and sprayed a little, though we had heard that the tide that afternoon would not be that strong, that usually the display in the chasm looked even more treacherous.

Signs warned against “sneaker waves,” water that would tangle around your legs and pull you back over the cliff, into the ocean. Here in this place, even a little wave, water around the ankles and a little spray, did not inherently seem that benign and I wondered what it would take to let me become so comfortable so that the water could take me unaware.

I lost that little piece of crystal on the beach. It must have fallen out of my pocket, a sacrifice to the ocean to keep me safe. And nothing happened. There ended up being no reason to worry.

At night, on the beach, around the fire, we drank and there was laughter. The dark was dimensionless except for the crests of waves blossoming like unnaturally white teeth in widening smiles. The ocean at night seems flat, more like a screen, than that immense regression toward the horizon that awes during the day.

excerpt from "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become."

I think so many of those who move away for whatever reason and return "home" experience something like this.

Green River

As if holding a green glass bottle to my eye, the world had changed. I looked out the window of my office down at the banks of the Willamette River, at the trees growing on Hard Tack Island, and could not see the far side of the river. I could not see purple mountains, some days hazier than others. Bright green, green that is triumphant, green that’s mostly blue, a little yellow, a little brown. Before there had been only brown. And gray. And early evenings. A few trees bloomed pink and white on the west shore of the river below my office, fluffy, fat, and lazy, too dense to ascend heavenward, dense like clouds painted on ceilings, fat and lazy like the Baroque cherubs who lived in those clouds.

I love looking up through a tree blooming with soft pink flowers, the branches twisting darkly behind, the sky light gray and low but somehow light.

Now though, green. Bottle green. Thick and shiny. Green that chokes, as everything just grows and grows and grows. The river is no longer gray. It no longer reflects the blue of the sky. The sudden growth on the banks around the water, on Hard Tack Island, has oxidized the surface of the water, resulting in a deep verdigris. The river seems to move slower, too. Not like a wide, deep Pacific Northwest river. These rivers here are never quite flat, the winds from the Columbia River Gorge or from farther down the Willamette River Valley push against the surface of the water so that on some days the water seems to be flowing backward, up toward the mountains, running away from the sea. Even on the most empty day, not a gust, not a bluster, the strong current below marrs the surface of the water. The river always seems most deep and dangerous those days; I wonder how I never noticed the great currents before and how much of this is posturing.

Placid but not pellucid. That’s how the Willamette looks this week. More narrow, green and brown, more Southern I think. It reminds me of the Cahaba River back in Alabama. Like everything Southern, the Cahaba is in no rush. The water thick, brown with mud, green with algae, the water lazies south toward the Gulf. We swam there in the heat, on one of those hottest days, the water not even that much cooler. Deer lapped at the bank and water moccasins waited in puddy pockets near the shores for enough provocation.

June will come and the Willamette Valley will remain resplendent. It will not wither in the Southern heat. It will not fade yellow or crisp brown. The water will remain blue for months and when we bathe in the river, the current will still be cold with snow melt.

In the morning, the leaves light up white and bright green, shimmering as wind blows north up the Willamette. A portion of the river directly below the sun is gilded, patina of white gold leaf, lighting up in a hundred tiny bursts of reflection, like bulbs on an old Vegas sign. Everything is moving - the minute constant movement of static on a television, ants covering the sidewalk. Nothing on which to rest the eye.

Inadequate Proposals

Sometimes some men have movie star grins. He said, “We see each other around a lot. My name is Brad.”

And he just grinned and grinned. White teeth grin. Clear skin. Tall. I had seen him at a coffeehouse the previous day and I had just watched him working out. Now we stood on the sidewalk outside the gym. I said, “Yes, I just saw you yesterday. My name is Christopher.” I grinned then looked at my bike then looked back and Brad and felt awkward. Then, distracted and awkward, I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I said, “Welp, have a good night!”

It’s hard to talk when you’re thinking about your bicycle, and the ride home, and dinner, and what to say next, and about how you have nothing interesting to say, and about your boyfriend, and about what your boyfriend would think about you standing with this stranger talking on the sidewalk.

