emma b. says

2011-11-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

Time: rememberence

My mom called to say that he had been in accident, the internet told me he died. I sat at my desk and had a detached conversation with my good friend who had lost her brother-in-law to suicide about death, I said no expects the Spanish Inquisition, and she said and then they show up. So I went about shuffling things as my mind stilled, and Archie, my puppy, tossed and tossed his froggy in the air. The day waned as Autumn does, from that bright/cool sunlight arcing through the last of the racy purple-y red leaves, to fat, fat indolent raindrops falling out of the sky with startling velocity.

I called my brother, driving home after work with his wife and two babies in tow, I reported tonelessly, I used the word "passed" when I should have used "died", I fell into soothing, consequenceless purring, I hated that I said it, yet I did.

My good friend asked about him, I said, he was a big part of my life, once, when we were kids. She asked me if I had slept with him, and I did, more than once, I don't have any particular memory, just that it was, that there were boyfriends and girlfriends and there was a good four years where we were all entangled like the knots in his girlfriend's spiral perm, I am pretty sure that was in 1989. And all of that got colored by something that happened much later, and for the sake of rememberence I will set it aside, except that I didn't.

My brother said, he was an important friend, and I was struck and saddened, because he was, vital to our youth, to my brother for different reasons, but that doesn't even matter anymore, not when twenty or so years have gone by and the baby fat has melted from your face and you have your heart done in, but good, I should know, I did it to him.

So then remembering. When he tried to fix your '71 super beetle and then your dad made you take it to the mechanic to undo his fixing.

When a bunch of us kids were building snowmen.

When we went to see that reggae show and he held your hair back when you smoked too much weed.

His nimble body leaping from boulder to boulder at the Yuba.

Spending the night in a windstorm. * This is particularly vivid.

My father's various nicknames for him (included feckless), the time he took out our shrubbery, the last fucking horrible accident that he got into with my first love's little brother - Jesus Christ, wasn't that fucking close enough? How did it not penetrate? How do you slam into the front of minivan farrying a bunch of trick or treaters, jesus, you are 41 years old, and a better artist than most, there is so much life, yet, there is so much life, yet.
I can see your face plainly, now. And it's shiftings from adolescence to manhood. I can see your hair go from spiky to long and back again. I can see your face before you tatooed your new religion on your chin, I can see you scooping up homeless people to shelter in my apartment in San Francisco, and I can see me coming home at 3AM and coming unglued. I can see your uncorruptable guilelessness, and I can also see poor old Trog crapping all over my apartment. I can see that you loved me and you couldn't see that I didn't love you back, and I am sorry for that. I am sorry that I didn't respond to your outreach, you never understood cocoons, or boundaries. I see you again, gone too young, I see you again, but you are gone.

ainsi soit-il
amen

2011-06-30T22:13:00.000-07:00

Time: Love

And in the morning I woke up and I was forty years old, it was a beautiful day.

That was a month and dozen or so days ago.

A dozen and some days backI flew to San Francisco to hang out with old friends and eat, drove out to the Russian River to eat and drink some more, I got really sick on the second day, smoked some crazy ass dope and stripped off my swimsuit in the hot tub surrounded by gay men and a former lover, ~~and a married man who.~~

And then I knew, what I knew already, I've been gone a long time, and life had gone on in my absence, which we all know happens, doesn't mean that it doesn't feel a little bit lonely when it's underscored. I haven't been in stasis, and they wondered about my clipped speech and portlandisms. (put a bird on it allfuckingready) I had thought for a long time that I had exiled myself, which I had done and was very deliberate about it. And for a long while I was a Californian hiding out in Portland getting frequently kicked in the gut by extenuating circumstances and making the best of it. I've gotten used to crying in airport restrooms, for the piece of my heart left in San Francisco, and this time, stuck for a four hour layover, too sick to drink local beer, I just wanted to be home and home is Portland.

It was before twilight when I got in the cab, and clear, and mountains and flowers and green, and the sun waning in the west when it had already set over San Francisco.

It's easy when you are 21 to fall in love with the biggest metropolis you ever got to know really well, sticking your nose in it's private corners with all of your youthful indiscretion, when you can get away with driving down by those behemoth factories in the dark hours where you have no business being. And faking your way through the low brow and the high brow, because you are young and you are in love with this place, from the crud in the gutter to that glorious skyline, and every crossing of every bridge was a suspended path back to home, back to home.

For me and Portland it's been a slow burn, I was simmering with resentment, shaking with inarticulate fear, that I still can't quite put the right words to. In the end, or rather the beginning, it was beauty that won me over. Not in the skyline, but on the sidewalk. After all the months of darkness, it's the flowers and the effort that people put in to tending flowers, it's the people who plant lettuces in their front yards trusting that no one will come along and pluck them. It's the kids and dogs and kids and dogs, and barbeque's. And the good people that I know and have come to love.

So now I am 40 years old, possessed of a slanting house with a full front porch. I have no career to speak of. I am making a business with four girlfriends, we specialize in foreclosures, we make time for Zumba and dogs are welcome in the office and I haven't worn make up in I don't know how long. I keep having dreams that I am dying and I am devastated as I drive myself out to SFO (that is where I die) that I haven't been able to love and be loved in return. I take that as a sign that I need to put myself out there, if I can fall in love with a city, and I can fall in love with new friends, the next logical step would be to crank open my rib cage and fall in love with an actual man. Or a factotum penis. Whatevs.

2011-05-01T22:29:00.000-07:00

Powerwashing: Villains

Well after such an explosive jolt of rainbow-flavored saccharine below, what better than to laud/applaud/mourn an assassination.

But first.

I made out with a farmer after a babyshower. My littlest nephew went into the hospital with a viral meningitis, scared the bejesus out of all of us, and came out fatter than he went in. My mom came, I made her pull dandelions, so she took me shopping, no one was murdered.

All week long those in charge of conflating the weather have been touting Sunday as the day we would all fall to our knees beneath that super-shiny disc in the sky and rend our clothing. This almost happened. As it delivered.

E and I went to our fifth consecutive day of Zumba, because we have become those women, and some ladies gravitated towards us as I was loudly lamenting dudes and what the hell is wrong with them, when you have a perfectly willing woman beneath you, let's go! Let's go, already. We shut up and dance.

The morning was still brisk, and I had gone out the day before on a tear..... Found the smokinghottest sandals and sundress, all in anticipation of the glory of sunlight and warmth, to turn off the furnace with a satisfied snap, to bring up the fan from the basement, to blind the public with ghost-white of my limbs.

So then to Portland Nursery for grass seed, organic weed killer and begonias and pansies. And home again to don the garden gloves and dig and yank and spray, and bend and twist and curse. Get the pansies in, plant the herb garden, seed the front lawn... think about mowing, really need to mow, really and truly need to mow the lawn which has sprouted six inches in as many days.

So I opt to powerwash the porch. I inherited a powerwasher with the house, which my brother promptly appropriated, since he owes me like, forever, since I am captain super auntie, he begrudgingly let me borrow MY OWN GODDAMN POWERWASHER.

It occurred to me when I hauled it out of the garage that I had no idea how this thing actually works, and I certainly knew that I couldn't call W to ask without enduring a shit-ton of guff, and to my astonishment one cigarette and some fiddling later I figured out how to make it go.

And go it did. I felt like a motherfucking captain of industry, or a Hell's Angel or something, PSI something, something, with water! Awesome! I went a little nuts, I was a woman with a (squirt) gun, and the porch! It's like new! So much awesome! I can't wait to do it some more! If I wasn't concerned about wasting water I'd powerwash every gottdam day.

I was so into powerwashing that I made myself late to my J's mom's birthday. And it was on the way home when OPB radio was pre-empted by the President.

Nearly 10 years ago, I stepped into the sunshine in September and hailed a cab to BART so I could make my appointment with my therapist in Berkeley. My cabbie was Indian and sweating, he had some AM station on and at first I paid no heed, so swaddled was I then in the unhappy cocoon of depression, but when we reached City Hall and the barricades were up I pulled myself into the brightness of the morning and listened.

I did not get on BART that morning, I stared down the stairs and imagined a watery claustrophobic fiery drowning, instead I walked home. It wasn't long before that name surfaced, such a melodic name Osama Bin Laden, on every pundits lips, the rhetoric of revenge, blood thirst, blood thirst enough for two wars, two never ending wars, since then elections have been disputed and things have fallen apart, we hoped for a bit, it's hard to hope in the face of status quo and the same old self-serving political gamesmanship, and that melodic name faded into the background, like he was some kind of mythical super-villain, plotting away in some remote mountain cave, sending out poor tape recordings, essentially become benign, like an impotent Lex Luther, past his sell date, much like Britney Spears.

So it was unexpected, then. To be driving along, with the windows down, with blossoms in the air, wine in the veins, steak in the tummy, still light out, but just. Blue hour, magic hour. Indie hour on the radio and then there is the President, the villain is dead, the villain is dead, we have his body in custody, lives lost, so many lives lost in the name of this one man and his madness, not just ours, but theirs, too. Ten years on, I admit I'd forgotten you, I wish you weren't dead, because the world needs a Nuremberg style trial, you should have hanged in a public arena, you should have had all the names of the dead scrolled before you, you, you bastard, shielding yourself with the mantel of righteousness, I hope the first circle of hell burns with a special vigor for hypocritical villains of your ilk.

wow, I am angrier than I thought I was.

2011-04-10T22:26:00.000-07:00

Pangs and Contentment

Thursday, after our work day we regroup for wine and snacks at AWs, I am feeling flush, and feel the full rush of spring as denoted by my allergies and the tulips and the crocus and the daffies rising despite the dismal rain, so I pick up the Iberico ham and the good cheese at Pasta Works, joke with the charming butcher about not breaking my bank. Jesus Christ, I think those pigs might be magic.

Friday morning I leap out of bed with a rose hang-over to escort KBs daughter to school, there is frost on my car, but the sun is shining, after a month of rain, it's enough to make me kick up with a nearly religious joy, indeed I mouth a word of thanks to the Universe and put on my sunglasses. CB is nine, she is lovely and delightful, as happy to see me as the noodley dogs are, her mom departs for the airport and I let her, except that I don't, kick my ass at Uno after I quiz her on spelling and then we walk to school. We greet her friends and other parents loitering on the playground and as I walk away beneath the magnolia blossoms by the red brick school, I get a pang, or that's inadequate, it's more like mourning. I am bereft that I have no kid to walk to school, or something, I am not sure.... All these fantastic kids I have in my life, including my two nephews, and not so much as a twinge, but the walk to school - didn't exactly break my heart, more like it filled up my heart, and never have I had that kind of nostalgia or yearning. It might be too late, then again it might not be. Even this morning I was at my brother's to give some respite, bouncing like a madwoman on the big purple ball with an infant in my arms, OK he does smile like the Buddha, but he will open those tiny lungs to the sky if you stop bouncing, and all I could think was I love you, but you are making my back ache, and your mom squirted breast milk in your eyes, and I was all ew, just ew.

So I took Theo to the park so J could get groceries and W could grade papers in peace, and we went nuts on the slide, and the love I have for this creature with my dad's ass and my crinkly eyes is astonishing, because I don't think I have ever loved anyone so unconditionally. Parents and siblings aside, in my mind that's an absolute. And since I am being so very saccharine, let me throw in a word for J, who is less my sister-in-law and more of a sister.

So then, contentment.

Friday evening we convene at our local tavern for the Blazers v. Lakers, yet another unexpected pleasure. In that Portland, with all of it's DIY ethic and nonconformist fanaticism is fucking gaga for the Blazers (and the Timbers, but that's a whole 'nother tale) and I am gaga for that Young French Thing, so the sight of the hipsters and the bewhiskered cheering for mainstream sports is somehow cheering, we drink dollar beers and eat nachos, and I go to bed early.

Saturday. Team Zumba Zombies checks out a new club - we all have upgraded our 24 Hour memberships to all club access, and we go to the new McLoughlin facility next to La Carreta, the dance room overlooks the river. We get there super early and fiddle around on machines, dance our pants off and steam, sauna, pool. It's like a spa, it's most excellent. By Sunday I will be aching from all of those fancy-ass machines. I come home and immediately head out for a family birthday party, J's family, who are my own, now, thanks to their inclusion, chat with my college roommate who is my sister-in-law's sister's neighbor, drink some beer, eat some cake, the usual. I am inexplicably happy to be shivering in the wind tunnel at Overlook Park, where I have never been before, looking onto the river and the West Hills, tagging after toddlers belonging to extended family and chatting with J's parents who I adore. I have a long conversation with college roommate's longtime husband that I first met when I was 18 years old, we take notes, we chat with my brother, everyone bonds over bands, and that is life in Portland, you bond over bands, beer, kids, bikes, dogs and the best butcher.

Later I head over to J and A's - J is assembling pizzas, there is money down on Connect 4, their daughter catches me trying to filch a cigarette from my purse and questions then upbraids. I come home early, and I am content until I pass under the lintel and am again reminded of the emptiness of my home, and mostly I am unbothered by this, especially when I am craving silence, but the juxtaposition is so stark sometimes, and even though the television is on and I've got my headphones on, it's a poor substitute. Sunday. After I leave my brother's house I come home and do some Spring cleaning, think about digging up some dandelions, but don't. Instead I head downtown, I haven't been since January when I was laid off. Haven't crossed any rivers, stayed solidly on the East Side, so I venture across the river, dodging bikers, to Nike Town in pursuit of dance shoes. They don't have my size, but they are on sale so I purchase a size 6 1/2 and the cashier asks me if it's for Zumba, uh huh.

It's taken three and a half years, but I know now that this is where I belong.

2011-03-29T23:29:00.000-07:00

The thing about Serendipty and Zumba So the addage goes something like this, when a door slams shut in your face, a requisite black eye, ego wounded, another door is allegedly supposed to open to fill the void, some sort of special door for the pundits and the mystics that real people worth their salt sort half-heartedly cling to, or barge into without any hindsight. So I did. So I went underground, so I have been underground, I surface for few and only when prodded, I don't know how to describe this mechanism, I certainly can't defend it, I get chastising voicemails from the people that I love the most and chafe like a surly teenager, even when it's my 90 year old grandmother calling to see that I hadn't surrendered the gimlet gin gimlet before she had. Because then she'd really be pissed. So, doors. It happened, fortuiously, that I had a friend in need of some work, and it happened that there were several of us floundering on the open seas of unemployment, and so it coelesced and we are a wee company specializing in foreclosures, privately I refer to us as the ethical vultures, well someone must, someone will, why not a bunch of girls who rocked the shit out of "Simple Minds" radio based on a text from my brother. I figure, who am I the fuck to judge, when I have the last threads of solvency wrapped firmly around my index finger, and it's turning purple. Sometimes you just fall, but I have been falling into things............. That is not what I want to say, exactly, I have let serendipity guide me, in a thousand and one directions, which means that my resume is chalk full of disparate things, means that I have been steering by the stars, rather than charting my own course, means in real terms, in equitable terms I am a 39 year woman without a partner and without any prospects, how terrifyingly fucked up is that. It's kind of terrifyling fucked up. Which is where Zumba comes in. When I lost my job, and started with the girls, I joined a gym, hounded, really. Zumba four days a week, four women, music we mostly hate but know the lyrics to, two step, samba, salsa, I fucking love it. We fucking love it, with all the freaks and the spazzes, happily heating up the room past the point of barebility, dance it out, it will make it all better, dance it out, it will mitigate all of that ache, it will give you the strength to deal with the absentee homeowner, it will give you the strength to confront all those demons in the bathtub. And you will be alright, you will be alright.

2011-03-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

Auntie Emma Welcome to the world little man, you me and your big brother are going to have a swell time of it. I saw you when you were almost ready, and your mama was bent double, and your papa was unshaven and nervous and I spent the night on the couch shooing off the dog and dreaming of giving birth. Your big brother was none too happy to see me in the morning, but an aunt's perogative is to bribe and cajole, and on the evening of the second day all were home and all was well. I held your tiny person in my arms, your tiny limbs still folded frog-like and your long mandarin nails on the hands you don't quite own yet, you stink prodigiously for something so wee. Your neck swings and swivels, you mewl, and yet, godlike, out you spring into the world, fully formed, a good pair of fresh lungs to express your monumental displeasure with the air, with the world, we rock, we bounce, we rock, you give in a little until you must have the breast. Sorry, dude. Your brother is talking up a storm, he's got a low rasp, he's not altogether sure that you are welcome, yet. I put on a movie when I was pretty sure his little heart was breaking because mama wasn't there, and he snuggled into my side, and I wished for a moment that I would have a child of my own. Bite that thought, bury it under the daffodils, throw it up to the thunderclouds breaking in the sun. I thought, my house is so empty, my brother's house is so full, wife, two boys and a dog, and total chaos and sleeplessness, but maybe there is life and beauty in that. I think perhaps I should start with a dog. Maybe the rest will follow, good luck, good love, a long, torpid drive on the trip to bountiful, all my loves swaying on dandelion heads, scattering on a fortuitous breeze, my young nephews and I ready to turn sommersaults with all of their grandparents, and their parents, and their greatgrandmother, and the ones that have already gone, shimmering like mirages to tumble through. I think that Dolly and Bill and Morrie would like that. Hopefully decorum is meaningless in the afterlife. So tiny Louis, welcome to the world, we love you so much already, your whole big family, your back is watched. I love you, I love you, I can't wait to know you.

2011-03-16T23:23:00.000-07:00

This woman's work, again.

I am sorry you left, I am sorry he left, whichever side decides to champion the loser's role, I am sorry and neither of you are villains. It just hurts, I remember.

I am sorry that he wasn't everything that you wanted, I am sorry that you chose to go, but go you did and that decision you seem to not want to shoulder. I get it more than you know, you retort that I haven't been here long enough and that I haven't seen. But I did, and I do.

