Thanksgiving

Just listen to a lot of Exit in Guyville, I said, you will be fine. This to my friend who had just signed divorce papers.

I said, I know of what I speak. And then we drank hot toddies in the hot tub and it started to rain. It could have been the seventies, but it was an hour ago.

It was an hour ago and it was ten years ago and I got a little lost in the folds of time and woke up near the end of a vaguely shitty year and realized that the heads that talk and the internets were preparing to eulogize a decade, full of Very Important Markers and eight years of war. Eight years of war. Farewell to the Oughts.

In my head it is still August of 2001, in my head I am just turning thirty, in my head it bubbles with possibility, in my head it is not unseemly to pick up boys in bars, though I never really ever did, in my head it is always a clear day in San Francisco, in my head I am wildly love with someone who is not my ex-husband or anyone since, in my head we drive along the delta in Autumn, fast, through an onslaught of falling leaves and wonder what it would be like to be farmers.

Sweet, cruel reality.

Outside my head, but within the confines of this house where I live now, I am only just scraping by in Oregon. These walls they are mine, lathe and plaster and foundation. The furnace I pray that doesn't bust.

So. The lessons, they abound. Hubris, humility, going a little without, compromising this for that, a tit for a tat, valuable, certainly, painful, certainly. Take a lot of comfort in that you are not the only one afloat In These Uncertain Times. And still. Thanksgiving. These walls might be a millstone, but they are mine and thus far they hold. And I might be a hair's breadth of losing everything, I cling, I cling. I am not in any jeopardy of going hungry, last night I made a mad good stew for the week's lunches and tonight my new divorcee gave me a dozen of her mother's eggs. I am thankful. I give thanks.

I read something today that was so apt, it was on The Awl, about how my generation, is something like the middles, caught between this great seismic shift of the way we digest media and the soft, surprisingly strong furling tendrils of nostalgia and the constant pervasive now, what the hell does celebreality mean anyway, any yet anyone who has spent anytime on the internet or trolling through cable channels knows, people have possessive opinions about that irritating non-entity Gosslin, famous for what, in vitro?

They don't execute people in public squares anymore, but that rabid public still bays for blood, these days we say knowingly that it is snark. We eviscerate in the court of public opinion. Meanwhile the real culprits, the ones who deprived of us our four hundred dollar boots and caviar (snorts derisively, sorta) are free to duck hunt and figuratively rape the country they purport to love so.

Thus as it ever was I suppose.

My new friends ask sideways and my old friends ask askance if I would take back if I could, this, this move, this starting over. No.

The Taurus in me squared her haunches and dug in, things could have been different, things could have always been different, but in my mind it's a constellation of events that led to this and here I am and here I shall remain until a separate constellation guides me elsewhere. Recently I have been plagued by the same grostesque demons that used to haunt me in San Francisco, you can't out run them from state to state, that was my mistake. You can't pick up and leave all that you knew and loved and expect that things will be different, they will, they will be radically different, but the things that cleave and divide, they will remain, no matter what the weather, I said that too, to my newly divorced friend - do you know that in Oregon a divorce can be finalized in a matter of weeks, unlike California where I had to wait by the mail box for a year.

And I am thankful, chiefly to my little brother who eagerly opened his amazing group of friends to his beleaguerd older sister. And I am thankful to my parents who continue to believe in me, when I am completely convinced that I am the world's biggest fuck-up, and I am thankful to my very old friends and my very new friends for their good grace and infinite kindness, I am thankful that I remain fitfully employed and I am thankful for insurance. I am thankful for our President, good luck and Godspeed, friend. I am thankful for the good and fraught ghosts of boyfriends past, I am hopeful that Someone will send me some love soon, because I need it and I want it.

I am even sort of thankful for raking, but not really. Fuck, I rake a lot. Leafs! I like you best on the branch.

P.S. In the state of Oregon 38% of households are food challenged, regardless of employment status, California is not far behind. The next time you are at the market pick up a bag of rice or lentils, donate. Do it. Food banks traditionally need lots of protein, beans, canned tuna, cooking oils and breakfast items. Do it. Spend ten bucks, do it. It might be you standing in that line.

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.