Adam and I have been dating for about a year and a half. I wouldn’t say surely, but maybe, there is a possibility that another man has flirted with me during this year but I didn’t even notice. Which seems like it could be a waste, a waste of sexual energy. And who doesn’t like to be hit on, flattered. Honestly, I’ve probably just been caught up with this thing with Adam, maybe a little oblivious, but it seems like it has been a long time since another man has flirted with me.

I biked home from the gym and Adam met me at my apartment later. I made polenta with butternut squash, caramelized onions, and bourgignonne sausage. Red wine from Argentina. We watched tv. We got naked together and fell asleep. 

Embarrassingly, the house smelled like sausage for the next two days. The aroma turned into a stench which kept me awake at night.

If I had brought Brad home for dinner, I would have been even more embarrassed by the smell, by the dishes I left stacked in the sink, by the clothes piled in the closet, by all the chores that needed to be completed. I’m embarrassed when Adam comes over and finds me in this disarray. But Adam forgives. Adam overlooks. We watch tv, drink coffee, read comics, and decide where’ll we go out to later.

I’ve watched other men hit on Adam. I've been jealous of the attention men give Adam and the attention Adam gives other men. I like the days I have Adam all to myself.

First dates are difficult. Dating is difficult. Dinner and drinks and parties. Small talk. Conversation explorations, feeling out the terrain of the other person’s interests. I would ask tiny questions, nod munificently, act surprised or excited in encouragement. We would have sex or not. We would be happy or not.

On our first date, Adam and I met for coffee. Which moved to drinks. Which resulted in a kiss. Which developed into an invitation to accompany to a party later that night. On that first date together, Adam told me about his father’s interest in playing horseshoes, and Adam’s failure or disinterest in following in his father’s footsteps.  I nodded, and laughed, and thought about how much I would like to kiss him.

A necklace made of small shells

The house didn’t have a musty smell. It didn’t smell like cat urine. No potpourri. A small, old bottle of Chanel No. 5, half empty, sat on the table. Four dollars. Likely the perfume hadn’t been touched in some time and had long since turned, smelling closer to disinfectant at this point.

Adam picked up a small plastic bag containing a necklace and held it up for me to inspect. A tightly strung line of miniature, brown seashells. Similar treasures sealed in plastic bags covered the table, haphazardly picked through and scattered. This bag had a necklace made of shiny plastic beads. This bag contained earrings made of polished shells. Costume jewelry all of it, but all still in perfect condition. Maybe no one had wore this jewelry in years, but it had been cared for by someone, kept for some reason.

Adam and I followed other strangers on a circuit through the estate sale, examining tables of artifacts. I listened as others exclaimed delightedly to a friend over some find, or tutted at the condition of some other potential prize. Ten glass ash trays. A punch bowl priced at eight dollars. Small, hardbound books: Romola by George Eliot, a series of novels written by Rudyard Kipling.

Who knows who took the costume jewelry my grandmother kept in the jewelry boxes on her dressers. Polished shells and plastic beads and fake, glowing gems. Some women kept their mother’s costume jewelry, even if they never wear it, justifying themselves by arguing that it might be valuable one day. I can imagine my sister wearing jewelry like this sometimes, and I wonder who’s holding on to all that jewelry now.

Who from my generation collects and keeps the porcelain figurines which filled our grandmothers’ curio cabinets? Elegantly dressed 18th century ladies and gentlemen playing chess, the frills made of real lace to compliment their ivory skill and pastel colored porcelain blushes.

Tutankhamen did not hoard half the treasures many Americans do. We Americans love our possessions. I’m definitely no different. My apartment is filled with little prizes. But who will love them like I have when I’m gone. What family member will want the painting of a cat? Who will take care of my house plants? My library ripped apart, I can only hope each book finds a good home.