Men and women, separate, secretive, open wide, private martyrs, bold, terrified, capable of the sublime, unintentional destructors. Reckless defilers, all in the name of someone else's love. Oh yes, I remember.

You want to parse heartache to heartache, I will go toe to toe, because you think you are the only one to have the one you once loved and then not so much show up at at a wedding with his current girlfriend, you honestly think you are the only one, at least some of us put on our war paint and our best foot forward and showed up, and made a concientious effort not to say anything too embarrassing, or drink too much.

You are in for one hellava heartache, he will marry the young thing, and then they will have a baby, and you will cry in the bathtub for a while and have to, I mean, you will have to let it go.

And so you do, without breeze or tide, even without that twinge of regret (and the boomerang, and the boomerang, and the boomerang)

... and the boomerang....

and all of them they lay their heads, and all of us hide our heads in the sand, noncommital, awaiting the next disaster. And then it happens, you can hide, but you can't really run, you can't really run, you can't really run. You can't really run., not from the property wizard not from his consory Square Footage, but we can at least pretend.....................

2011-03-03T00:08:00.000-08:00

Diamond Dust and Sulfur

Last Friday my brother and I headed for the hills. Mount Hood is now my beacon, where the ocean was in San Francisco, I am now oriented to the East. In my nerd heart it's my Lonely Mountain, where a dragon lies smoking in his dreams, it's true enough, too. You get as close to the summit as you can and the reek of sulfur comes undulating out of crevaces and up to your nose as you try to shield exposed bits from the elements, and hand tightly to the chairlift.

W was playing hooky and I wasn't, what with nothing to do and nowhere to go, a bit of mountain tonic was just what was required. We are NoCal foothill kids, he and I, between the flat heat of the valley and scrub pines on the leeward slopes, and for me snow has always been a childish joy, snow is indelible to my youth and childhood, and I think nothing is as beautiful as snow falling, nothing as profound as it's silence as it comes hurling from the heavens (I don't live where snow falls a lot, so it's a treat, don't flip me the bird Michiganders).

Both of us have to undo the top buttons of our ski pants, an unwelcome testament to seasons passing, we hobble into our boots, I take three steps and nearly clatter to the ground. And yet, I find myself truly happy to be clop-clopping with my brother, lift tickets on, those old metal triangles long gone, goggles on, stomp into your bindings and head towards the nearest lift, the snow is so fucking fresh that is scronches - the ticket checker zaps you and you are up and away. I have to sit at the end these days, at some point I developed a major fear of falling off the lift.

W and I giggle about The Way Things Were, the spandex, the Vuarnet's, the really long skis as I cannot unclench the side bar, it's cold, it's really, really cold, but the sun is out, I worry about dropping a pole or worse, my iPhone off the lift, and then tips up, shallow slope, a glide and and a wide turn and then there you are.

The lip of the presipice, the first run, have I forgotten, are my skis good, should I have waxed, do I need to go flying down quite yet, will I break my neck, fiddle with gloves, fiddle with poles, take a look at each and other and let's go!

Let's go!

I think, jesus god, could anything feel so liberating, I think jesus god, my face is cold, I think jesus god, speed, I think jesus god, find your form, I think jesus god why is my brother so much faster than I, then I think jesus god, the air is sparkling, jesus god it's so beautiful and then I stop thinking and I am only a disciple of velocity, I've left my cortex dangling from a tree branch further up the mountain and I am simply intent on descent, and I am not afraid, it's like skiing on confectioners sugar over a layer of butter cream, it's forgiving, it sparkles, I am full of god's light, I am so having a cheeseburger for lunch.

Seven Years

I missed another anniversary, I am forever missing important dates. As of the 26th of February I have been writing out here for seven years. It seems like it should be a long time, but it feels like a blink. I have changed cities and states, I have changed jobs 4 times, I am on my second bout of unemployment, I have had boyfriends and then I have not, and haven't for a long time now. I was 32 when I started here and now I am taking my victory lap toward 40. I have traded in my discman for 2 iterations of an iPod and as I write now I am listening to Arcade Fire on my iPhone, I am not sure that I have been ever explicit that I write and have always written to music.

This world we live in changes so quickly, I am not even sure that I can begin to fathom everything that has happened since that day I saw the sunrise from beneath the tower in January of 2000, standing next to my then husband with the City before us and the Pacific to our left, I thought I saw promise on the horizon. I am a different woman now, I know a little more, and suffer from pervasive cynicism tempered with flurries of grace, but I still catch the occaisional glimpse of promise on the horizon.

* I would like to thank the people who have commented recently, I am grateful that somewhere in the world you are out there, I wish you a happy day of skiing, or may there just be sparkles when you least expect them.

2011-02-13T22:59:00.000-08:00

Paint Your Wagon, Paint Your Kitchen

At some point last week, when your shoulders are rioting and you are up to your elbows in gray paint, you giggle with your partner and bless the skies for funemployment. This is ephemeral, this is so very ephemeral, just like every other joy and every other love, but just like every other joy and every other love it's fleetness is a worth it's weight in all of the gold goodbars stacked against cataclysm.

So a hallway and a bedroom, then it's your turn. It's my turn. I pick a color with a swish and a twirl, this after three years in search of the bestest yellow ever, I am bold, I am determined to paint this motherfucker, and I decide. I am the decider. I have decided. Tape it up. Mubarak resigns, Obama on the radio, E and I have already given in and given up to OPB, thousands upon thousands are crowded into a square in a land that is far, far from where we two follow edges closely, neither of us where we ought to be, in an office somewhere, earning our keep, like every other self-made America. Instead we are listening to revolution, painting my kitchen the most lovely shade of sunshine. We are pleased with ourselves, we weep for joy, for them, we paint fiercely, we paint in solidarity, we are not sorry that we are not there. (crowds scare the bejesus out of me, as does she.)

Paint your wagon, there goes history. Just like that, thirty years and a breath of fire, just like that an immolation can topple a regime, don't put it past us, the most curious things will catch like a wildfire, like a spark on a highway, there we go spilling into causeways and throughways and ruining it for politicians and the status quo, quite accidentally, of course, until it wasn't.

They, even on public radio, can't resist the Pharoah metaphor, paint your wagon, paint your hieroglyphs, color your very own revolution. Naturally everyone who is anyone has something to expound upon. Naturally opinions are wildly disparate. That's why I didn't put my color choice to concensus, that's why I just chose. That is why I walked out of my workplace, having cleanly said my peace, my own little rupture, my own little revolution, despite the despair, how quietly liberating, to stand in front of the befogged wall of all that happens, and quake and shiver, and not to know which direction to take absolutely, so to choose, without choosing, to leave.

So then I left, and I spend a good deal of time dreaming, strange dreams without rancor, strange dreams full of water and sunlight.

Here, in the hereafter, things are not so mythological, they have heft, they are the bills that come due. They are the ironclad manifest of all that should have, could have, would have (if only this, if only that) been.

I still need to finish the trim in the kitchen, a sort of muted but not muddied kelly green, they call it herb garden. The ceilings are high and it's kind of a bitch, kind of a lot like revolution I'd suppose. You tape it up, strive to stay within the boundaries, when you can't you use what's available, spit and wattle and temerity.

As-Salamu alaykuma

May God be with us all.

2011-02-09T02:08:00.000-08:00

2011-02-09T00:40:00.000-08:00

Plus ca change

So I missed my flight, after a long night of drinking with my ex-husband's best friend.

That was weird and good, I guess, mostly.

So on the phone with the airline, after texting the Most Organized Person in the World, who texted back that she just spit up half her beer, it was nine. AM. Their time. I flew first class to Cabo San Lucas for a week. It was the best week, ever. It's a tale for another time, it's long and tangential, but if you are fortunate enough to be beloved and be beloved amongst your beloveds, please don't miss it, come hell or highwater, jump that flight, drink champagne, then mix some drinks, lay out, talk and talk, talk and talk, watch for whales, beneficent, talk until the tequila runs out, then talk some more, get tan, fall in love with your old friends all over again.

So then you disembark, radiating sunshine and a week with eight girls (women, I guess) and you cab home through the dismal weather of the Pacific Northwest, and you go back to work, resynch that stupid clock and continue on until Friday. When something is notably amiss, as in who is that girl? Whose rabbit hole did I just fall into, am I fired, what the fuck?

I was sitting in a meeting planning our summer picnic when the axe I was anticipating fell.

Let go. "we really like you."

The day before the winter party that I had planned, I was disinvited. That stung, a lot.

So all that good vacation like so much wasted ether out the window. And then what, and then precisely what, what to do, where to go, what now? For god's sake what now.

I am four months shy of turning forty, which is not all that momentous, seems like I ought to seize or at the very least grapple something or someone, just for the moment, whatever that might be. Pinion, that's a good word.

I got good and stuck, I've been good and stuck, come'on then, unstick me me, up where, up where we'll ride and rein the clouds, slip past Nertiti and her long neck, up to the stars, as hungy as they are, hungry and blythe.

How many dragon teeth or olyphant ivory would I trade for a pair of strong arms, a million or so, if only I believed that such a thing were real.

2011-01-03T20:23:00.000-08:00

Digital Nostalgia

oh hai.

It's hard to escape the past in the Facebook Age, someone, somewhere, with idle time and a slip of a memory will search for you, and you will check your email at work, and your brain will communicate momentary confusion and you will utter Jesus Christ outloud, and your cubemate (at least mine), will say, Yes?

And it will be your roommate when you lived in Aix-en-Provence, and she will say, do you realize it's been twenty years. And you click out of your email quickly, to stave off all of those slips of memory, ticker tape randomness of all that was, the toilet next to the kitchen sink, a market full of flowers, my mouth full of another language, N peeing in her boots in Marseille, me trying on full tantrum and chucking a drink at the curr I had misguidedly and half-assedly fallen for.

Then, tonight, two bites into curry I remember. I was pregnant with my high school sweetheart's child. And we mutually agreed, with our parents consent (what were they thinking) that I would make my way to France and figure it the fuck out. Which I did, with remorse, but without regret. So twenty years and what if. Just a fleeting thought, and then it's back to the curry and reading about the Vatican library in the New Yorker.

I leave on Saturday morning for Mexico with eight of my oldest friends, we are going to celebrate our collective fortieth birthday. It seems so abstract to me. Obviously, turning 40 is better than the alternative, but wasn't 1991, like, yesterday?

2010-05-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

A Year Without a Haircut

Oh hey.

Funny how you can go from January to May without a good blood letting.

It was April of last year, I had gone to J's house, after she'd flaked on me a couple of times, she'd left her salon, and her kitchen made me a little sad and her boyfriend was a little creepy, it was way the fuck out there in North Portland, six weeks later I forgot to book and appointment. Then another six weeks, and then it was high summer and I took to going to the pool in the park with E and massaging lemon juice through my hair. It was growing anyway.

Then it was Fall and the full reckoning of poverty broke upon my resigned shore. And kept breaking, straight through Winter, and then the year turned, and I thought, well I thought, I'd have a little sociological experiment with myself. A year without a haircut.

A little back story to compile for empircal evidence. Once upon a time when I was twenty-three, I cut off my waist length hair to pose as an adult, and since then I have gone every eight weeks for a cut and color. I have been pixie short and platnum blonde, I have been a fierce bobbed red head, I have had a hairdresser who was fucking my husband, I had fabulous A for a long time who went to my highschool, I had the French boyfriend who turned me strawberry without my permission, then another A, close friend and much missed, sweet respite in Sausalito, thumbing through magazines and shooting the breeze with the curious mix of socialites and peers, the bay in my nose, Smitty's across the street.

I am blessed to grow stupid hair. I have hair that cascades, I have fairy tale hair. I am two days shy of thirty-nine years old and I still can't find any gray hair. A year without a haircut and I am just as blonde as I ever was with these stupid curls, I wear it down and it's like catnip for men. All they see is hair and tits. (oh and oh, all those thousands of dollars)

You might as well ask, why haven't you shorn your locks if you resent them so, the secret is, after I cut my hair the first time, I used to dream about it. There is nothing better then pinning your hair up with a pencil, there is nothing better then twisting and twirling, the twining through of fingers. Even though it's hot and heavy, and most of the time it feels like a dirty cape, or half of a hair shirt, it's the first time in nearly twenty years that it falls between my shoulder blades. Maybe I am just reaching back to when the world seemed so wide open, so full of promise, when the day that I might turn thirty-nine seemed forever away and now here it is and I would like to bleed out in the bath tub, save the bright star of hope and the horror it would cause my family. That and three years of growing out this hair.

Besides the grand show is half over anyway, might as well see it through, that's a novel thought, mortality, never thought about that, don't really want to, let's talk about my hair.

Because it's a much happier subject than the Portland Project, two years, seven months, a veritable mixed bag of results. Or a braid, one part providence to one part disappointment and one part sorry timing, then all the stray wisps, of self loathing and all that weight that snuck up on you when you were worrying about all the other shit that wasn't getting done, the tendrils of love that got snapped off in a dry climate, or when you decided that you simply were not worth loving, not sure when that particular bane rooted to the follicles at your nape, but there they propogate as itchy as lice and harder to poison.

2009-12-08T22:22:00.000-08:00

SNAFU or Fuck You 2009

I remember after Princess Diana died and the Queen gave that speech about her Annus Horriblus and the masses with no latin chortled into their television sets, this was in the days before internet domination, and Beavis and Butthead were still on MTV (she said anus). I remember where I was when she died, I had just taken a hit of ecstasy after a dinner at Moose's (gone now) and I think we were having drinks at the Washbag (also gone now) as the drugs were coming on. I remember thinking then how fast the world was.

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Annus Horriblus. Yes. And then again....

I suppose I gave up for certain on 2009 when I elected to be a good steward and save some money by taking the bus this morning where it was a penny bright and shiny eighteen degrees, and my pants legs froze on the way to the bus stop and some asshole lifted my wallet on the bus as I was thawing the lobes of my ears out that were not covered by the all the fucking gear I had on.

I went for a warming bagel and had that moment of sheer panic when you realize that your lifeline has been stripped from you, every card, insurance, credit, bank, identification, all that massively inconvenient bullshit that requires that you shield your identity from this asshole and that asshole and that other asshole. So I retreated to the bathroom to cry it out discreetly. And my cube farm mate lent me lunch money and I thought that maybe all was not lost.

Fuck December and fuck Christmas.

I worked my ass off to get my co-workers to donate to the Oregon Food Bank, and I managed to get those stingy fuckers to give up 1,100 pounds of food, and I came home to find my water had been turned off.

I have been cooking for families with newborns, and as a group we have elected to support a family for the Salvation Army, and these are things that I passionately, passionately believe in yet, somewhere in the back of my head there is a witchy, witchy nag who is begging for some kind of parity or some kind of break, if not karma, how about kismet. I'd like to round-house her to the head and explain that it doesn't work that way. But gottdam if I am not a little bit tired of clinging to that happy, righteous buoy of good deeds and it's brother, selflessness. Gottdam if I am not a little bit tired of draping myself in the purple cloak of good fortune when it is, but it isn't, but it is, that's all well and good as my credit score gets decimated and I look forward to another year of trading this for that and more of this for that and travel and pets and home improvement are a standard of some bygone gilded golden age. Let's not even discuss shoes.

This is my third December in Portland, it's been dry and very, very cold. Another Arctic Blast, I wish it would snow.

In the spirit of SNAFU, because I am poor now and trade this for that, I parsed out the oil in my furnace for a very long, long while, got all ritualistic and shit about when I was going to run the heat. And then the temperature dropped dramatically. Last Thursday, I had my review, and it was glowing despite the two crappy work days I had just come out of, it was band night, and my brother said it was cold in the house, and it was. I was trying not to run the heat but for an hour after six. I had just discovered that I wasn't going to get any sort of raise, and I was wilting.

And it just got colder. And it got colder still.

I hit bottom on Sunday. It was glacially cold and bright and the wind was ripping through the veins of this very old house, I had committed myself to making a fruit salad for a brunch, and in the morning my brother invited me for dinner that evening. I dared not waste the last precious drops of heating oil until night fell. Also, fruit is expensive. I prepared the fruit salad in my parka, in lieu of champagne I used soda water whipped with a little evoo, in lieu of fresh mint I used the dried I had on hand, I forsook berries. It was still good (honey crisp apples, satsuma tangerines, mango, salt, pepper, dried mint, squeeze of tangerine, lime juice, olive oil and soda water). It was a lot of ladies and a lot of food and a lot of champagne, and then I went to my brother's and had a nice dinner until I dropped my nephew, I dropped my baby nephew, a head bonk, but I was horrified, but the look that shot out of my brother and sister-in-law eyes shamed me to my very core. And I lost it. All the rage at myself and all that shame and all of that anger and all of that hopelessness and all of that ugliness, and how the very thought of causing any harm to that lovely boy, in whom I see all of my family tree, is an anathema, even a head bonk, and all that I don't have, and might possibly never have, came pouring out, to my embarassment, in great rivers and in unstoppable gouts, and since then I can't stop crying.

Great rivers and unstoppable gouts.

It's the first time in a year, maybe even more, maybe since I was driving up the coast from San Francisco that I am swept in great rivers and unstoppable gouts, at least in this there is movement.

2009-11-30T22:47:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-10-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-09-07T23:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-09-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-09-02T21:20:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-09-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-06-08T22:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-06-01T23:26:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-05-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

38 Special, or the Rise Over Run

The alarm tolls, followed by the cell phone, because we need back up, every morning a momentous occasion, or potentially auspicious, we wake, we rise, we hit our mark, we aspire to be on time, frequently we fail at that, dreaming being what it is. But new, nonetheless, full of bright promise, even when the weather is in categorical opposition, we, meaning I, slough out of the sheets all gollum mutterings and half realized curses to storm clouds. It's our birthday ((precious, and I just dumped a half glass of wine down my front)), turns out we are not so young anymore, which doesn't make me feel any less young, just that much more fitfully rebellious against somebodies paradigm and someone else's thesis - here is where I will go and smoke a cigarette, as I struggle to articulate just whom I would like to throttle - who I am kidding, they are legion.

