Menaced by Squirrels

You would think that I was kidding, but I am not. The alpha squirrel in the tree out front has decided that I am some sort of threat to his walnuts, when I am sitting on the porch dreaming about the world going by, watching the bikers singing and the cars slowing and the dogs prancing and I am pulling on a cigarette, this fucking squirrel drops onto a branch at eye level and chitters menacingly at me, in squirelese I think he's saying step away from my nuts you fucking Californian transplant. I am half afraid. It's a goddamn squirrel, push comes to shove and I'll put my cigarette out in his leetle tiny malevolent rodent eyes.

In other news I am still having difficulty discerning my ass from my elbow.

It was a long and new weekend, started on Thursday, fucking around at four AM with the Runner, all new. New faces, new places, different rhythms, different flow, whole new voices on the radio, new songs, new waterproof boots. I said in an email to a friend at home that I feel a lot like I am parading around in someone else's clothes. Note the "at home", I keep having to remind myself that I don't really technically have one, yet, anymore.

Much is happening around me, movement and migrations, not just my own, still I am still in the vortex, and I think I like that calm girl wearing my face, if I could sustain some beatific semi-artificial near-state of almost-grace, even after all the adreneline has worn off and I can no longer maintain my gargantuan appetite for cheeseburgers without serious detriment to my waistline. I like her and I think she should take up gardening and the mandolin.

I woke up this morning to the sunshine. I woke up this morning and was cheerful. Even when, by rights, I should have been hung over, a lovely dinner with the family of my Bellesoeur and late night tequila shots and billiard with the Runner at some place dark and smoky downtown - you show me your town and I will just show you mine. There was a late night vodoo donut.

So I went to Mount Tabor, and meandered upwards. It's not my Golden Gate Park, no Eucalyptus, no scraggly, salt cured pines, nothing growing oddly sideways. I reached the top, a sort of balding plateau, with very tall douglas firs and trees with forks and molting leaves. I stood for a long time and looked at Mt. Hood in the distance, we just don't have anything quite as looming or quite to scale in California, a big fat old volcano wearing an unruly wig of shifting clouds. I turned to face the city, this new territory spread beneath me in shades of russet and ocher, and I quite unexpectedly and without warning began to sob, the kind that makes your shoulders heave, the kind that makes you choke. I suppose there is that, I mean about being a lady of leisure, you can be in the park at 10:30 on a Monday morning and no one is about to see you weep over your past and unknown future, you just sit your ass down on a bench at the presipice, close to where someone has planted roses in memoriam of someone who is gone, and the flowers have tarnished and gone heavy with rot. Still, under the sunlight every surface is limned with unfulfilled promise, and it smells really good in Portland, greener, but much like a new penny ought to smell.