I should have rescued the orphaned Romola. I found myself disheartened by we buzzards around this estate sale carrion, disinterested in she who had passed. At the same time, the departed spectre who lay at the heart of all these possessions must have been cared for: she had family and friends to care for her home, claim that table or crystal decanter, to organize this sale, better that these things find homes with others than be cast out onto the rubbish heap.

visions in birmingham

everything could have been different. i can feel it. 

i’m sitting at a coffeeshop in birmingham, alabama, across from a park on highland avenue, a coffeehouse that didn’t exist when i lived here half a decade ago. i walked down the hill from my sister’s apartment for a cup of coffee. sitting out on the sidewalk, i take off my jacket. nine in the morning and the day is warming up. i had expected a snow storm, more of the unusually extreme cold weather the south has experienced this year. instead, the sun shines, the temperature approaches 70. bare trees have not deterred the happy chirping of birds, and i can feel spring fast defrosting on the second of march.

two women on the far side of the patio talk of running and biking. they discuss their friend from california.

a middle-aged couple, dressed warmly in fleece north face jackets over work out clothes finished with running shoes. two australian shepherds with kind brown eyes snuffle for crumbs around their feet. i drink coffee and crease my brow at my computer screen. the dogs notice i have a muffin.

the young cashier might be homosexual. evenly dressed in a t-shirt and khakhis. he wears a hemp bracelet colored red and dark red. a display for bible bars sits next to the register - they contain 18 biblically approved ingredients as found in dueteronomy. his eyes are dark brown and worried like the australian shepherds’ on the sidewalk. he’s polite, but not friendly. maybe he mistrusts me, wonders why he doesn’t recognize me. it’s birmingham and all gays know each other.

a young man approaches quickly on the sidewalk and sits down amidst a scrabble of aussies and smiles at the older couple in front of him. he asks for their debit card, explaining that he left his in a bar last night, grinning mischievously. his parents acquiesce.

fair haired, weak chinned, blemishless, when the young man returns to the table, he explains to his parents that the reason a few of the men at the bar have not been talking to him is because some “tranny” had been talking shit about him behind his back. dressed in workout clothes like his parents, he waves flamboyantly at two girls passing on the sidewalk.

the parents look happily at their son, indulgently in love with him. the son seems comfortable with himself. this is a young southern man who came out to his parents what must seem to him years ago. his father probably said nothing. his father was probably still disappointed to hear it from his son’s lips, but had been expecting this for years. at this point, retired, his parents just want to enjoy their lives, their vacations, their coffee, their dogs. they find themselves disappointed only when their son asks for money. they always indulge.

the fair haired faggot enjoys his life in birmingham. he’s completing a nursing degree and spends weekend nights at a gay bar, living on vodka diet sprite and gossip. he only has safe sex with other young gay men his age. to his friends, he sometimes laments the fact that he hasn’t found a new boyfriend yet. he has more fun making fun of the old queens who have been struggling with hiv since he was in diapers.

when i lived in birmingham i knew boys like this. their lives, their concerns always seemed so remote from my own.

i close my computer and start back up the hill, walking toward my sister’s house with the rest of my coffee.

always already

the days stretch out again. i wake up to lavender and periwinkle framed in the window instead of just a winter dark bedroom, radioactive orange from the streetlamp. it hasn’t rained much this winter and when i leave work, pink and blue mottles the sky above the purple stretch of mountains away to the southeast.

adam cut his hair the other day. shorn short, clippered. sometimes a sharp change delineates and emphasizes some aspect, some beauty that was always there. it surprises but also comforts. i suddenly thought, it’s still there, all this attraction. it always was.

i grew up on artforum. my friend antonio, my sister, my best friend ali. we always had an issue of artforum, stolen from the school’s studio, tucked into our bags, sandwiched between our sketchbooks and school books and journals and novels and pens and everything else, our shoulders slumped under the necessarily heavy et cetera we carted around as teenagers. sometimes we even read the articles, but we had those old issues to inspire, like unread bibles on shelves or in drawers, truth and morality radiating outward from its mere presence. those images and names and dates and history just needed to be close.

i sort of lost it after college, lost that enthusiasm for the expanded field, for art and art history. i grew tired of the endless puzzle, opaque pictures and films and performances and actions and essays. i grew tired of every new modernism, of every critique of every past critique. i grew tired of words shakespeare wouldn’t have made up and the self-referential mobius strip that contains and validates and props up of the specter of contemporary art.

i love it and hate it. but i have still subscribed to artforum for the past three years, glossy magazines the shape of records but thicker and heavier piling up on my carpet, often unread.