You shoot with a 38 special, you end a life, you measure with rise over run, or you are unnecessarily literary, or you maybe are digging a mine, or maybe it is the turn of the century or maybe it is a near decade past the turning of the last century (good god, already?) and you are too obliquely referential, or maybe it's the martinis and the unsolicited shot of tequila.

Rise over run, half risen, running blindly, or barreling, or barging, or even only half cognisant, trade your geographic familiars for dubious volcanoes and rivers without the girth of seas.

Unlike the poet said, the center holds, it always will, now and evermore. It's us. It's us with our rise over run. I...

It's my birthday and that's another story. I'd like a bath. I'd also like a boyfriend. And I think it is going to be a very good year.

2009-05-11T22:48:00.000-07:00

Rebuts Herself

And then there are all of the intangibles. Things you don't account for when the accountant is wheedling, the things you should have said to someone else when you were leaving, all of those things you should have said when you were leaving the varied and diluted scenes of the crime, a dollar here, a massacre there, it all adds up in the end. It is only my quarter hind flank that is in tatters.

All of those pithy one-liners conjured out of anger out of some smiting rage delivered to an empty vehicle a half a mile too late, shut it down and keep it to yourself, it's just as well. Keep it down, keep it down, down. Otherwise one might step on the brakes too hard and go screeching into the intersection all furor and loneliness, heedless, headless.

But it's all really OK. Earlier this evening I met friends for roast swine flu and we probed some politics and ate really well. I have no idea what tomorrow is going to bring me, I am hoping for a lovely rose and a good man. That is if I am lucky enough to not be hobbled by the pandemic that wasn't. Strange days, strange days, indeed.

*in the last and final days of the aporkalypse we went gathering the wild greens in california that wasn't burnt, theold, old missions kind of scared me, but it was the best and most sacred place for rosemary, if you got there before the nutria did.

2009-05-04T23:40:00.000-07:00

Dear Anonymous (see below),

No good reason for staying quiet, really. I have been quietly tending to my cauldron of bitches brew, fetid, acrid, my smoking, simmering pot of anger. The fumes have rendered me inarticulate.

I am fifteen days shy of turning 38, and I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore, I whisper as I bend over. No diss on President Hopey, he's got one helluva job to do, but at the nadir of eight (I nearly typed wars) years of fecklessnes, this time, fuckers, it's personal. As in it's personally wrecking my life. Ah, America. Seven thousand souls perish on sands so many of my fellow citizens couldn't name on a map and now you ghosts of administrations past have got your stony-toothed craws all up in my livliehood. I survived a round of layoffs, to be stripped of a benefit that made my poverty palatable, then they "restructured" our health care, next up pay cuts. Trust me when I say there is no fat to trim out of my budget. I don't work for the devil, but I feel I am being reamed by The Man. Business is what it is, spreadsheets and bottom lines, and if one more person tells me I am lucky to be working at all I will break out my cudgel and go a-braining. It's my fucking blog and I will whinge if I want to you. Because, yes, I get it. I am lucky. Even luckier to be on the parental dole, and benefits and blah, blah, blah. But it isn't where I shoud be (and where is that, exactly, friend, do delight with your inflated entitlement).

I dunno, where does anybody expect to be at 38? On the cusp of achievement? Certainly not needful of parental bailout, certainly not weighing out the cost/benefit analysis of an all ramen diet, and how will I afford my wine, and when was the last time I put on my fancy shoes and went to dinner. Billy was totally wrong, when he assured me after tennis under the sun in Marin, that I would move and shit would fall into place, house and dog and boyfriend. Now I am saddled with the a three hundred thousand (and change!) albatross that I alternately love and resent with a lawn that after months of dormancy wants to grow three fucking feet every week and a mortgage keeping me in noodles and lean meats and so no furry friends four footed or otherwise. Plus IT NEVER STOPS RAINING.

I went out on Saturday for a walk, ill timed, per usual, and I was halfway up Mt. Tabor when the sky opened up, as in, it was a fifteen minute Katrina, where I thought I might actually drown standing up. Drenched cat is not euphemistic enough.

On the phone, earlier, distraught with my father, I was trying to say how much I hate this, how very much I hate this. Twelve percent unemployment in Portland, likely to get worse, how powerless, how very powerless, and how infuriating to take the licks in stride all the while repeating to self how grateful I am to have a job, and yes, but really - FUCK that NOISE, if we absorb too much as sheeple then we are no better than the goddamned Commies, oh yes, I went there, particularly after I read in last Sunday's NYTimes that Wall Street bonuses were expected to be on par with 2007 levels and then my head exploded and I died a little. Have I ever told you, Anonymous, that I have issues with Authority Figures. Also if I read one more trend piece on how very sad the riches are I might be compelled to commit the dual sin of murder and covetousness, break my heart you sum total douchebags, go ahead and shop your closets and recycle your residence on St. Barthes, you are not quietly breaking my heart, you are fueling that bitches brew, you are fuel on the fire, and consider this my brethren, I am only one bourgeoise step below, granted I read all the shit that you are putting out there in WSJ and Portfolio (because I am a glutton for punishment or a gossip hound, so hard to tell in the new recessionisim) In another words, it's all good until your butler comes after you with a swine flu infected pitchfork.

God, part of me thinks that might be sort of glorious.

What about the rest, the true poor. The ones who don't calculate in ramen but calculate the fundamentals of shelter. What about the poor souls entrenched in cruel system, I read the article in the NYer a couple of issues back about debters prisons, frankly, I think that a prison might offer a simplistic relief to those caught in the hell that is never ending paperwork and negotiation for things that are so very, very complex as to leave our very brightest mathematicians and economists baffled by the feet upon feet of paperwork. What about them, America? What about give us your tired, give us your hungry? Do me a favor and give where you can.

And so, Anonymous, I must sign off, the Man beckons my morning, it's been too long, I know. I've missed you, I have missed this.

xoxo
E

2009-03-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

oh shit, full moon fever.

2009-03-06T23:12:00.000-08:00

Guns

I drove out to nowhere, to shoot guns. With dudes.

I have never been around guns, repellent and alluring. Things of death, things of power, things of men.

But when a bunch of dudes that I work with invited me to shoot trap, I thought, well why the hell not. I did not have a liberal freak out, I had a fucking (pun deliberate) blast.

I am reasonably certain that I was the only woman at the gun club, I am not sure what I expected, but this is what I saw. Flood lights and construction without aesthetic put up just to the left of marsh lands and close enough to a prison to put the fear or the hunger into the jailed. And men, lots of men. I walked through the door and a the crusty old coots in their cammo with their protective glasses and their ear protector thingies slung around their necks shut their craws as if an alien had just entered their midst. It was really fucking strange.

First thing. Guns are loud, the report is sharp and quick and cutting, cordite snakes to the ground, I can still smell it on my fingers. Guns are loud, louder than on TV, but only if that is the only reference, a report, an involuntary shudder. I felt floods of adrenaline.

As I was the only woman, and the only total newbie, and since men are wont to demonstrate, I got good lessons, I will not disavow that I did not work it just a little bit, not to be flirty or damsel in distressy, and polemic feminists will surely flame me for saying it, but it was interesting to play the paradigm. I am hardly helpless*, I know they knew that, it takes a certain amount of salt to dude things and be dudeish while not being afraid to be a girl, especially when one has no designs on fucking any of them. Also, advantage mine, I am a pretty decent tennis player, and I am really good at darts, the principal is the same, keep your eyes on the pigeon.

They gave me a short barrelled 12 gauge pump shot gun. You are five in a line, you shoot five rounds in position and switch, 25 shots, a box of ammunition. You get to yell "pull!", which is almost as fun as pulling the trigger. Pull! The clay pigeon sails into the night, sight, pull the trigger. BANG! The butt kicked into my shoulder, my head spun, my nostrils burned, I heard white. I missed. I laughed. I was totally hooked.

Two boxes of ammo later I had felled many clay pigeons, out shot several of the dudes, my shoulder was throbbing, I was slightly deaf, was freezing my ass off, was wildly exhilarated. The dudes were pleased with their student. And you know, sometimes I think it takes a girl, who will whoop and holler to make the others drop their pretense of manly stoicism and whoop and holler, too.

It was just what I needed. It didn't entirely quell this continental restlessness, but the joy of mayhem, of proxy violence was invigorating. Nothing quite like hitting a clay pigeon and watching it shatter in the night under the flood lights, when the grass beneath your feet is tinged red with spent shells, a little bit cowboy, everyone drunk on imaginary bloodlust.

*I got home and dudes had been in my house. Have I mentioned that my brother's bandmates are building a practice space in my basement, it's true, also true that I might be possibly nuts. But home I came and cold it was. No heat. Panic. I was cold all the way through, went to the basement and contemplated the behemoth that is my furnace, turned tail and fired off an email to the dudes, halp! I said, you've ruined my heat and I am cold! I was instructed to google, I had visions of blowing up my house and/or freezing to death. My brother stopped by this evening and nonjudgementally (honest! fatherhood/sleep deprivation has mellowed him) showed me the switch that had been jostled. Oh. Then instructed me to change the filter, stat. Oh.

Now, more on gender dichotomy, perception edition. Word got out about our shooting party and in the course of conversation with dudes who are friends with the dudes who were there this is what came back to me... I apparently showed up in high heels and lipstick and proceeded to blow some shit up like a mother fucking femme fatale. Now for the truth, I was wearing wedge boots, with a two inch heel, because they are comfortable and also water proof. I had on rolled up levis. While it's true that I was wearing a kicky raincoat, it's my only raincoat, and it's very functional. I was, indeed, wearing lipgloss. It was subtle! It's also true that I had my hair up in chop sticks, but only because it's slightly less lazy than a ponytail. Jesus, by the telling of it, you wouldda thought I'd shown up in a ball gown. I was both flattered and baffled. Had the thought that maybe this is how myths are born, some cordite besotted engineer mistakes a pair of rainboots for a pair Louboutins (who, wha?).

And the bruises, the tangible, that imprint on my body? I have a perfect square on my arm , on my inner bicep, just beneath my shoulder where the gun slid down the super fabric of my kicky raincoat, the right length of the butt of a rifle. Currently crimson, I anticpate the day it turns that sallow, sufuric chartreuse. I wear it with pride, like the badass that I am.

Onto the nerdgasm - OMG, BSG! How fucking great are the writers, Anders as Ship. I swear to Gods I heard the collective ecstasy of dorks dorking the frak out (me included, what, go out? don't you know there are only THREE episodes left of Battlestar Galactica) End transmission.

2009-03-04T23:35:00.000-08:00

The Youngish and the Restless

So restless. Some kind of metaphysical pull that is manifesting as a phantom itch in my fifth limb and skritch in my second heart. It's not something I have forgotten to do, some bill left to languish in one of my languishing bill piles, it's not a task. It's not work. Something is coming.

Last night I dreamt I was dying of cancer and the nurse had given me a drug in hospice and it was good, I was pain free and filled with an unreckoning of regret. I woke up at four in the morning, eyes gauzy with dream and felt for myself, unfamiliar beneath my own fingers, hunted by my night wanderings, wondering as I came to consciousness if I had become an aunt yet. I think it's time for a physical.

I did become an aunt today, not until late morning, as I was sitting at my desk trying to fend off the prickly pink anemone tendrils of restlessness driving me to distraction, so I arranged and rearranged piles of paperwork, abjectly watched the surge in the market, waited for my brother to call.

Welcome to the world young fellow, it's a strange and wondrous place. I intend to spoil you rotten, brother says you look deep, I think you look like a rather wise turtle.

And then I visited with friends, and then I picked up my brother's dog and then I was slightly miffed that I missed Lost and then I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine and tried to plot the origins of this restlessness. The moon is half full but that is no help, it could be all the greening new things and new life that buds and sprouts, the crocus and iris and the daffodil-dillys weeks away from bloom. Could be the economy, could be paucity of money in my bank account, but it's not that either. Couldn't be the president.

I am going to shoot guns with a bunch of dudes tomorrow night, I am hoping that will help. But it's not aggression, though the semblance of violence might be a temporary fix - that is if I don't have a liberal shit fit - since I am (or was) a card carrying Californian-New Yorker-reading spawn of dope smoking hippies, and yet the thought of shooting skeet appeals to my want, yea need, to blow some shit up. Have the bruise on my shoulder to show for all those shattered clay pigeons. Some proof of life. Some tangible consequence.

It's not so much the absence of desire, it's more like an abscess of desire. I know exactly what it is that plagues me. I am ready to be heartbroken again.

2009-02-24T22:39:00.000-08:00

Just a girl, watching a speech, coddling risotto

It wont be the last time that I flippantly, so flippantly say these are strange days, and it won't be the last time in the near future where I opine that I think I might be living history. And it feels a little weird, a little outside. If I am anything like my mystified peers, we all thought it began and ended with MTV, it all began and ended with other people on television, making spectacles of themselves, with conveniently appropriate soundtracks that we culled and edited for ourselves, this was back in the heady days of mix tapes, from walkmen to discmen to iPods, from bit technology to the wild, wild internets with its sideways combination of news and porn news and just plain old porn. It was always about other people, it was never about us.

So here we are slightly baffled before our screens and our news feeds. Digesting our dinners, along with god only knows what and my poor brain pan is already completely saturated.

And yet, strange rays of light beamed through the television and npr and the computer, our President, that beacon, that beacon of reason, quick (homage to the Simpsons) let's break his legs.

I'd ask a sage if there were any left, is this what it is like, to be aware of just how likely these days are going to be put through the spectrum of history, just who records this anyway. I am just a blip of an uncommitted blogger paying half my mind to the risotto on the stove, wishing I had more sex in my life above money, wanting to hug the President, I've got a free account and dammit I am throwing my two cents out to the world. Because I can.

And there you have the crux of the modern world, a citizenry armed with lap tops and opinions, how to sift, how do you even begin. Naturally, I am right and you should all agree with me, right? Because my iPod thinks I am gay man, and this is a problem, while on topic my iPod would like you to know that I am not having enough sex and beseeches the reading public - shut up iPod....

Note to iPod shuffle, stop already with the Jane's Addiction, what is this 1989??

2009-02-15T20:59:00.000-08:00

Put a dollar into the machine

And spin.

Queen and Aces, jacks of spades, king of diamonds, good luck, bad luck, no luck at all, just a little chance, a room in Vegas wall-papered in fools gold. Iron pyrate. I learned that early growing up panning by the river in gold country. It's illusory and it floats. But it sure is shiny, there under the midsummer sun.

Just like everything else that isn't heavy enough or bolted down, floats to the surface, like oxygen or the belated truth.

Who wouldn't be beguiled by all those beautiful things leaking out of clouds and fissures, patched up by a little bit of lover's spit. A poor choice, a misguided notion made beautiful by a clumsy two step and a long kiss.

If it were only so. I spent Friday on the mountain, flying. I spent yesterday crying. Then I smoked a joint and watched Wall-E. I thought you weren't supposed to miss what you don't have, but I do, and I do. If only I weren't so completely terrified of casting the net, if I weren't so zealously guarding my heart. A guarded heart knows no love, an open heart breaks, nobody wins, unless by some fluke of willingness and timing and stars and the confluence of the moon it just happens. And it might, or it could. If you let it, or if you made it, if you let go, if you could let go.

2009-02-05T22:25:00.000-08:00

Recession is the new black, skinned knees are the new blue

We sit in groups around tables around kitchens around televisions sound muted, men in tight pants against a background of vibrant green, men in blue suits, hovering over slow cookers simmering inexpensive but delicious things. We keep our voices down, to coat the panic, to toe the line of nonchalance, we'll be alright, we'll be alright, we tell one another, nobody is going to let anybody starve, we will all keep our houses, we will keep our roofs and our blankets and ramen if it gets that bad, pray that it doesn't, we'll make it through.

We hush involuntarily, drink too much, accidentally kiss the ones we should not, mire a little in guilt, mire a little in exhilaration, move forward, keep moving forward.

Survive a layoff, feel an avalanche of sympathy for those who fell before the axe, and a surge of relief that it wasn't your skin, not this time, not yet.

Where did this world come from, because it isn't mine. Or it is mine, it's my inheritance after all these years of a recklessly bejeweled search for wealth, where everyone was entitled to exorbitant handbags, where there was a long stretch of time when I only bought matching sets of frilly french lingerie. It's true. Right along with the shoes and handbags and really expensive hair. I am keeping my hair, fuck you, you can pry it from my cold ramen noodle hands.

I keep wondering why none of the talking heads remember the cyclical nature of history, we are on the precipice of decline, it happens every three hundred years or so, accept when the cycle is accelerated: see Europe wars I and II.

With that comes art, and literature, and all of the beautiful things that break our hearts and keep us human. That is a trite answer for something that greater minds have puzzled over.

Still. Still. Here comes the unknown. We've pitched all of our expectations at unexpected President. There is hope, there is always hope, that magical, elliptical silvertine thread, it's the quiet that underscores those hushed conversations, it's starlight and moonlight and in the pinking of daybreak, it's the cold hard practicality of weighing eggs against milk and beef against lentils. And also this, some of us are going to weather this and learn some hard lessons that will serve us well, some of us are going to lose everything, some of us already have.

I have begun to count my blessings every minute of every day and I am determined to pay it forward, where I cannot account for cold hard dollars I will pay forward in small acts of kindness and good neighborly-ness. I'll tell you this, these days, more than ever, in a really long time, I wish, I wish I had somebody to nestle into. Just a pair of warm arms, that is all.

