Portland, Year Two

(I sit and stare at the monitor, a blinking thing in this modern age, waiting, anxious, or whatever you want it to be, expectation, fruition, a fall back, an easy blame, the happenstance of imagination, a sleepless night, the postlude of a kiss.)

It was one of those days, you know the kind, the kind where you wish you had a pedometer attached to your best pair of tall boots (why did I wear those fuckers today) when every deadline is FRAUGHT WITH PROFESSIONAL PERIL. I wouldn't ordinarily recklessly allcap -
I am droning where no one gives a fuck about my work life - that seems to be all I am these days.

Two years ago I pulled to the curb in my car laden with all the things I couldn't live without and I started over. Today in an email to P I said, there are all these things, little measures, that I thought I couldn't do without. I haven't had a pedicure and I gave up waxes (what's the point) but the haircuts and the color.... I haven't had a haircut since May and last night I home colored. And now it's kind of orange. Jesus Christ.

When, how? When, how, did it cease to matter, was it all about the money, was it the difference between a sort of manageable gentility, laissez-faire, faut vouloir, to, to - I have paid the last of my bills and I have forty fucking dollars before I get paid in a week and I haven't been fucking laid in nine months and I take a breath and I gain five pounds and I have great friends here but I am dangerously close to expiring from loneliness, a hot, holistic loneliness, yet no amount of bossinesss on the part of my little brother and all of those who think I might possibly merit a little bit of love can make yield - to probability, though I dream of it, that I do.

Things change, that they do. Inevitably, without any kind of forethought, life just serves up what it it will.

And then there is this. Three Sundays back, Puget Sound. It's just before seven in the morning, the sun is low slung, but clear and it couldn't possibly ever be anymore lovely and it's weird, because I should be asleep, but I can't sleep, and I haven't slept at this point for awhile and I still haven't slept. Micah and I get into the sea kayaks. Or, I get into the sea kayak, scoot into it. One never has adequate words for paradise, not enough poetry in the universe to phrase paradise.

Because paradise is half hung over on a fjord in a little kayak that taxes your abdominals. And paradise is the sea urchins below and the Olympic range behind. And paradise is the cool wind in your face and splash of an oar, and paradise wants to paddle out to where land meets sea and then crest the surf. Paradise is picking oysters and digging for clams at low tide.

Paradise is gliding though tar-black waters, towards an unending middle, towards an unattainable bay, when the sun is at your left shoulder and you don't have any sunblock on, out there where the silence is deafening and a mere ripple could send you into that cold, clear, welcoming deep. Drop a hand into the water, balance your oar, hold your middle, turns out that crazy Russian lady was right, it's all ballet after all, water is cold. Later you will swim, as the tide rumbles in, you will swim, because you have been dared and also because there is nothing like salt water for floating, and you want to keep going to the buoys, but it's sort of lethally cold, because summer is gone. Because that weekend, from Sunday to Monday, Autumn decended.

But in the morning, where it is lovely, just lovely, for the first time in a long, long time, I prayed.

Later, I steamed clams in white wine and bourbon, I half-assedly crossed myself. It seemed appropriate.

Iron Chef Challenge

So, the Instigator threw down the gauntlet, or rather I cheekily rose to receive it. In days past I was accomplished in the kitchen, but beyond my usual standards I haven't been called upon to deliver and frankly without any boys to charm and what with that nagging poverty I haven't turned much out of my kitchen.

So, this was the challenge.

Eggs, crab legs, portobello mushrooms and flank steak paired with Portuguese white wine, heifeweitzen, pink champagne and red wine.

The menu:

apps were thrown off because the crab legs were still frozen.

1. 30 min. Crostini with sweet sausage marinara, poached egg, white wine.

2. 25 min. Picked crab with truffle oil on endive spears, with fresh vegetable slaw. Pink champagne.

3. 25 min. portobello, yellow squash and fennel fricasee - beer.

4. 28 min. Pan fried flank steak with fig reduction and broiled new potatoe and leek chips. Red wine.

5. 16 min. seared nectarines with cinnamon and mint over vanilla ice cream.

Basically I stood over my stove for five hours, and it was totally worth it. I executed a fine meal, that I pullled out of my ass with five minutes notice and it felt really, really good. (A huge part of the challenge is not knowing what you are going to have to contend with.)

I would happliy do it again.

The best thing about remembering, or the best thing about doing is the ease that takes over, acid to acid, salt to creamy, finessing a sauce, the satisfaction of your own good knife work, ghosts on your shoulders, kitchens past, cut on the grain, cut against muscle, get out of my head, go on, get out, I still pick parsley exactly as you demanded.

But this, this fleeting glory belongs to me and my palette, I did it, and I wasn't sure that I could, but I did. And holy fuckballs, I done brung it home.

The Sharpest Moon

My hair is getting long, I haven't had color or a cut since May.

I am rootastic.

I just brewed two gallons of Mai Tai for work tomorrow.

That's a lot of grenadine.

The moon hangs like a knife point in an Almost Fall nightscape. I'd like to fall asleep beneath it, out on the lawn, oh troublesome employment.

When the moon rises in fuck

Bad shit happens. Tonight there was a heart attack a misscarriage and an incident on a swing, in between there was meat and tomatoes and some tears.

My good friend's father, my other good friend's uterus, and another's child on my good friend's swing. We only meant to be together for the season's tomatoes and Gartner's meat crack, but bad shit happens.

So you stick together, or try to and mostly succeed.