the other week, i read an essay by thierry de duve concerning marcel duchamp and his effect on art. clear and understandable, de duve’s writing is lovely, not over technical, not dry. i realized while reading his article that i knew so little of duchamp, this giant of art history, this figure whose history seemed so pat. engaged with de duve’s article, i wondered how i would argue against it and delighted in how convincing and refreshing i found his thesis.

at some point, duchamp stopped making art and started playing chess. i don’t make art but still consider myself an artist.

sometimes when adam and i find ourselves in a bar to which i’ve never been, i feel a flash of that same warmth and unfamiliarity and uneasiness i felt when i first moved to portland. the city feels trite now, worn out and worn in, but it wasn’t always this way.

when the drought in oregon ends, i’m sure i’ll find myself tired of the long rain again, but on some quiet afternoon, not too cold, not too rainy, i'll walk down through the neighborhood to meet a friend for a drink and wonder at how lovely this place can be, lush, green, and damp, even in winter.

lost in space

i’m dizzy and nauseated. re-entry sickness. coming in from outer space, i always get sick upon landing.

i have worked for the same company for five years and i have taken time off periodically over the years to travel, for vacation, or to stay at home sick in bed. the other week, however, was really the first time in years i’ve been in portland for a week without working. adam and i had some time off and we did hardly anything, we’ve been waking late and drinking champagne everyday. watching tv. eating out. cooking dinner. cleaning the apartment. reading.

even the small amount of space created by those seven days off work were disorienting.

it had been years since i had time off to drift around like this. i had just moved to portland from birmingham, jobless, short on money, i had no idea what to do with myself. i moved here with booth and though we had promises to ourselves to keep regular schedules and work on personal projects and find jobs and save money, we found it difficult to keep these promises. i found myself waking later and later, staying awake on the internet applying to jobs, staying awake drinking with the man i abruptly found myself dating.

i enjoyed the freedom from a schedule, the demands of a job, but the shapeless days made me sick, caused confusion. i slept more, wasted hours in bed. the apartment nearly empty of furniture, the walls bare and white, and the days void of action or agency. like days wasted in sadness, perhaps we were more depressed than i understood.

adam and i enjoyed ourselves this year during the break, grateful to have the time off. free from the gravity of work and obligation, we did not get much done but felt great about it. i have to admit, though, that at the end of the end i found myself asking, “what day of the week is it?” and repeating to adam, “what are we going to do today?”

this saturday, adam and i will wake up, pop a bottle of champagne, and enjoy a morning off. then sunday, the rain of obligation will begin again.

freezing fog

a freezing fog had come and gone before i woke, leaving white footprints over the morning: grass that crunched under foot, solid white car windows, a spider web thickly crystalized on the railing. it didn’t smell like snow, but almost. it could. it could be soon. even in oregon, even in alabama.

 

and i remember a morning in bed, back in birmingham, watching the snow fall, the window directly in front of us full of static. cold, we stayed wrapped up under the covers. i read the paper and he flipped through a book filled with pictures of paris.

 

clear skies with a chance of snow. i want one of those mornings with adam. i want to wake up with him and see flurries, to decide it’s too dangerous to go into work, to drink coffee and stay in bed. i want the day to be so quiet, the city stopped by magic. i want to re-live all these memories with this man who i now love.

 

having dated adam for a while, memories that were once cherished and meaningful and beautiful to me have changed. moments that i once lamented as lost, times i would have gladly lived again, i now want to re-edit with adam in that picture. these reminiscences have turned sour and i question how happy i had been, how much i loved any moment. i wonder if i had just been delusional or naive.

 

this is unfair to my memories and to the people that i loved. adam and i won’t eat sesame tofu at my favorite chinese restaurant in birmingham. i’m not even vegetarian anymore! but we do search portland for good chinese restaurants and authentic chinese dishes. recently adam introduced me to dan dan mien, thick spicy ground beef over noodles like spaghetti. adam can’t coo in french with me but teaches me mandarin, the tones awkward and stilted as they come out of my mouth, my throat hoarse from strangling the 3rd tone.

 

adam and i might miss the snow. the weather report threatens snow tomorrow but we won’t wake up together. tonight, i’ll sleep at my house, take care of my cat who has become listless and sad because of the cold weather. we’ll wake up separately and go to work. and tomorrow after work we might warm ourselves with whiskey, bundles up against the un-snowy cold.