In local news, I fell up some stairs at a super bowl party took off a good seven layers of epidermis and nominally won the chili cook-off. Since then my left knee is threatening to go septic and I was laid out by sinus infection. I am missing something, it itches miserably like a phantom limb, I could probably pinpoint it if I chose to.

*************

five years. I have been doing this intermittently and sometimes with ferocity for five years now.
Congratulations my dearest alter Emma B., you got gumption girl.

2009-01-20T23:26:00.000-08:00

Finally

just finally.

On days that merit some sort of historic reckoning you think back four years and then eight and are slightly astonished by the passage of time. Where was I and what did I do, where was I and what have I done.

Four year increments, I could have gone to university all over again, twice. Or high school. Twice.

In a conference room full of engineers, ranging in age, ranging political affiliation, we all watched a little bit of history being made. David Brooks, not my favorite pundit, described as wintry, and he was right. It is the winter of our motherfucking discontent. Is it apt that is was clear as a bell and cold as hell, who could not be moved by all of those people who stood up in the darkest hours before dawn broke to be a part of history on this day. If only to tell the story, to be passed down and embellished upon - I was there. I was there.

In talking to my father earlier, he said maybe I can start being less angry, uh huh, I said, and maybe I can start being a little less poor. I am a by-product of the sixties and the legacy bequeathed unto me is one of relentless optimism colored at the edges and the middle by the most cynical, cynical cynicism. So many opportunities squandered, the indomitable rise of the greed monsters and the passing glee in their fall as you watch your own livelihood disappear. The unemployment rate in Oregon just swelled to nine percent.

I wish you good luck, and I will support you how I can, I can measure my grace in ounces and I will promise compassion. I will sacrifice where I can for the things that I believe in. The right of good and free education. The promise of reasonable health care. The freedom of choice. The freedom to love whom you will, regardless of gender, regardless really of any societal constraints.
I will do this while I scrimp to meet my mortgage, when I look back on heady days of 1998 when everything was all about shoes and champagne. But I did get to have that, so there is that.

Shall I throw caution to the wind and flap wildly on the wings of exhilaration, I wish I could. It's still the winter of our discontent, the road will be hard and long. Lest the wheels not get stuck in the Spring thaw. If we are a little bit willing to take up the yoke and bare our knuckles to the elements, slough off our television complacency, then maybe there is hope for us yet. Either that or we are all Cylons. (for the geeks, no I couldn't resist)

In local news, my company party was this weekend. Did I play air guitar to Back in Black on a stage in front of the entire company. Yes, yes I did.

Yes we can.

2009-01-08T19:41:00.000-08:00

The Gold Standard of Trash

Thank you VH1. Just when I didn't think the bar could be dropped any lower you brought us Brett Michaels, his glorious weave and a double bus load of Ho-bots. Sweet cheese on crackers, vagina shots? EWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If that bus went off a cliff (oh please, oh please, oh please) it would float on clouds of flammable extensions and cushions of super-inflated breastisises. I swear to God it's enough to make me surrender my ladyflower. Talk about your rode hard and put away wet.

Of course I can't stop watching.

2009-01-06T23:24:00.000-08:00

True Confessions of the Wishful Louche Kind

So it turns out that I have been celebate (excluding the marvels of the internets and battery powered miracles) for almost a year. It'd be a joyful occaision if I were born again, or even remotely tittalated by extreme piety, alas, alack, nyet. All I am is wistful for all of the sex I have not had with boys and men, glorious boys and men........

...... Which brings me to point number two.

hallo!

I have been on a fairly rigorous (weddings exempted, sorbriety caveat) non dating plane since the engineer. We could get into it, but I imagine that most are astute enough to realize that I have been sheltering my poor shriveled heart ---- c'mon really, two years later, still shriveled, not robust?? yeah, fuck you, still shriveled, step off, conscious. And then my dumb brother had to go ahead and shatter my carefully constructed mirage by signing me up for Match.com. Shit.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Shit.

Shit.

Do I hafta, really?

and yes, yes I do, I have to at least try.

2008-12-23T00:12:00.000-08:00

Snow, Ice, Wind - Part II, The Arctic Blast

I haven't gotten out of my ski pants, save total disrobement, in three days. I bend over, I lace my boots, I secure my goggles, I zip my parka, I get gloved and out I go into the white. I love it, I am afloat on all of that dry white snow that has obscured my corner and nullified the steps up to my front porch.

I've gone sledding, I've gone stomping through the snow, I have found that feets of snow impede motion, and let us not speak civilly of that horrid wind chill, that hurts my teeth when J make me giggle as we are fetching bacon for his lovely family, and makes my nose run like, like a german snot luge.

I sat in agony for a long while tonight while my bad ankle sent spikes of pain up my shin in protest of all of those dritfts of snow I gladly thromped through, booted and suited I stood at the stop for the mytholigical bus beast that never came. Toted back the sum total of my meager Christmas shopping and groceries in my green bags this afternoon, felt thoroughly little house on the prairie, had a glass of wine, did the dishes, did the laundry, shoveled the porch, had a bath, felt momentarily invincible.

and then I tried to upload photos and was thwarted, therefore I will go to bed.

It's been beautiful and I have loved every inch of snow on the ground.

2008-12-14T23:24:00.000-08:00

Snow, Ice, Wind

Ah, local news. Churning the citizenry into a cappucino froth, the weather! It will happen! (with the caveat of or not!) but something will happen! So prepare, prepare, prepare!

And then we all stand around and marvel when it does, doe eyed in the cold and white. ODOT will capture the brazen and the foolish on their way to somewhere or nowhere at all, slip-sliding sideways and backwards when the East wind has buffed the macadam to a high gloss and in slow motion anticipation we spin the wheel away from the discordant sound of metal on metal.

I was anticipating a house full of people today, and I had a vat of chili to be made. So I got up at eight and looked outside. I've been running the heat at a steady sub-tropical 75 degrees, so I roused myself from my languid Sunday morning with the promise of wonderland. I was not disappointed as I folded myself back into my still warm sheets for another twenty minutes, I announced happily to my teddy bear that it was snowing and ruefully wished for a live body. If you are ever going to wake up to anyone, how lovely to do it when the world has gone white and quiet, and landmarks been befuddled. What better reason to not get out of bed.

But I did, empty bed, chili to be made.

I was chopping onions and browning chuck by 8:30 watching winter out my kitchen window, all of that confectioner's sugar snow huffing off of my neighbor's roof.

I have never really cooked with jalepeno peppers before. I made a note to myself to not rub my eyes, so after I had washed my hands in hot water with soap, I forgot and I rubbed my eyes. Holy Fuck, I'm blinded. I'd just like to state that it's not easy to give oneself an eyewash without an eyecup and the easy use of ones hands.

so I went out and had a mani and a pedi. Came back and beaned my chili, got wise put on my sorels, my ski goggles and my ugly ski jacket and went tromping through the snow and the wind on a cheese mission. A fool I looked, but a warm fool is no fool at all. Priorities after all.

One stock pot full of chili later, I found myself fitful in the house, a little bit stir crazy, a lot lonely. But that's what cold winter nights like this are for, underscoring what is absent.

2008-12-02T00:08:00.000-08:00

Raking Leaves, Dancing Britney Spears

and the women come and go, talking of michaelango. the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog. I thought I might have something as I wait for my hair to dry before I retire, so as not to have my longish hair go completely unmanageable somewhere after three in the morning. Which is to say I have nothing, save all I don't say.

Now that my hair is getting longish, a state it hasn't seen since my very early twenties, I like twisting it round and pinning it rakishishly about my head. Note rakish, not romantic. That's a long conversation I really ought to have with someone sometime soon, but not tonight. Also I just realized that my favorite threadbare sleep t-shirt circa 1991 is on backwards. Hold up a sec while I adjust and turn down the heat.

It's warm and wet in Portland. And I should be asleep, I have an early meeting, but mostly I slept the last five days and now I am wide awake and feel like dancing.

That is when I wasn't raking, scooping, bagging the leaves that just keep fucking falling onto my lawn. (gottdamned leaves mutters the Very Old Woman under her breath) I kvetch, but secretly I love it. I like the singular repetition of it, the camaraderie of it, as neighbors stop to commiserate, I love my iPod, I like a mouldering sweat and leaves in my hair, I don't even much mind the odd squicky larvae thing I unearth. The thing that irritates me is it kicks in my semi-dormant OCD and I feel I must rid my yard of EVERY SINGLE LEAF OR I WILL LOSE MY CRACKERS. Uh, wine helps.

And then there is poor Britney Spears, who on the day before the economists point out the obvious about the recession, pours out her soul to MTV, she is sad, bless her heart. But she is not likely to go hungry or lose the roof over her head. Savvy to have such a non-divulgent and at the same time extremely revealing not-mea-culpa-come-to-jesus to the very same media that built you up and so gleefully took you down. Everyone loves a train wreck. The question is what is her part in the complicity of the machine, at some point you must willfully surrender to the shuddering mirage of fame, of power, of the glory of money. And why is it always the young women who pay so fucking dearly.

I often think of Britney Spears in the context of another musician's song. Rufus Wainright has a line from a song that goes "I used to dance Britney Spears, I think I'm gettin' on in years" I can identify with that. I am too old for Britney Spears, I can't dance like she did in that school girl's uniform, never had any desire to emulate her, always scorned her obvious manufacturing. Still I can symapathize, ten years, two kids, and a million unflattering paparazzi pix later, to be rolled out for that kind of public comsumption would make me crazy. And to think there was a time where I was sort of vaguely ambitious enough to want that.

Thank heavens, I guess, for a solid case of oscillating intertia which has left me poor and unlaid in Portland, but rich in hope and friendship and expectation. Minor miracles, whatever.

2008-11-04T22:32:00.000-08:00

Election Day. Oh, Thank God.

I was sitting in a room with full of friends and strangers, that was a speech for the history books, beautiful, gracious, intelligent. There was not a dry eye in the house.

As always, I have twin doses of optimism and skepticism, but tonight I have allowed myself to be giddy and possibly tipsy.

Thank you America for not making me stay up 'til the wee hours, then showing up to work the following morning still drunk and belligerent.

California, you are making me really sad. Californians, get the fuck out of your neighbor's bedrooms, you oughtta know better. Shame on you. Love is so rare, how could you judge anyone who finally finds that sweetness, two dicks, two twats, who cares, as far as I am concerned anyone who does is nothing but a used up stanky self-righteous douchebag.

Update - Portlanders are setting off those sweet, sweet illegal State of Washington fireworks all over the South East. And horns, they are blaring.

2008-10-29T21:23:00.000-07:00

The Infomercial

OK Barack, whatever ambrosia your sellin', I'm buying.

I called my dad immediately afterward, we were both teary.

I have never, he had never, seen anything like that. It's a new era of the cinematic politic. I am both enchanted and deeply suspicious.

What a country. In one breath on NPR you have African American voters in St. Louis thrilled to vote for the first time at thirty, after a decade and some of lassitude, in the next you have a bunch of white supremicists whose factions are divided as to whether to get rid of the n***** now or let him be elected and therefore bolster their fanatic numbers, this they speak of candidly of National fucking Public Radio. Good God, really?

Closer, my peer group here in Portland is skirting dangerously close to the rounds of lay-offs, I count my lucky stars before I sleep I landed somewhere stable. Salary be damned, poor is the new black.

2008-10-17T21:51:00.000-07:00

One Year and Five Days Later

I find myself employed.

I find that I have taken a salary cut the equivalent of a small economy vehicle.

I find that I am slightly panicked, but overall I am grateful. (this economy, these benefits)

I find that I really like this new company and the work that it entails.

I find that my Friday night consisted of raking leaves, a quick run, San Marcos Almonds (an extravagance) and cheap wine.

I find the future auspicious.

*note to the Fates - oh ha ha ha, fine then, your senses of humor are perverse and ribald, don't think that I don't appreciate all the little clues you've been dropping willy-nilly, couldn't be clearer if you sat a beatified Jonathan Safran-Foer in front of me - or whatever his name is - to read Everything is Illuminated in the motherfucking flesh. Please call Loki off, and ask Pan to cool it with the wine, though I wouldn't mind if you sent down Venus to abet me in getting laid sometime before I turn forty. Go on and sharpen your shears, ladies. As a personal favor, I'd be most indebted if you cut short McPain and the She Beast.

2008-10-14T23:12:00.000-07:00

Portland, Year One

The moon is full, it's clear and cold. It's warm in the house and I am well fed. I am in good spirits. I shouldn't be, really. What with my joblessness and the hideous state of the economy and all these harbingers of doom gathering like a chattering murder of crows. A year and then some of working willy-nilly if at all, and all I can think is that I have been fortunate to travel my new city and meet all kinds of people. That oughtta count for something.

There is still time to scour Ebay for used carpetbags and jalopies before the shit seriously hits the fan and the media lapses into assissination speculation.

I am just about to let go of every plan I ever made, let go of every facsimile of a career that I should have had, let go of every expired expectation, right after I get out of the bath and just before I quit smoking for the eleventy-ith time.

We are tottering on the brink of medieval country justice, I am careful to lock my doors and I keep my pitchfork handy, just in case.

But in the slightness of this calm, my calm, I take the time to purchase a very swell pair of red shoes. I go for a run beneath a benevolent moon, I eat left overs and finish last night's wine, I sing in the kitchen as I unload the dishwasher, I am mindful to give thanks as I round every corner.

I've made it a year, I can make it another.

2008-10-05T23:43:00.000-07:00

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

I missed my train thanks to a drawbridge and a barge. (also my hair takes forever to blow out, but that is neither here nor there)

Speeding down wet streets, getting lost, getting to the station, getting a ticket on the next train to Seattle, getting a parking ticket, thinking about mixed blessings, getting coffee, going for a run, killing time before getting to the train station to do it over again.

I pulled into the parking garage for attempt number two and had one of those sudden claps of certitude that I had parked next to my ex-boyfriend's, the engineer, car. Swell. I was suddenly glad I had missed the 8:30 train to blow dry my hair, knowing him, insofar as I know him at all anymore, he was on the early train.

I boarded noonish. Settled into my window seat with my i-Pod and the New Yorker and my book and my expensive, yet crappy train sandwich and my expensive, yet crappy demi of chardonnay, and proceeded to reach backwards as the train swayed northwards to Seattle. All of the other trains, in other states and other states of mind, and continents and countries a decade or so ago. I'd go to Seattle just to ride the train. For the syncopated jostle, the lurch and lull, for the countryside and the backsides of small towns and the underbellies of middling cities unfurling in the window. Temporarily mesmerized by blurred passage of elongated freight trains. I kept Andrew Bird on repeat, it felt appropriate. I'd ride just to remember, it's always better to remember when you are going somewhere unfamiliar, through a landscape devoid of the footprint of memory.

Flashes of bay I don't have a name for, no orientation on my personal map, I miss large bodies of water, I miss the ocean like I miss the presence of my best friend, but at least she and I have email. Me and bodies of water have only the kinship of proximity. Brine only has immediacy.

Seattle recalls San Francisco except it isn't. I stayed with my new friend and she showed me the town. Pike's Place, the usual tourist destinations. Last night we hit the town and closed down the bars, I met a women who is my economic doppelganger and together we solved this crisis with the aid of some truly spectacular cocktail slinging by an exceptionally hot and exceptionally talented bartender. I was impressed by the array of seemingly available men specimens.... I was standing outside with two other women engaged in debate when some intrepid fellow barged in on our conversation and was all whoa, yer talkin' economics and I looked him straight in the eye and said yes, it's a real boner killer isn't it, and chastened he turned tail. I felt sorta bad for half a sec, but whatevs, this is the reason, dear readers, that I haven't been laid in seven months.

ms. D and I went to the russian baths this afternoon. Hot, cold, tepid salt water, banya, the beat down with oak leaves, repeat as needed. I then had a deep tissue massage by a tiny lady with really strong hands, as my body went into spasms, I haven't been touched for such a long time, I am super ticklish and I have a year's worth of the stress of unemployment embedded deep in my tissue that I emerged half drunk with relaxation, she stuck an elbow into my right hip and I nearly bucked her off, she said, you're kind of overdue for this, aren't you. Ya think? I stayed awake on the train back long enough to do a cursory reconnaissance to see if I could spot the engineer, get some wine and wilt into the chair and surrender to the syncopated jostle, the jolt and lull. Much better to sleep on trains than planes.

Off the train, down the quay, it's gotten so inky dark with the change of season, it's gotten wet again, my mind is off thinking of kissing as I clickety-click to the parking garage, and then there we are, side-by-side, loading our luggage into our trunks.

I met the engineer on a plane.

I haven't seen him in a year, we make small talk, I decide I... I decide that cycles are strange, indeed. I decide that I am free to be heartbroken again. Or not. I decide that a full beard is not a good look on him, but I decide that I might hit again for old time's sake, even though that would be unwise, and then I get in my car and drive away - what on earth is there left to say.

In a week I will have been here a year.

2008-10-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Weirderland

In the past fourteen days I have ridden the world's smallest loop-de-loop in the world's most peculiar semi-permanent amusement park, down by the river where the carnies are not intransigent, housed in barracks and I danced something called the "chicken dance" at a dissipated Octoberfest.

I have oomp-pa-pa'ed at the Polish fest.

I have shambled at the last Last Thursday.

I have sat on my porch during a short, but incredibly hardy torrential downpour, I have given strangers shelter on my porch.

I have lunched idly with my neighbor, who was then laid off.

I have danced for change and bar tended for none for Obama.

I have watched the debates and found them wanting.

I have been blissfully unaware of the massive stock tumble. Fuck me, if I am not ever tired of the jabbering heads and their fear mongering prognostications.