The day heated up brightly, I castigated myself for not riding my bycycle, but if you have ever had a period you'd know that bikes and cycles (ha!) are not so condusive. I keep having these dreams about making out with people at work I am not the slightest bit attracted to.

I am going up to the Olympic Peninsula with some friends at the end of September, I can't wait to step between the rasor clams and wade and wade in that glacially clear water, to scent the tide water like I scent the sun on my skin, a wide open sky, a cacophany of quiet.

September Song

Summer slipped by in a haze of heat and grass clippings and glass after glass of rose. I haven't had anything to say, because I have been reluctant to say anything. Poverty gave way to anxiety, and then acute lonelieness gave way to detachment. So my demons came a saucer-eyed to sit and leer up at me from their perch on my chest, so I worked long hours in an effort to make myself indispensable and the longer I worked, inexplicably, the less money I had and I became a shut-in and didn't get nearly tan enough.

Now the first of the leaves sway to gold toward russet and there are tendrils of cashmere melancholy above the promise of loam in the night air.

I've made a number of promises to myself this month, I remain wary, but with an indefatigueable idiot savant's optimism that if it doesn't take today it just might take tomorrow. I have missed writing.

So among the many promises, maybe I should make another, to write something for every night in September. It might take, it might not.

Up

How many balloons would it take to lift this house from it's foundation and just how far could I go. Far enough, or not far enough.

I saw the movie on Saturday and I thought I might have a full fledged teary-snot melt down after the first fifteen minutes, then I laughed, then I cried, then I laughed, then I cried some more.

On Sunday I woke up to the sweet-sour, overripe taste of mortality. Just like the song says, everyone you love, someday, will die. So I started doing rudimentary math, and I started to fray a little in the bed clothes, when did my mother get to be 68, how is it that a year and eight months in a new town passes with a second parade I've missed and fireworks I've only just heard. How did I and everyone I know slip a year or so, is that a lump in my breast.

Why do weeds grow so fast, when did I begin to waltz around these perilous edges, why I am still waltzing alone (hardly anyone does it anymore, anyways, not properly at least).

I play the memory game at lay me down time, I play it on the precipice of sleep, when faces and places congeal and go fluid, I skate after memory, still on steel wheels in my mother's tennis skirts, screeching on cement to AM radio. I was afraid of giants, then. That's nothing compared to mortal terror.

So escape! Cut some peonies out of your garden all perfume and safe harbor for ants! Become a flower felon like your belle soeur and clip flowers out of stranger's yards - disclosure - there is a vacant lot catty-corner and it's full of pink and yellow roses. Ride your bike with your nose to the wind, it's all going to be alright. Sit outside and drink wine with your friends until the sun sets past ten o'clock, we are North after all.

I just read this study somewhere on the internets that liars are happier (ah, no, I heard it on the radio) that the capacity for self-deception leads to an "actualized" life. Self-deception as a survival tool. Honest people recognize their foibles and imperfections are blindsided by all the unceasing ache, prolly pile it on their backs on top of their hair shirts... that sounds about right, christ, my back itches.

It's alright and it's okay, strange buds push through and thrive, I will cull the weeds. I will love the people I love, even though I am not always good about saying so, you are always there as I close my eyes, know I am skating after you, on steel wheels, faces and places, all of yesterday's parties, fluttering with my eyelids and my heartbeat in the quickening heartbeat between knowing and forgetting.

Thanks to A and J, for a long conversation about the responsibility of sons and daughters.

Mon Bicyclette

I got a bike, it got hot, things went languid all dolled up in summertime guises, I went riding. Downtown and around, sweat trickling down my spine, sun at my back, sun in my eyes, people speeding past on two wheels and in four, I was looking at the trees.

It was a gift, a good one at that. From my parents, for my birthday. I told the young man I wanted a seat that wouldn't too terribly indent my ass and was just girly and practical enough. And that, my friends, is how I became a bike commuter. A sorta indolent, slow poke, fraidy-cat, relishing the breeze, unhandsignaling (I don't know them and my hands are generally firmly affixed to the handle bars) kinda commuter.

Staked the iris, pulled weeds, learned that the best thing ever is getting high and getting handy with the trowel. The thing about gardens is that it is never ending, I am not sure I had any real clue of the actual scope before I got myself indentured to this house and that yard.

Friday, a marriage. Out at the Edgefield in some place called Troutdale, consider this, during the height of the Depression six hundred souls toiled there, it was the state poor farm, and now it's a Disneyland for the semi-drunkards, a bar every ten paces, gardens abloom. Me and my new friends, we dance, we laugh, I begin to feel forlorn at some point, I start to wish I had someone to dance with, someone to fly my freak flag with in solidarity, I waive it anyways, with decreasing trepidation, because that is what vodka will do, and soon enough it is all alright.

I chastise the groom somewhere past one in the morning for hollering beneath my window.

After breakfast we golf, my brother, his wife, with my nephew in a sling, and two nearlyweds, armed with wedges and putters in flip flops, I without my sunblock will shortly be paying for that oversight.

But I dont care and I wont care, because it is fun and it's beautiful and I need that searing, and I am ever so pleased about my flip flop tan line.

So it goes. I am still as poor as a church mouse and it's not as if I am not going to account for every penny in my head any time soon, but the softening of the season seems to make it just that much more palatable, which isn't to say that I didn't cry in my car on the way home after the wedding.

And now this, one of my (much) younger colleagues has set a tennis date, I fear his emphasis is on date. Oh dear.