A few days later I cried in my car, listening to Frank de Ford rhapsodizing about Paul Newman taking his wife's hand at the theatre.

I have been surveying the wolf spiders that live in great abundance and have grown to great girth all over my yard and porch. I shooed an enormous one off of the porch this evening as I was suddenly and compulsively taken to hose off the porch. I walk like an elephant about my yard, flapping my arms furiously, surprised by the tensile strength of the webs I inevitably blunder into.

And I have been to see the baby olyphant at the zoo, found a good place to feed the ducks, seen the swifts dive into a chimney and have been generally delighted that Portland smells so good, watching as the leaves switch hues, lament the onset of darkness and the inevitable rain, have been grateful for a hale September.

I am looking forward to carving pumpkins and gainful employment, as always.

In twelve days I will have lived here a year.

2008-09-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

Divergent Sandwiches: An anthropological lesson in lunches

It's officially a year since I have had a job. I have temped, hither and thither.

There was the several month stint on Pill Hill. Eating in Hot Doc Cafe or the Patient Buffet. Doctors and students and patients and families, Mt. Hood and good tacos.

There was that weird place in Sellwood where the electricians dined out of the vending machine and the coffee was brownish water. I'd run home at lunch.

The interviews, lunches downtown, some fine-ish if I was feeling optimistic, some a little frightening if I was feeling trod upon.

Then the suburbs (shudders) a comparative study in cobb salads, at TGI Fridays (yuck), California Pizza Kitchen (mmm, also apparently high end ((shut it, your snob is showing)) something called a Red Robin (black olives, really? comes with two vats of dressing)

And now the cafeteria at Reed, where the lunch meats are artisinal. Slap dash and surprisingly expensive. But eavesdropping on the students is well worth the price of admission. Oh the downmarket posturing, you oughtta see my eye rolls. (I told my brother that the music they listen to is so obscure that only the nine hipsters in Macau plus the lone Reedie knows it exists - and then - vindication! the TA in the department asked me if I had ever heard of the Cocteau Twins, I schooled her and felt totally rad, that is until I felt old) I told her I thought the Cocteau Twins were to the mid-eighties what Tori Amos was to the mid-nineties, and I swear I heard crickets.

I have dined alone and I have watched people, all the nutso iterations of humanity and the crazy shit they not so daintily shovel into their snouts, mind you, I am just as culpable. Of shoveling, that is. And I might be nutso too. We are strange creatures, and boy are we divided. The class lines they are demarcated by arugula (fuck you media) and american cheese (fuck you kraft).

I'll not get started on that because I am striving not to become the sputtering apoplectic that the elite media --- I'll end by saying that this political season has all the trappings of race and gender, but really those are only incidentals. We'd do well to remember the French Revolution, it's the perception of class, and moreover it's the perception of place.

I'll say this once (god, I hope so, before she gets relegated to the annals of historical obscurity) that Palin beast inspires in me a palpable physical violence, as in I would really, really like to punch that hypocritical bitch in her wolf hunting face. Who is writing the republican agenda these days, did they raise Benny Hill from the dead? Are people really buying this two penny farce? And they are, and they do. Class and party affiliation, that and lunch, welcome to America, I'd like a roast beef on rye, with arugula and extra pickles.

2008-09-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

A Smattering of Jonquils

I thought it was an aberration, some kind of warty Fall augur. Bone white stalks shooting up in the shady corner of the garden, harbinger of ill will, of cold and of rain, just at the nostalgic incandesence of the last sighs of Summer. The air has gone heavy and the trees fulsome, I feel the undercurrents of seasons waxing and waning in the disparate strata, the dewy cool beneath the heat of a honeyed afternoon sun, it's unspeakably glorious. And so rise this smattering of late season jonquils, verging strumpet virgin pink, they arch in the shade, they make me happy.

It's funny, but I think I may have found salvation in a television commercial. Or maybe it's just modern american life, spoon fed a mind-numbingly simple idea (and somehow in my state, no less than redemptive) in less than sixty seconds and I'd like a credit card and a dress that I have no occaision to wear to go with that please. I may or may not have more to say on that later, but I need to cogitate some more. I've been cogitating already for a week, I am on stand-by for the epiphany I am almost certain will not come, at least not by way of my shrill summons. Epiphany, much like miracles are subtle things, they come at you sideways and are best left to wingnuts and theologians.

2008-08-27T23:05:00.000-07:00

Portland: Month Eleven and Some

I tend to internalize until I implode. I keep things down, and then it gets really noisy in my head, and it's been really noisy in my head.

I thought that I'd write something really pithy... that if you put me in a cassock I'd be indistinguishable from a monk, minus the good highlights and the lady parts, but I am regrettably chaste and regrettably frugal, possibly unshaven at the moment and have gone radio silent. Ah, but then there is that whole crisis of faith thing, it turns out that my self-flagellation is all done in my self-imposed silence, the welts that rise are visible to no one. Except the halo of desperation that trails after me like an unwelcome red balloon, people reflexively flinch from that shit, and who can blame them.

Eleven months and four seasons later, the underbellies of trees have begun to twitch autumn ward, I remain unemployable. I am pulverized. Beaten. My mojo is in tattered deficit. One recruiter approached me with a position in a shed in some lonely place where I'd be responsible for weighing trash trucks, she seemed embarrassed, I was embarrassed. What I was thinking: WHAT THE FUCK? I WENT TO COLLEGE FOR THIS? REALLY? REALLY?? I declined. Then another recruiter sent me to the far out burbs today, lovely people, I don't really want to make a 36 mile round trip commute for data entry, for a wage I made nine years ago, am I being fickle? Am I being unreasonable in this economy, in this notoriously down wage state of Oregon? Am I being too snobby to believe that I merit a job that will keep me engaged that my tap into my underused critical thinking resources, because I can't think anymore, it's too goddamned noisy in my head, and I am too beleaguered to give a good god damn anymore.

There is still a slim chance for the dream job.

rant - I can't take it anymore. The interviewing and the waiting and the recruiters who intentionally disappear, I feel like a worthless withering weathered turd. I could run, I'd have a good 72 hours or more before anyone realized I had gone, I've been thinking about that, but where would I go, then there is the whole hair dryer inadvertently dropped into the bathtub, but that might inconvenience my neighbors, let alone my family, tempting, but when you're dead you're just dead, there is just too much beauty to miss out on. But really, what the hell am I doing here? You know, well I know it's bad, when I walked out of the vegan joint on the corner (delicious, actually) and melted to the sidewalk in tears, and did the unthinkable, I called my mom. I never do that, but that's a complicated conversation for another day.

I keep reminding myself that no one ever said it was gonna be easy, but the last eleven months have been a baptism in sometimes semi-scalding water and sometimes a tepid flame and sometimes exponential loneliness and some moments of unfettered grace and the sweet flightiness of honest joy. I swing savagely from pendulums end to pendulums end without any reasonable middle.

It's also hard being the, being the proverbial fifth wheel. I don't know anyone who is single, I don't really know anyone who isn't pregnant or going to bare fruit herewith. I thought by the eleventh month I'd have at the very least employment dialled, and then I'd get a puppy and then I'd think about thinking about boyfriend perusing. What I got is puffy eyes from all the weeping I've been doing tonight. That's a different set of baggage entirely, it's related, but a separate diatribe.

I am looking for comments, or I am fishing for words of encouragement.

I didn't really address the whole crisis of faith thing, I'll leave it with this, I've been talking to Someone ever since I was a little kid, when you spend a lot of time, when you spend most of your time alone, you talk to someone, I've been addressing my own personal pantheon avidly for some months and for years and years beyond that, you could call it pleading, but it's really it's specialized begging. Someone is not hearing my pleas, must be busy with all of the horror that' s being perpetrated in Someone's name, and all those who are hungry while I sip my wine, and all of those who are in pain as I draw my bath, and all of those who will go cold when I ask my parents for a loan to fill my oil tank, I am thinking of you as I count my blessings daily. To get all Hillary Clinton channeling Harriet Tubman, we go, when the dogs are barking, when the lights are coming, we write ourselves out of it, short of that we run, towards promise, we sit through the bleak sunsets with the promise, the sweet, sweet promise of the gilded morrow, I could hold my breath until I turn six shades of blue, but how do I know that tomorrow wont yield the most glorious of glorious days?

This is the forever curse of the pragmatic optimist. Short of that, writing out helps, keeps the legions in my own personal peanut gallery semi-cogent, at least for a moment. I pray for peace, and for compassion, I pray for my family and for my friends, near and far, I pray for our collective good health and for the vibrancy of the whole slough of kids, I pray for love, in the hopes that it will keep us well, in the hope that it might find me too, short of that I pray that naked pictures of Michael Phelps might show up on the internet, because I am harboring a purely scientific desire to see the proportions of that man... Seriously, he's a 23 year old goof ball.

2008-08-11T00:53:00.000-07:00

My Olympia

My thumb is stuck in the blackbird pie and I am having a crisis of faith. I unabashadly love the Olympics, and am hoping it's just the sour cherry balm for my soul.... All of the tea in China and all of that. I will have more later.

2008-07-20T21:22:00.000-07:00

Every Day Should be Like Sunday

I was sitting on the porch today, sipping fizzy lemonade as the backyard cat prowled the perimeter and the trees swayed vaguely, feeling absurdly bucolic, when it occurred to me that I was very simply happy.

Sat in my sister-in-law's sister-in-law's backyard sipping sangria for the umpteenth baby shower I've been to since I arrived in Portland. Ate canapes, hung with my sister-in-law's sister, and their mother, overcome with well-being I wept in the car.

I came home and sat on the porch some more, then loitered at New Seasons where I waffled over cheeses and salumi, stocked up on good, cheap wine, hoarded the local blueberries that have finally come into season.

Evening here is watering time. I am on a corner lot and my yard is open, watering time at evensong is visiting time. It makes watering a very long process. Other neighbors are watering, others still are walking their animals or their children or both. We chat over hoses and leashes and screeches. I am not the most forthright social person, but I truly love shooting the breeze with my neighbors, it gives a sense of belonging and rightness. I never would have thought it, in my previous incarnation as hardened urban dweller --- people are still lighting off firecrackers -- I kept my eyes forward and my invisible forcefield activated always. Portland is like a very large town. I was out of town last weekend and when I returned my elderly Chinese neighbors across the street sent their eldest son over to inquire after my well-being, they were concerned. I was taken aback, and then I was thrilled, aint no way anyone is breaking into this house, not when I have spies across the street, like Gladys on Bewitched, except ancient and non-English speaking.

Sleepy in Seattle

I took a job. And as always happens, the second I took this job, which I settled for, I got a call from the famous disappearing recruiters with The Dream Job. The job I took is one of those ultra corporate dealies where everybody travels like mad people and speak in acronyms. Something that with a modicum of organization a slightly retarded monkey could do in his sleep, but I was desperate, it's not permanent, not yet, which is why I would feel little compunction if The Dream Job gets offered. I successfully wooed the HR person, round two up next. Keep your fingers and toes and noses crossed, internets, this one is the one I really, really want.

So the corporate job sent me to Seattle on Friday, through a series of fucked up communication misfires instead of hopping on the commuter shuttle (at 5:00AM the motherfucking tramp stamp of dawn) I ended up driving to Seattle, a city I have never been to.

Uh.

I missed the meeting I was supposed to attend, hooked up with a group for a scavenger hunt, which was cool because I got to trek all over downtown, but not cool because there was a tremendously bitchy underminer in the group. Then the dreaded corporate barbecue, good god, how fucking lame. The cool thing was the park by the Sound, I got to break away and stick my feet in the Sound and was startled at the clarity and warmth of it. I split early, at two -- mind you it was a goddamned parking lot from Seattle to Olympia. Summation: eight hours in the car, three on the ground, I think I might hate Seattle just a little bit.

Bandon-by-the-Sea

K and R came to town Thursday last. We road tripped down the coast to Bandon where we crabbed, I got seasick on the dock, and rode horses and ate Dairy Queen. After driving a million hours and spending the first night sharing a room with two dueling, snoring saw horses, I checked into the Bandon Inn on Saturday. That was the first place I stayed in Oregon, it was a bit weird, and lovely to return there nine months later, just long enough to gestate a life, figuratively, of course.

We drove back up along the Umpqua river and side roads and back roads, which included my first ferry crossing. We called it the getting to know Oregon trip, and Oregon is really fucking strange.

2008-07-04T23:26:00.000-07:00

Mt. Tabor, July 4th, 2008

I suspect you might have secretly loved it, all the young men without hats and the girls barely dressed, there shrouded in the last vestiges of evening, drinking beer in cans under a sliver of a sliver of a moon, back lit in sulfur from the blasts of illegal fireworks, standing and sitting on the hillside over the city, and the city is alight in every neighborhood, whistles and explosions, fast and fiery colors bleeding into great gout's of stinking smoke, settling into the trees, seeping into pores, listing along the pavement a vengeful, diaphanous fog. Such a city taken with pyrotechnics, it's strange for us, contraband fireworks are difficult to obtain in California and we are collectively afraid of some snowy spark setting our land and houses ablaze.

My brother's eye's madly gleaming at the prospect of sorta blowing shit up, he gets that from our father, keeper of the cannon. But there is a little of your madness in both of us, that is your legacy.

You always liked spectacle, it's fitting that a Fourth of July baby would. I stood on the hillside and beheld, just beheld. There amongst people I love and am beginning to love, it was beautiful. I wish you could have lived well enough and long enough to see it and love it too.

* for Maurice Sheerer

2008-07-04T01:19:00.000-07:00

Robots in Love

So I fell hard for a box of bolts, who chirps and beeps, in a world of great ziggurats of our ancient discards, who is binocular eyed and is a lover of Hello Dolly and cockroaches. I am pretty sure that Hello Dolly is the first musical that I saw as a child, did I love it, yes I did. Still do. If you tell anyone, internets, we are done. Is there any wonder I have such a fondness for the gays.

Wall-E. Best rom-com with a message ever. A wonder to behold. I will own it, and I will watch it when I am feeling bereft. I was thinking as I walked through the darkened mall, when I wasn't strictly, completely weirded out walking through a darkened mall, that I should have left Sex and the City feeling the same, that sort of hapless sweetness that comes with a movie that reaffirms one's commitment to the notion of romance and possibility, because, honestly, if it can happen to a lonely trash compactor, it can happen to anyone at anytime. God bless those geeks at Pixar.

I had an interview today -- the first in over a month. In a sense it was the best interview I have ever had, it was with a veteran interviewer for an in house with one of the recruiting agencies I have been working with.... This guy fucking grilled me on one side, flipped me and grilled me on the other. I haven't met anyone so keenly perceptive in a really long time. It was a fascinating experience, and I felt a sort of kinship with him, he as much as told me that he would love to hire me, but didn't think I would stick, and he was right. But I would stick for awhile. I'd gladly stick anywhere for a year or so. He asked the question, given the choice would you ask for permission or for forgiveness. I puzzled over that this afternoon and this is what I put in my thank you - "I've mulled over that question over the course of the afternoon and it struck me as I was watering my garden, I consider that etiquette dictates that one should always ask permission, but asking forgiveness requires a certain fortitude that I wholeheartedly embrace. As to risk aversion, I believe that it is a catholic obligation."

In other news, I am an idiot. I finally filed for unemployment, why did I not do this months ago? I will tell you why, I thought it meant surrender, and it sort of does. I sort of felt like I might be taking from others who are more needy than I am, then the devil on my other shoulder bleated, bish plz, you have been paying into the system, the angel concurred and together we decided barring a decent offer we might take the summer off. I am late for my annual exam, and I really need to see the dentist, but it's not like I am fucking anyone (shortly after the Skate Rat puked in my bathroom on my birthday, he stopped returning my calls) and my teeth aren't rattling around in my skull. Yet.

There is nothing any doctor or any liquor can do about the constriction in my heart.

Last night I watched the lightening from the porch and thought it better than any fireworks. Though, back in California, the lightening nearly set alight my slice of paradise on the river.

I keep going back to that mantra, nobody ever said it was going to be easy, I just didn't expect it to be so hard. This myriad of expectation and disappointment, hopefulness and hopelessness, in circumstance but mostly, largely in myself. I listen from the porch at the feeble whee of firecrackers set off from neighboring backyards, and the whoop and holler of promise of sorta blowing shit up, it's an intermittent sort of symphony of half assed cauldron drums and the ineffectual nature of legal fireworks. It used to be the sparklers really sparkled. I want the roiling unpredictability of an electrical storm, I want the hair on my arms to stand at end, I want the percussive drama of the thunder and I want the deadly light show, it's just no fun if the understory doesn't burn and someone doesn't get to say that they survived a direct assault from a supremely irked and contrary Mother Nature.

Oh yeah, and I'd like the letters and sodas part, too.

I don't sleep so well anymore.

2008-06-20T20:33:00.000-07:00

Solstice

Summer is here. Finally. I celebrated by working in my yard. Pulling weeds is true therapy. I have peonies from my garden dressing my dining room table.

Summer is here. Finally. I woke up the other morning to a summer cold. I am hoping that pulling weeds will cure that, too.

Summer is here. Finally. I was in California last weekend. Apparently it was gorgeous, that is until my plane landed. I have mixed emotions about my visit, it was comforting to be back amongst my dearest friends, but it was so familiar and yet strange, as in discombobulating. I stood out on a deck in Marin in the evening on Saturday and thought that California smells like heaven. And then I thought that I didn't belong there, and I wasn't entirely sure that I belong here either.

Summer is here. Finally. I am sitting on my porch with my laptop balanced on my knees, nursing a beer watching, box of kleenex within reach, watching souls in cars and souls on the sidewalk revel in the late evening warmth. They are drifting, we are all drifting in the carelessness of the first of summer, high clouds holding to the heat. It's still plenty light out and vroom of lawn mowers shimmers in the not so distance.

Summer is here. Finally. The quest for employment continues, apace. Oh it's hell, it's hell, it's hell.

OMG! The icecream truck just went by!! Orange sherbet push-ups!!

2008-06-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

World's Quickest Retreat from Gainful Employment

Two days.

2008-06-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

It's Summer Time

I was offered a job of sorts this afternoon. I took it without hesitation, and then I cried until my eyes swelled and I couldn't breathe.

I took a pay cut that amounts to someone's salary, I am taking a job that I could sleep through and I am doing it only out of neccessity for the very small pay check, no benefits and no 401K naturally. And I cried and I cried. I took it because I can't wait any longer, I took it because I need to pay the bills that are mounting, I took it because there was no other choice. And I cried and I cried and I felt like a total shit for crying, but, but what. You gonna go crying about how you are too smart and too experienced, why, yes, yes, I was. I think I might cry some more. I am not the most self centered bitch, I just thought I was worth a little bit more. But I will take what I can get, and when I show up on time on Monday, I'll come with some razzle dazzle and hope that my moxie will earn me a raise and benefits in three months time.

I found out about the job late this afternoon. After a week of shuttlcocking about my house and riccocheting off the walls because it's been maybe 50 degrees out and the wind has been lashing all those febrile leaves about and thrashing all of my flowers, and that's all I got now, is the flowers in my garden. I'd gone out with my brother as he shopped for a birthday present for his new wife, we went to Tiffany's, my brother is a good listener, and he done good. I was looking at all the sparklies and sent a half-assed wished somewhere heavenward, maybe someday someone might be so thoughtful, heaven forbid someone might love me that much.

Of course conventional wisdom dictates that I radically fucked on that front. Do not even get me started on how much I hated Sex in the City WITH A WHITE HOT BURNING SWORD OF DERISION. I may try to articulate it better at some point, but a week later and I am still pissed.

And maybe I am pissed because there is some wee element of truth in that. I am a thirty seven year old marginally employed woman, I am single. Does that make me invalid, does that make me untouchable? According to the material laws of that ridiculous movie it does... And if you had seen all those gaggles of chicks hooting between fistfulls of popcorn, you might have thunk so.

I am a thirty-seven year old marginally employed woman, I am single. It's hard, but I'm no crone, not yet. I struggle with romanticism, but I am not ready to throw in the towel yet.

There are things and people out there... Who are like minded.... There are days to conquer and days to surrender to, if nothing else I have a lovely front porch to sit on and watch the world pass me by.

2008-05-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

The Tertiary Ellipsis

...
...
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warning: noxiously maudlin post brewing.

I was thinking last week, as a battle of the self-referential blogs played out on the internets, well, I was thinking about blogging. It's still an ugly word, all these posts later.

Two young people, good writers each, with the great fortune or great misfortune, to be prominent in the new media, had an affair and proceeded to go very, very public with their soiled laundry. Their private hurts flamed in arena of public consumption for us faceless, nameless, hungry plebes to lap up with unrestrained glee. Who doesn't love a tasty flame-out, who doesn't love to smack the gristle of someone else's hubristic comeuppance. I do. Thank god I wasn't blogging in the way-back of the late nineties. I say stupid shit in my own private little forum all the time, shit that would invariably get me condemned in certain circles, but I am not a public person. I am just the girl you passed on the street, or I am just words on a screen, what I get to write here is mine.

But I think I thanked God a little, that I wasn't 27 and spilling my guts on the internet, because I was married then, and I would have probably abused my little forum for hateful, heartbroken screeds. I would have probably posted the pictures I found of my husband and his lover on the couch of our apartment. I would have screened my own indiscretions. While not as numerous as his, my own were equally as treacherous. Mostly for myself.

I don't dwell much on those days, quick, painful jabs, followed by veiled nostalgia. Don't get me wrong, D and I have made our peace, and I will always love him. Mostly I am plagued by the memory that I was in over my head almost everywhere I could turn, and when the bottom fell out I nearly drowned.

I am reflecting on the internet and I am reflecting on depression. At the almost bottom, I nixed the hairdryer in the bathtub as I was worried about inconveniencing my neighbors, that's when I realized I was pretty sure that suicide wouldn't be an option, no matter how I checked out, someone was going to pay, I was miserable enough, why would I want to risk further burden in purgatory. I was, at that point, seeing my therapist twice a week and the psychiatrist every other week and I was fantastically medicated and a raging alcoholic. But I was 27, it was the last days before the collapse in San Francisco, I was bartending, making lots of money that somehow evaporated before I made it to the bank, dancing on bars, raising hell, crying a lot, young enough to not be crippled by hang-overs and not enough sleep. I was also really skinny then! Yay! Poor health!

I am thinking of those two people with their hearts on their sleeves and their public greivances as I think about the fact that I hid for seventy-two hours, crawled inside the TV eye, felt as though I was circling the drain, listened for the thunder as it broke far, but it wasn't the same, and I could not surrender, I could not get abject, and I wanted to. I wanted to sob until I choked, I wanted to beat my breast, I wanted to drink and smoke and drink and smoke and drink and smoke, but moderation prevailed. I eked out a few half hearted tear drops at the commercial breaks, and begged the question what fresh hell is this? Should I sue my therapist for being too thorough? Because I know I have the tools to deal with it and can't indulge in the caprice of depression, or are my neurotransmitters fixed? Am I a grown up? Shit is wrong in my wee universe, got no job, got no prospects, I am this close to getting myself a newsboy cap and selling papers on the corner, I am too old to be an urchin. Shit is not right. I spent the afternoon dandling other people's babies and didn't wish for one of my own, but I did wish for someone to come home with.

Shit is not right, but it will be. Of that I am absolutlely certain, and that is the difference between me at 27 and me at 37.

2008-05-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

Rants and a Rave

I turned thirty-seven yesterday. It was a quiet day, I read a novel. I walked. I spoke to no one until the late afternoon. It was warm and muggy, the wind came strong in the evening. I was lonely. In the late evening T called and asked what I was doing, I thought about asking him over for a tumble to celebrate the onset of early middle age, but I was busy watching Dancing with the Stars. It's true. I forsook sex in favor of watching the cha cha, but you know what, I was kind of embarrassed, that show makes me weep like a little bitch. Or maybe it was the circumstances.

I keep walking through spider webs, literally. I feel bad about blundering through their web craft, I wish they'd stay out of door frames and stick to corners. I worry I'll find an unwelcome visitor in my hair.

I didn't get the job I so wanted. I thought, no, I was convinced that word would come yesterday and the rest of the year would prove rainbows and unicorns. Word came today. I've been doing freelance work for a friend and I had to go out to my car for a bit and pound silently on the horn. And suddenly I was really fucking pissed.

Is it me? Do I smell bad? What have I been doing wrong? All I hear is how great they think I am, and then I wait around for decisions to be executed, and I hear, I command too much salary, over qualified, delaying hiring for six months, delaying hiring for a year, thinks I'm too liberal (what?) I've lowered my requirements to the minimum, and the recruiter came back to me with a long term position that is less than my fucking minimum. And the sorry truth is that I will take it. It's been a long and humiliating trip through the employment world. I am looking at taking several very large steps back in my career, just for a steady paycheck. For the first time in my life I am very directly affected by the economy, and I am one of the lucky ones.

Because here is what I sort of not so secretly think.... I am not a kid, and I am not a man. I have a lot of experience, enthusiastic references, I am organized and moreover I am smart. I am not specialized, which I think would make it even harder. I am not married, because I think that would make it even harder, I get there is an undertone of a little bit of fear that a company might invest in me and I would run out and get pregnant. I am a motherfucking smart woman, I don't want to be bored at work. I don't want to be nickel and dimed. I don't want to go to battle for a pittance, lousy insurance, no bonus, no matching. What the fuck is wrong with you, employers? You want a mindless drone, or you want someone who can actually accomplish something.

They want the young drones, the young ladies who can't defend themselves and don't want to, or the young men ambitious enough to work sixty hours for naught.

I rail against the fact that I feel for the first time in my life I am caught in the cross hairs of the economy and can rely neither on my intellect or industriousness to charm, cajole my way into job. As I said, I am one of the lucky ones, I know how to ply the system, even though I'd rather drive pins underneith my finger nails, I can network when neccessary. It's through networking that this freelancing is keeping me in cable and little else.

I just don't understand, although I do. It makes me indignant, it makes me afraid, it makes me embarrassed, it makes me feel helpless in the face of circumstance, small when contemplating the stack of bills, this from the girl who has (had) almost no debt outside of her mortgage. Makes me wonder how I will get ahead, not for the bling, but because I would like to afford a puppy, because one day I'd like to finish the basement, and in the short term I would really like to buy some geranium baskets for my front porch. Again, I stress, I am one of the lucky ones. I'll keep my insurance and my car insurance and my cell phone and keep current on my mortgage, and I have a safety net in that I can depend on my family for help, I am not five hundred dollars away from falling through the cracks. And my heart goes out to those who are.

You know what else irks me, it's optimism. Unflagging optimism is why you end up bitten on the ass on your birthday because you thought it would just fall into place, the signs were auspicious, the moon was rising. Fuck optimism, anyway.

While we are at it. Fuck you Georgie, you motherfucking asshat, this is all your fault, you too, Greenspan, all of you greed monsters on Wall Street. (if you haven't heard the This American Life regarding the subprime/credit crisis, go and listen, it should be required in economics classes)

Also, fuck the weather. Cold, hot, hot, hot, cold. I woke to rain. I thought about bitching, but thought my peonies might be grateful, so I didn't.

Fuck politics with a hot poker a la Edward the Second. Don't make me regret my vote, Obama.

Fuck the junta in Myanmar.

Such incomprehensible sums of human bodies in Burma and in China, I begin to not be able to empathize. But I suppose if you started to stack the bodies in Iraq and Afghanistan it might level out.

And the rave....

My brother and belle soeur hosted a barbeque for me on Saturday. I had gone to the market in the morning, sat in the sunshine as the massive flowering trees shed the last of their blossoms in fragrant blizzard, savored a popcicle that some enterprising hipster had made strawberry-lemonade, organic, natch. Paraded through the sunshine with my bunches of lilac and my stained mouth.

Showed up to W's house with nine pounds of potato salad, sweltered in the evening's heat with beer and weenies and new friends. When the sun set, we moved on to tequila, my last clear image is my belle soeur dragging a wooden pallet in through the garden gate, we had run out of wood for the fire pit and she made a mission of finding more. My brother had passed out at that point as was apparently mystified at it's pressence the following morning. Good times. I neither threw up, nor fell down, but someone else I know did.

2008-05-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Portland Month Seven

Some unseen hand flipped the switch and it went from cold to really fucking hot. Just as sudden as that.

The weather is fickle, like weather everywhere, it's not a portent and it's not a harbinger, it's just the weather, clement or not. But these last days of grace have been a welcome boone, as my garden explodes in blossoms, color, color everywhere.

currently there is a squirrel losing a lover's quarrel off my front porch, it's just another example of everything gone sideways, it's not neccessarily a bad thing.

A few snapshots.

This evening. I am standing in my yard, miles of hose wrapped around my ankles, I am wearing flip flops and a short skirt, a mosquito is draining my right arm, I am furtively watering my lawn, when it comes to refurling the hose, I realize that I had better get it right, nobody is coming to do it for me.

Earlier I am running down the mountain singing I want candy, outloud, I don't care, it's the middle of the afternoon and no one is about. A minor advantage of unemployment, mitigated by poverty.

Later. Chemical pink margaritas with friends.

Later still, elbow deep in potato salad. I'll turn 37 on monday.

A few days earlier, just as the weather is beginning to break. I am standing on the porch, under the last of the slanting sunlight watching the shadows shift and the neighborhood settle into twilight, I had a very forceful realization, akin to a sledgehammer, and just as unpleasant, that I was home, and to my chagrin I didn't want to be anywhere else. I sat on the porch for a long while after that, let the darkness settle on my shoulders, took up the mantle and paced for awhile, fell asleep after I had sloughed off the comforter, watched the boughs of the trees float on the breeze in the shadow box high on my bedroom wall, considered weeping, but was bereft of grief.

For pennies and dollars and wishes and dreams, I am home.

Portland probably suits me more than I care to admit, I enjoy the ritual of friendliness.

I love my belle soeur and her family who have so effortlessly incorporated me.

OK, fine. Lurching towards the seventh month, and if anyone is really keeping score it's closer to nine monthes without gainful employment. shit, really, that's scary. Word is supposed to come down on a job that I really want on Monday. It's my birthday, must be auspicious, right?

Maybe 37 will be lucky. Maybe I'll get a job I love. Then I'll get puppies. I'll grow some lovely tomatoes. I'll love up on my garden, I'll love up on new friends, and maybe if I am exquisitely lucky I'll meet a man who I recognize and who recognizes me. We'll go a'frolicking through the fields of fallow dandelions and we will laugh a lot.

But in the mean time, you can find the city girl in her pink gardener's gloves, poking about the raised bed, trying to determine weed from succulent and succulent from perrenial, learning that the wise person wears safety glasses when wielding the weed whacker, the hard way, of course.

2008-05-08T20:59:00.000-07:00

What Cliche is

Me. Waddling up to the semi-hipster cashier, in my sweats. In my basket, a bucket of midol, a bottle of wine, and a Ritter Sport bar -- mmm, marzipan and chocolate, oh, and for maximum embarassment on the part of the semi-hipster cashier dude a GIANT box of tampons.

So yes. Oh bearded one, if you give me that look I am going to depilate your facial hair with my teeth. I am going home to have chocolate and wine and Ugly Betty for dinner. Grey's Anatomy for dessert. Lost as my digestive.

2008-05-07T23:04:00.000-07:00

Digging in the Dirt

In between showers there are patches of brightest sunlight, I shade my eyes, I put on sunglasses, I am paler than the whispiest ghost. I bask like a grateful lizard in these intermittant patches of sunlight. Portland, the City where magic happens overnight. I went out the other morning (on my way to the ten millionth interview) and a tree in my garden had thrown up some kind of golden spool of blossoms, things that I could have sworn weren't there the day before got busy being fecund and full of color. I remain perplexed. As I navigate this laid out garden gone frankly wild and use what little sense I have left to try and determine flower from weed, succulent from invasive. I like trowels and I am afraid of my lawn mower.

I like to entertain myself when I am in my back yard, as I look about at my competent neighbors, there she goes again, that silly city girl, she just pulled up the iris bulbs, look at her poking her nose in the poison ivy, that's gonna itch. I jest, but only sort of. It's a wonderland of bugs and weeds and worms and all kinds of lovely color.

My parents were in town a week or so ago, the weather proved mild enough for a primer in Emma this is how you mow the lawn, and Emma this pretty thing is actually a nasty weed, and Emma don't pull that up, that is a forget-me-not, Emma this is the poison and this is the hose.... Then I dropped them at the airport and proceded to to be unstrung by the goddamn garden hose, I slaughtered my neighbor's potted plants, managed to spray everything but the fucking dandelions, came in the house certain that I had likely killed every small bird and child within my toxic radius.... Apparently the Gays left me a weed whacker too. It's some sort of contraption that functions with some sort of primitive string. My mother and I were a pair of neandrathals hooting and beating our breasts waiting for it to magically neaten my walk ways. Evidentally you need to plug it in. (secretly I am afraid of losing a digit)

But I like this, the digging in the dirt. I like the costume. You get into your grimies and you put on your gloves (I do not WANT worm parts embedded under my nails) and you dig in the dirt. It's probably primal, and possibly, latently violent, you weed, I shall rip your entrails from my patch of earth. You wrinkle your nose at the earthworm you have just halved and go on about your business. You begin to pay attention growing things, you begin to haunt the nursery, you don't buy anything (because you are poor) and you don't plant anything (because you are poor, and because conventional wisdom dictates that you watch your garden during the first year) I have ambitions for potted tomatoes, and that's about it.

Except for the rest.

I knew this before, but it's only been re-enforced. I don't do well without structure. Six monthes here and more than a month without work I am driving myself underground. I don't reach out very well, I don't want to be a burden, and I am loathe to foist myself on anybody, this can be as much as a disadvantage as it an advantage. Don't get me wrong, I have done all that I am plainly capable of, I am out in the world - mostly. I am only human, and rejection is never pleasant. Let's just say I have become the world's most adept and competent interviewee, to no fucking avail.

That said, I am holding out for good news on Friday, keep your eyes and noses and toes crossed, please, pretty please.

2008-04-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

Portland, month six and change

I notice that I don't sit at the head of my table. I sit to the right of the head, which is where I sat as a girl at my parent's table, the table I am writing at. It's the one piece of furniture that I really wanted from my parent's house, even though they have long sat at another table, this one - from my father's days at Sears, is special. I am grateful to have it.

I have given several dinner parties where I sit at the head of the table, and I do admit to feeling partially willfull about taking the head. This is my house, and it is my rightful place, and yet, I feel like I am usurper, though I am undeniably pleased when I take that place and serve from my kitchen.

Somehow, in my every day life, I cede the head of the table to the absent honorary, I prefer to work with my back to the picture window, facing the kitchen. I am easily distracted by the goings-on out the window and the swift changes in the weather this late-ish, early-ish in Spring. I don't mind the slow unfurling of the leaves on the japanese maple, but I am anxious over the unameable bulbs that are slow to do whatever they are impelled to do, I fret over the length of the grass.

Six months or half a year, six to one or a half dozen the other way. It's still an undeniable slice of time. I keep thinking of my tennis partner who told me that within six months of moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco he'd met his partner, and now they have three awesome dogs and live in Marin. Those words, I think I'd held as some sort of mantra, as if it would be that sudden, as if I were that type. I spent the weekend talking to my sister-in-law's dog. I have hardly spoken to anyone else. Pleasantries with my neighbors. The coffee jocks at Stumptown. The Korean lady at my brother's bodega.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad thing. And I haven't been lonely, in that I haven't yearned for more (ahem, lack of sex - apparently what I need is a mute houseboy (the skate rat has the flu of death)) and maybe it's a function of being alone for a long time, that these periods of intense solitude are something I cherish, I believe I won't have them forever, but that might be the romantic in me piping up.

I have been sharing the kitchen sink with a spider. She's (Charlotte, always Charlotte) been there for several days. I am careful not to rinse her down with the rest of the refuse. I have become a dutiful recycler. I figure so long as she mind's her business and I mind mine, there is no reason why we can't share the sink.

So, Portland.

A week ago the weather gave us a sweet taste of summer. I went to the market and bought roses, the same roses that are wilting (why can't I find what I wan't to listen to) on my parent's dining room table. I went driving.

A week ago I was out, everybody was out. Reading my book on a blanket in my back yard, human and leafy thing alike, stretching out, reaching tendrils, furtive and pale white, there underneath the sun, sunglasses at seven thirty, skirts. That first breathtaking taste of night without a coat. Just a taste as it turns out. Given the hail, given the dismal skies and the thunder on the horrizon.

A week later, I am a shut in. Runs between storms. Suited up in heels for interviews. Talks up a storm, comes home for naps. Zealously guarding dwindling funds. Two weeks without work, idle time truly is the devil's time. Trips to the DMV, yes, I failed the test and can't seem to locate the title of my car. This whole project is fueled by the seemingly endless fumes of hope that my motor is propelled forward on, color me fucking purplexed. Seriously. I am hanging on by a pinky to those lovely vapor trails cast by airplanes, and yet I cannot help but be convinced of the stupid rightness of it all.

Shit works out, it just does.

2008-04-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

Irrational Fear of Earthworms, part II

When do you develop an irrational fear of earthworms?

I suspect the professionals might have a field day, pink and blind and primal, covered with the slime of fresh earth, vaguely tumescent, longish, drowning, surfacing gasping for breath in the cool night air. Shrink's fodder.

I keep having this pseudo nightmare where I am running barefoot down a corridor being pursued and I have to run through all the worms, alive and squirming, I am alternately disgusted and horrified that I will be smashing through them.

Sometimes I sit on the back steps for a cigarette, just to break things up from the front porch. I watch with repulsed fascination the earthworms stretch out their great length over the the pavers for a breath of fresh air. The shadows don't help. I sit and watch as these things emerge from the earth, primal and thoughtless, survival, and survival only. And yet, it's these beings that keep my lawn so lush. One heart, two heads. Go to town all you junior Freuds.

I think it has a lot to do with being supremely and arrogantly urban. I love nature, because someone was always there to tend to my urban forays into the wild. I am a connaisseur of parks, but I am no gardener. I can admit this now, as my back yard begins to go feral and I am at a loss to distinguish flower from weed and my brother has yet to give me a primer on mowing.

In other words I have no idea what's going on in my pretty, pretty over grown yard, I sort of stare at it like some helpless feudal lord as the dandelions serfs wage a bid to wrest control.

I suppose it's a good parable for life, I should love the earthworms for the mulch that they give, and shouldn't be beguiled by the golden headed weed that is the charming dandelion, out to choke my unruly lawn, and by extension me.

In the seven plus months that I haven't had a legitimate job, and the two days that I haven't worked at all, I am struggling to keep the niggling demons at bay.

In the nearly six months that I have been here I have drunk up the changes like some sort of dandelion wine elixir, willingly, eagerly. Happily. Now I chafe. I should be making the most of this time, but with the intermittent rain and the price of gas it's hard not to burrow into the recesses of my incredibly welcoming couch. And it's still cold. I'd leave for California tomorrow if I weren't beholden to be available for the dangled apple of the second interview, or the first, the tantalizing prospect of full employment if only to bitch about it from the comfort of benefits and such.

Still.

I spotted a woodpecker in the front yard, spent part of Saturday sitting on my porch half listening to birdsong and reading. Got drunk at my brother's house on Friday with a good group of people. Skiied on Sunday through pillocks of snowy white buttercream snow as the flakes fell idly down between the leaden sky and spikes of sunshine. Left me breathless and panting at the lineless lift, this after I had booted the skate rat out of my bed at seven on that Sunday morning. How to argue with the goodness of that. The independent rightness of that.

If the money runs out, I'll be in deep shit, but I still have a little time, time for a drive home, possibly, or to the coast, definately. I am still surprised that despair has not permeated my being, I handle this optimism with kid gloves and greatful reverence. It will be alright, things will fall as they will.

When it starts to go dark I just go driving in my head, my home landscapes with their temperate hills and flora and the steely corrugated Pacific, bridges and peninsula, freeways as familar as my blue veins, bridges I've crossed a thousand and one times, stars and city lights and night blooming jasmine the elementals I wrap about me to stave off the North West chill. There are more stars here, but I can't track them on this changed horizon. I traipse contendedly through this old landscape, but it's gone of course, or rather it's not mine anymore. Or it is. I've got a new city to map, and I still struggle with orientation though I live in the South East and you would think that would be helpful, but I still displace where west is. Really, it doesn't make any sense, when you have always lived with the ocean on your left, it's hard to accept that the ocean is on your right.

Also the bay stink is far more pleasant than the river stench. By god there are days when that river is foul.

2008-03-23T22:42:00.000-07:00

Portland Month 5.5, Easter Edition

There is a deep current of weirdness here.

Friday, the pish, swoosh, clatter of bowling pins. Smoky bar, lane side onion rings, back lit by the black lights, pitchers of beer with cold cores. It's a birthday.

Later, the skate rat and I end up in a strip joint shaped like a Gallo Jug, full of leather clad bikers and one extremely hot and extremely hostile lesbian stripper.

Later we smoke some dope under the stars and I get lost in bed.

Saturday, I head downtown to buy a conservative suit, and wind up spending a shit ton of money on pretty things. Pending joblesslessness (that's a lot of s's) be fucking damned, mama's riding the flush of some sexy time and if I have to resort to wearing stockings to gain respectable employment you can bet dollars to donuts that I'll have something vaguely naughty underneath.

I meet friends and brother at the Elk's Lodge - the where? - for a 'twilight rummage sale'. The doorman solicits me for a dollar and keeps me hostage, this after I've walked the perimeter, assuming that the entrance is the service entrance. In I go. Into the smoky murk, full of the elderly and bewigged snoozing over tables of worthless crap, to the betatooed and tragically hip, to the just fucking tragic of ambiguous sexuality and morbid degrees of girth. Who the fuck cares, there is shuffle board, and portraits of Elk members past, I score some awesome tchocke for all of six dollars and we drink rum and cokes in the depths of smoky disconnect.

Because I am discovering daily, short cuts and bridges, places and restaurants and bars. Because I am discovering daily, because I am weirdly afraid of earthworms and the freeways here, because of these, I have found that I am enjoying being a stranger. I am enjoying the strange. Things that eight months ago I might have automatically dismissed, I just sort of let go of any pretense and let it ride.

Sunday, Easter Sunday. It's always sunny in California, the amalgam of Easter in my head is warming and twirling in my Easter dress, and later just twirling through an early afternoon drunk. I wake to a mean, gray rain.

I head out with my friends A & J to her family. We hunt eggs, we eat eggs, we scavenge for treasure, we are thoroughly sodden, everyone is unphased. Then we laugh for a long time. Then I head to my belle soeur's family. We eat some more, I swear to give up devilled eggs for another year, and then I am back in my beloved house.

It's taken some time, but I am beginning to yield. I think I am falling in love with Portland. With it's particular and extreme dichotomies, the confluence and the quiet battle between the old currents of the city and the new currents is everywhere, it's a funny dance of mutual respect and mutual repugnance. It's poignant really, it's a last bastion. We all know who will wind up winning. I suppose if I were elderly and badly bewigged I'd like to go out valiantly as well, menthol 100's ablaze.

2008-03-19T23:05:00.000-07:00

More Bullets/Equinox

* I'm still here, in Portland, that is.
* Still sick, three and a half weeks of intermittent fever, impacted sinuses, newest symptom - extreme gastro-intestinal distress.
* Still jobless, temp job ending shortly, dipping into savings, skirry!
* interview next Thursday, think good thought internets, I am counting on you.
* still hanging with the skate rat, mixed emotions about that, he's sweet, and I freely admit that I am making up for the deficit of making out.
* I have half an ear cocked to the local news at 11:00, local news is weird. Weirder since half the time I am surprised that I am in Oregon.
* State of Oregon hates me, I don't get sick like this, ever.
* My cherry trees are shedding their blossoms all over my porch and my side walk, I can't bring myself to sweep them up - they remind me of Akira Kurasowa. Four Seasons I think?
* It stays light here, late, again, so far North.
* I have all kinds of flora shooting up in the garden, but I am so hopeless, I cannot distinguish what is weed and what is a potential crocus.
* That said, my lawn is shortly in need of serious mowing, I went and looked my lawn mower (awaiting my loving care in the garage) it's the electric kind. I stared hard at it for a quick minute, then decided the lawn could wait a little longer.... then I called my dad.
* My best friends P & M came for the weekend from SF.
* I was so happy they came up, we had an excellent time, though the weather was skittish. I was glad to be host, proud to show off my home and my new town.
* If you are ever in Portland, do eat at Le Pigeon. Four words: foie gras ice cream.
* Had a really great dinner party on friday night for my old friends and my family and my new friends, and I was extremely pleased that all parties were happy and suitably wowed by my carnitas, slow cooker, oh how I love you. Thanks P!
* Muse still mostly gone, not sure what to do about that, best to be patient.
* Pessimistic about the economy, but I've been watching the market like a hawk. Follow the money, but the money is confused. Mixed emotions about Wall Street bail outs.
* Funny how quickly a scandal fades - Elliot Spitzer's hooker seeking ways diminished by Street fluxuations and Obama selling out his granny.
* I think I have finally set aside all my skepticism and have allowed myself to be wooed by Obama. (I still have reservations, if HRC were any other woman... No more dynasties.... even Bill, Bill! who I hearted, oh so very much, is making me berserker)
* There are lots of rainbows and flowers here, everything will work out as it should.
* Plus! Bowling on Friday!!

2008-03-07T00:35:00.000-08:00

Happy Song

I'm letting go, I'm starting to drift away, it's beautiful.
Paraphrasing my current happy song on my brother-managed iPod.

And just like that, it was done.

So long pre-concieved notions, farewell benefitted job, so much for the sought after idyll, up in smoke after too many cigarettes and the beer I am becoming accustomed to, but don't yet totally enjoy. Hello to new hair, hello my inner super-dooper neat freak, girl, chillax, a spot in the sink is no cause for bleach.

but between you and me, it's always going to be alright to gyrate in the bath tub. Everybody has their own particular dance music, nobody ever has to know, we've got the secrecy of bath tubs and vehicles on freeways, in private we are all a superstar of our own private narrative, making amends, charging forth armed with the twin swords of imaginary righteousness, changing the ending, bossing, bowing, falling head over heels for the perfect disembodied dick. Dancing in the dark, striking Billy Idol poses, striking any pose, all of these poses (thank you Rufus) get you nowhere pretty goddamn fast. Poses are elementally static.

And then there is this. Totally unfamiliar, not fighting any current of any river in particular, not fighting any tidal pulls or the moon, just riding the current, the pull of the moon, the erratic economy. I've got no plans to lasso anything like some mystic cowgirl, I checked my ego at my front porch. Not fighting, I want to slide down the yellow brick road of varied songs, I am at the mercy of a tin man, the cowardly lion and fickle providence, somehow it will work out - that me and theoretical dog will win some kind of ecclesiastical golden ticket and spend our days between the Elysian Fields and a composite cafe somewhere between the west coast and Paris, in the middle of the ocean, where the coffee is sublime, where the cigarettes are endless and nobody ever heard of cancer, and I will write the kind of post cards I wrote at seventeen, guilessly free of the threat of velveeta that might smother genuine sentiment.

Not that I would have anything to say about this, that, or the other thing. I've been too busy sleeping.

fuck you flu of death.
.
I did get a sweet reprieve over the weekend, which included a skate rat I went to highschool with in the eighties. Hooray for fulfilling freshman fantasies, hooray for quid pro quo. So it goes, so I roll. I eagerly await the next spate of weirdness. Bring it.

Beautiful, beautiful, just beautiful. You should see my garden.

2008-02-27T21:28:00.000-08:00

Fever

I am hot, I am cold. I feel like a steaming pile of runny dookie. Fucking swollen lyph nodes. Fucking job market. Fucking economy. Fucking neti pot of accidental drowning while standing in the bathroom. Fucking February.

I must be sick, I am giggling like the village idiot while watching The Pacifier, is it wrong that I am smitten with Vin Diesel, or is it the fever.

2008-02-22T00:32:00.000-08:00

Hey you, destroying angel, I've got your number and I've got you dialled. You can't fool me in your tattered sheepskin, and I am not buying your emotard Pacific Northwest Beard Until Spring Routine.

I've got bulbs primed to bloom and an iPod full of my brother's mysterious music. I have friends afar, that I miss like lightning, that I miss like old american cars and Easter kickball.

Hey you, destroying angel, is that the best you can bring. As I type in my grey sweatshirt and my pink underwear, an ipod slowly dying and an army of indie ballads come to do your bidding, I shall slay you with something you have never heard before, but will surely break your heart.

Come then, like the ephemeral sexydirtysweetness of an unwished for dream of a half realized pastische of romance, come in the morning before work and let me be fortified.

For the rest, for the people in love that I love, let them thrive, let it be my late valentine. From my parents contemplating victory on the courts after that last tequila, to my brother and his wife down the street, all of the good lovers in San Francisco, and all of the good lovers in Portland, and all of the good lovers everywhere, it's a short and ardent prayer, go on and love then, love your partner, love your children, love your crazy ass family, love your friends, love them all, always. Love your exes, love the ones who stalk you, love the ones you stalk (from a legal distance) love the fact that you are not in love anymore, wish your ex-husband's new wife well, and him too. It's a hard road, you have travelled it.

And then for those who have disappeared within the grid. And for those who were consumed by fire. And even those, who we cherish, who never met the perils of adulthood who died at nineteen and twenty in calamity-by-drunken-tree. I am sorry Steve and Stacy that you never got to see us when we were sort of growed up.

Go on and love then, keep love, keep love through forty, cleave to it like some extra fatty cut of love pork, keep love for those of us who still sorta believe, who still want to believe, push on and rock on for all of us single girls in our pink underwear who are writing our hearts out to the internets dieties in hopes that we might abjectly stumble onto Something That is Worth Pursuing, and No He is Most Emphatically Not Like the Last Douchenozzle I Fell For Before. * at least one hopes.

But to all the people I know who are in love, and you are many, you span weeks and decades, there are children, and there are cats and dogs, love on, love on, you give me hope.

Love on, Love on, Live on. Fear will always be a component, and fear will always be your steadfast opponent, he or she will always taunt you from corners, in glances askance. Be a cowboy or a cowgirl, then, in the dark, fuck it, just go.

(I posted this last night and edited it this morning, this post is inspired by an gchat I had the other day with a friend) apologies to my brother who was mystified..........

2008-02-19T20:59:00.000-08:00

Anthony Bourdain

Not having had television for nigh on six years, cable is a happy rediscovery - even commercials delight, perplex and frustrate me.

Don't get me wrong, I am still a radio junkie, up here they have OPB (and my brain chimes in, yeah you know me - Every Single Time)

But mostly, mostly, I get to slurp up reruns and first runs of No Reservations.

I own his cookbooks, I've dined in his restaurants... If there is one man I would happily sup on from stem to stern, it's Anthony Bourdain. I have been a mistress to a four star chef and I know the drill, you love them and they leave you. But I have decided that if I could be anywhere, it would be in the cradle of babylon, the fertile crescent with Anthony Bourdain, food, sex and pomegranites. And booze. And cigarettes.

He's a little tall for me, but I have a mad thing for salt and pepper and olive skin...... mmmmmmmmm, that is all.

2008-02-16T21:52:00.000-08:00

Portland Month Four, post Valentine's and pre-President' Day Edition, or a year of change.

Loretta Lynn and Jack White lost their minds on buckets of sloe gin fizz here in Portland, me I've just lost my voice.

(savors small victory of a whole sentance, goes out the porch to smoke a victory cigarette)

so fine then, some bulleted thoughts.

* it's a push pull.
* I still don't have a job, this alternately demoralizing and a lesson in stoicism.
* I sort of hate the weather, and I sort of like watching it.
* bulbs of unknown provenance are pushing up in my garden, this delights me.
* I miss california, but I prefer skiing in Oregon.
* the skies here are more dramatic, but less blue.
* loneliness rains hard, so does hope.
* it's a pull push.
* no one ever said it would be easy.
* I can't really gauge my emotions, they zing wildly across a rainbow fucking pallette.
* I am fighting to do the best I can to secure employment.
* I am doing the best I can to meet people, which is both invigorating and totally draining. When in your previous life your newest friendships are five years old, it's really hard to insinuate yourself into a group of people who have known each other forever.... History counts, if only anecdotally, remember when I fell down here, or I fell down there, or my ex-husband fell down your stairs. Mutual remberences are the ties that bind, here I build anew. I am on the ground floor, impatient with my building blocks.

I had an exceptionally crap week last week, it was the triple header of the supreme slugishness of mid-february and stupid valentine's day and my hormones gone into a gruesome downward spiral. It took every ounce of fortitude not to spend every day until April hiding under my bed.

Bright spots on the horizon, P and M will be here in March. Skiing tomorrow on the sweet rock sulphur mountain. Days are longer, stars are brighter. It's a push pull, it's a pull push.

Next weekend will mark the year anniversary of my decision to leave. A hasty decision, as they always nearly are. A heated moment, followed by a shining moment of clarity. Maybe. Maybe I think what the fuck was I thinking. I close my eyes for a moment and let a year slip by, tennis games and Marin, and golden gate park and dinners out and emergency rooms, a couple of surgeries and landscapes and traffic, my beloveds, all of my old friends, old loves, old rooms, pieces of my life left on the corner of Haight and Ashbury to be scavenged and discarded, night blooming jasmine on forgotten walks home, drunk in long closed dive bars, peace on a ferry, dancing with the gays, falling in love in neighborhoods, getting heartbroken on street corners, beds I have slept in as the fog rolled in, my poor beleaguered ficus tree.

My hands blackened by newsprint as I set about undoing a life. The ruthlessness of packing, where you thought you ought to be gentle, fatigue and frustration and straight up grief cause you to thrust things in boxes or tossed without a second thought onto the trash pile. The sidewalk pile.

I think I have had maybe three thoughts about my apartment since I left it. One would think that after a decade, that there would be something, but I don't seem to be able to muster any nostalgia (was it time, I think it was time) Though I can summon the rooms with little trouble, I can walk through them in the drifting between sleep and dream. Sometimes it's startling, I was eating out the other night and suddenly I was at All You Knead, and suddenly I was eating chicken parmesan seven months earlier with a book I had long finished, but felt the uneven booth beneath me and heard the regular sounds of Haight Street, watched the fog bluster down the victorian canyons, paid my check and rose to leave, three steps through the gate, first door on your left....

That's where it ends. Though I could tell you the rest, the long walk down the hall to the bathtub, the ritual of lowering the blinds, howI never played the music loud out of courtesy to the neighbors I never really knew.

I still don't. Play the music loud, that it is. Even though here on my isolated corner, I've got a school behind me, the street to left, my elderly spying Chinese neighbors across the street and a girl my age to my right. And I have a lawn that needs to be raked, but that is beside the point.

So a year later, after all the execution of so much change, with so much familiar laid at the guillotine, with so many simplistic hangings of things that were dear to me in the name of change, which our politicians tout as some sweet necter, but I can tell you that I am adamantly not fooled. This kind of massive change sets you up for nought but grappling in an unfamiliar dark, the moon and the stars have shifted in the northern skies and you struggle for a fucking toehold and it's cold, people here speak a strange northwestern tongue and I miss the ocean like I miss the better parts of my californian soul.

Rash decisions aside. Here I am for better or for worse, and I am just optimistic enough to believe the former. And if you saw my house you would probably concur, it's not by any means perfect, but for what I could afford, snow white and her team of dwarve architects couldn't have given any better.

I am still not sorry I left. I love you San Francisco and all the friends and the memories that you hold. I have been bereft and achy without you, I fumble along this unfamiliar territory, or rather should I say I bob, in hopes of clement seas, in hope, that is all. Except that it's not.

2008-02-01T00:49:00.000-08:00

Checks and Balances

The checks arrived the other day, from the bank. Checks imprinted with my address, checks of permanence.

And then there was the appointment to have my hair dids. Three hours of sussing out, worrying under all those fucking foils, to come out not quite J perfectly blonde, but a happy enough approximation. I left after three hours, under a low slung yellowed moon, totally famished, thinking, surely I must live here now.

It's a peculiar sentiment that's been dogging me for days now, surley I must live here now. I've got a stylist, I've got an appointment for six weeks hence. Realistically I suspect that bolting is not an option, what with the mortgage and all that, but somehow services make it more routine, and therefore less abstract.

Yesterday I was homesick, quite desperately so.

Today I went through a grueling four hour interview. I'd like to think that I nailed it, but, what with all the fucking interviewing I have been doing, I am inclined to be circumspect.

Except for wanting it all and wanting it all right now.

As to writing, I have little inclination to do so, and I am not quite sure why that is, part of me would like to chalk it up to the newness coming fast and furious, unable and unwilling to parse all of these new experiences, part of it is being a bit wary of just how much I should write about -- in SF I had the tacit consent from most of the people I was writing of.

I am a little suspicious that the muse has up and left in favor of the furniture whore.

It's probably, mostly because I can't succinctly or even lend any lovely, lovely words to the tremendous oddity of of the passage of days and nights since September 15, 2007, which was, you may not remember, the day I gave up my pretty awesome job, and with that quit fifteen years of familiarity in favor, in favor of what, in favor of the notion of change, and a quick prayer that the fickle gods of serendipity might lean a little in my favor. Of course they do, just never in the trajectory that you prepared for.

In my case, as I should have guessed, it's backwards. Get the house without a job, bust your ass, half-assedly, things work out for the best.

These last months have been a lesson in stoicism, I'd like to think that I am passing with apomb, I am oddly resigned, still proactive, determined to sputter along, like the little engine that could, things happen, employers don't want you, you navigate social circles like sputnik, you forge allegiances, you think you might be nearly ready to expose your tender parts to a partner, and then in a fit of furniture buying pique, you retract, you retract.

It's late and I am totally knackered.

2008-01-16T23:45:00.000-08:00

Portland, Month Three

Things have swivvled such that I write from my old bed in my new bedroom. In my house. The house with the porch and the benevolent ghosts who are no keen on keeping the front door locked. In the neighborhood full of porch lights ablaze.

I have done things, as in I have used a drill (and krazy glue), and I conquered technology when I installed the motherfuckingrouterofmyass, because after the welcome presence of my parents and particularly my dad, which degenerated into me becoming some kind of unholy adolescent beyotch - I DO NOT WANT THAT COUCH!!!

Well so be it. Now I have a half primed kitchen and a pantry half stocked with oddities I will surely never cook up. But I do have a big red couch.

The house and I and history are getting along just swell. I register unexplainable blips in my peripheral vision, I say aloud, let's just be copacetic, the house can be ours, but my dreams belong to me.

I dunno if it is the doldrums of winter, come to weigh down the hems of my pants, I think it must be, but I've got an abject sort of sadness trying to settle into my winter parched skin. I miss you California, I can see you through this freezing night, just as clearly as I can summon the best kisses from all the best boys, you there, languid on the horizon, clear and distant, we, I, wherever we are, not impervious to the January sunburn.

Here, so far North, the sun leaks a gray light, it's wan, and cold, if bright. Still there is beauty. Things are gathering in the buds. I am growing fonder of that great dormant volcano, especially now that I have zoomed down his ridges, and hope to do so again soon, knees straining, breath short at the joy of velocity on skis.

But, from this crest of limbo I am ready to descend. I still need a job, I still need a lot of things, I need not to feel like an interloper in the rooms of my house, ambling from room to room, from toilet to toilet, silently entreating the ghosties and the powers that be, OK, well now what.

I'll tell you this much, you can move a thousand miles, let your hair grow, take to wearing hats, but your old sweet demons are never going to be put off by your subterfuge, they'll follow at a distance and come for you while you are getting your lady hard-on for anthony bourdain, they will come and lay down beside you on your new couch, they are coming to heap lead upon your leaden heart.

Don't let them win, not now and not yet. It's too soon, still, I can't even really tell my East from my West without golden bridges and the sea.

I've made it this far.

2008-01-04T22:05:00.000-08:00

Dispatches from Dateland

Life moves apace, and I'll keep it short and sweet.

It was a fine evening and the rain had abated, though Portland is being none to gently shellacked right now.

conversation, art, essential preludes to a goodnight kiss, but when that didn't happen at the parting I was fine, if a little disappointed. Meh, I figured, at the least I had made a new friend.

I am categorically exhausted, and will let the tale of the phone call hang until next time.
peace out, internets. (oh but this is good, and gave me a good long case of the giggles)

C as E

2007-12-28T23:08:00.000-08:00

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Here comes Christmas and there it went, with snow and brandy and strangers.

But I am getting ahead of myself, or behind myself. I seem not to really know anymore, these last few months a confusion of dates, a befuddlement of week days and spent hours, dovetailing straight into the cloak of darkness that is night here.

Has it really been a week and a day since I got the keys to my house?

We drank champagne, and I poured a ceremonial cup out on the porch, and thus la maison des reves qui arrives des fois et la peine qui suive certainement was christened. call me a fatalist, but I am still holding my breath.

In the days that have lapsed, there was christmas, there were the movers at eight o'clock in the morning when it was splendidly cold, there was my misfit possessions trying to assimilate to these new walls, there was christmas eve spent amongst all kinds of lovely and welcoming strangers.

And in the in between I have been haunting the house, running things through the dishwasher because it is novel and because it is mine, I lurk in rooms, a little unsure of what I should be doing. One night in a flurry of wine fueled mania, I unpacked all the boxes, short of my books (10 stupid, heavy boxes worth) and then sort of took stock in a dazed state, three parts ownership to two parts holy shit, then I sat on my front porch and listened for a good long while to the rain singing from the eaves. Then I returned to my brother's house and held tight to the dog. The dog loves being held tight to and she's most compliant, I thought for half a second, that is, I wished for half a second for someone more male and less hirsute, but then I realized I didn't want to talk at all, I just wanted to cling to the dog and get really fucking into Bourne the third.

So there it is. I got what I wanted. I have a house, and I can't quite express the terror and the glee. In a way, well, in the way that is just like life, no stars fell from heaven, and I didn't rise a suddenly, majestically fully formed adult. I am just an aspiring lady with a mortgage and a strong desire to make out with someone, short of that buy something shiny to commemorate the occasion, or a vacuum cleaner - - I must have left the old one on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. How much you want to wager that the vacuum cleaner trumps the shiny, because, of course, I am still not gainfully employed. Then just as strongly there is the urge to run, which begs the question, where on earth to?

best stick here for awhile, get acquainted with paint and Home Despot, furnishings and lathe and plaster, best to wait out the winter to see how my rhododendron blooms, wait to conspire with the boy on the bus, watch closely the river, heed the ebb and the flow. Things work out, they always do.

I've got my hats and my gloves and my fortitude to weather the winter. I have got my steadfastness to carry me through the bleak of winter, short of that there is liquor and tanning beds, short of rectitude there is always an escape to puerto vallarta. And in my life, I am fortunate enough to state that there is no shortage of promise to cobble from underneath the long neglected cushions, in forgotten pockets and reservoirs of confidence I'd thought I had left behind, from nights long past, turns out the duality of momentum has been with me all along.

2007-12-19T23:18:00.000-08:00

I'm Not There

It was a twenty four hour trip back home.

When the clouds broke over the bridge at eight thousand feet, I seriously thought about jumping, not to die, not at all, just to plunge into that cold pacific sparkle and commune with the sea stars and the detritus, the current at that distance is so concise and inviting, the westward sun so magnanimous. The rolling topography inching towards green, rolling and rolling to the sea. We'll all go under some day.

oh, but lovely, crowded California, I miss your sandy green undulations and tetchy fault lines.

but I am not there, not anymore.

I got to P's house and settled into my familiar spot in the kitchen, dicing and slicing and searing have always been my swords against the awkwardness of sociability. Had I had a fish, I would have gladly flayed it while struggling against the winsome pull of familiarity.

In the end, I surrendered. How nice to not to have to explain oneself, how lovely to fall into shared jokes, what a comfort that old camaraderie. And after an absence, what a delightful joy, like an effervescence, or a phosphorescence, maybe just a holy luminescence... ride that sweet wake until you get shot down by friendly fire and you remember why, in part, you left. It's a quince paste reminder after an evening of weinies.

After you finish the bottle of calvados with M in the kitchen as you are doing the dishes and are the last men standing, you stumble towards sleep rather than free the thundercloud of sublimated emotions gathering in your mid-section, flooding your lungs and threatening the detente in your mind, they gather like knit socks, just on the horizon, stealth confounding in the laundry basket. But what do I know, I am neither here nor there.

In the morning we take my former usual trajectory through the park, the trees are unchanging, the sky is unchanging, the path is not even that much more careworn, cities and parks don't mark your absence, just as they don't mark your presence - short of an honorific street name, short an accidental or deliberate tragedy, and even then, the memory of sidewalks and buildings is short lived and entirely incidental. That's the superfluous beauty of personal history, ain't nobody marking time but the metronome of your heart, the finite story and the inside jokes lost to clouds of champagne and the insidiousness of the quotidian.

I am not sure that I am sorry that I am not there and I am sorry that I am not entirely here, either. I wish the music was louder and what I wanted to hear, I wish money grew on trees, I wish there was a warm boy here, even when I am nearly not.

Tomorrow I get the keys to the house, to the advent, to the prospect of a different sort of permanence.

Part of me is unbridled.

The other part of me wants to get back in the car and follow the ocean until the ocean runs out, put the car in park and walk the tundra, polar bears and eskimos and penguins -- plus I hear they put their couglets (cougars in training) out on ice floes and the cold takes them to mighty dreams.

fuck sweet release by ice floe, I've got a house that needs tending. And I have a date.

2007-12-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

Almost Home, Life on Mars

A week from now I'll get another set of keys, just a set of ordinary keys. A set of keys to bulk up my key chain, to fumble over in the cold, to lose.

The keys to the house with a yard, the keys to a different kind of life, the set of keys to fill the lock of a bungalow in South East Portland, a set of keys to fill an absence. A set of keys stuck in the front door of a house that I can't quite imagine myself in, not yet, I am fearfully superstitious.

I drive by, swathed in rain and darkness, I note the light and the vulnerability of the lit windows. I think the house has a nice face, hidden beneath the long porch that I intend to sit upon and nurse weather-appropriate alcoholic beverages and maybe smoke cigarettes and maybe not, nurture friendships to fulsome, slough off my winter skin for a spring blossom and a summer ripening, spy on my neighbors and languid day dreaming all by my lonesome. I can nearly allow myself to see it, just nearly.

I've let old friends and new friends go gaga over this house, me, I have been holding my breath. It's been months now, since I've gone invisibly purple, short gasps of this cold, dry Portland oxygen, freezing my streaming eyes as I sprint to make the bus that carries the green eyed boy, I am rich in unguents and cash poor, cash poorer by the second... Here comes the bawdy parade! Mortgage! All the shit that you never had to pay for when you were a renter! Water! Trash! You want HBO, my girl, suck it and pay!

It's been awhile since I have been beholden to the bus. Apparently it takes an arsenal of pills and money to park on Pill Hill, which is sort of fine with me as I have become terrified of these dark and narrow, biker infested wet and icy streets - my point just up and deserted me - the bus? the bus flirtation? that all departing bus riders thank the driver, and the driver is cordial when you board, or that you went to some strange grocery sort of outlet/store to fetch cigarettes for the ladies and the 87 year old checker covered you for the .69 you were short.... and you wonder if it's the thick cloak of dark, if it's the hats and gloves and the good air and starkness of bare branches, or the surplus of mulch, who are these aliens anyways, and where do they get their water/beer.

anyway, this house.
Built in 1919, bungalow with a basement and an attic.
galley kitchen -- needs some paint.
two bedrooms, one and a half baths, bear claw tub.
I've a japanese maple in my front yard.

with a little luck and a little prayer to the gods of providence and of love, maybe all the rest will fall disjointedly into the slots, into me, into my yard, through my heavy, almost, door.

I'll have the keys, then. I'll unlock the doors, straight into the naked face of ambivalence and all of the honeysuckle sweetness of guile.

It'll be just like MTV, just like 1983, movers and money for nothing.

2007-12-09T23:21:00.000-08:00

Lost in Beaverton

So much for google maps and and my nagivational skillz. I spent a clear and cold Saturday afternoon with one eye on the road and the other on the chicken scratch that I apparently wrote to myself. I made my appointment. I was only an hour late.

When I got home I fell into the couch, held tight to the dog and wanted to fall asleep for an eon or so.

The newness, it's frustrating on so many levels. In San Francisco I always knew where I was, on any given corner I could have told you where the ocean was, where the bay lies, bridges and mountains, markers and milestones. These days when someone says to me, well X lies South of Powell, I have to locate Powell on my mental map and struggle not to transpose my San Francisco Powell, and then I have to track the sun in my head, and it takes up all sorts of capacity and I find myself beleaguered and begging for patience.

I have no idea where I am. I have a sense that at my brother's house, the river lies against my back bedroom window, more or less, but it's not like the ocean, those primordial currents that tug westward. I think I need to spend more time with maps.

In other news I bowled 158 the other night, in some sort of fluke of magesty I rolled four strikes and won a budweiser. I think there is some sort of resurgence of baby punks happening in Portland, I haven't seen hair quite so unyielding or pink since the eighties. Some baby punk skulked into the bar with an obviously filched wristband and tried to order a pitcher (in bowling shoes!!!) I had to admire the kid's chutzpa, of course he skulked out on the heels of a half muttered fuck you when the pitcher was (rudely) refused. Still it makes me a little sad to see these kids (shakes granny cane in indignation) regurgitating London circa 1984, but a little brighter and a perhaps more medicated and a lot more polished, no agenda to push, no soul to surrender (brandishes granny cane) as if I were any sort of authority, being a kid is hard, the world is wonderous and punishing, as if I had any authority, I am still astonished that anyone could consider me an adult.

but whatever. I start week two on Pill Hill tomorrow. There are jobs to be had, cities to be conquered, houses to be furnished, bus flirtations to be fucked.

2007-12-03T23:24:00.000-08:00

The neighbors have wind chimes, and they chime and they chime all throughout the night, they come screaming into my dreams.

It's not like the buses on Haight street, and it's not like the forgetable ruckus of the trashmen in the lightwell, it's preening in its insistance, shrill in its loveliness. It's not even the bittersweet constant consolation of tire tread on pavement, here it's the constant companion, but I am far enough from the street where the melancholy whoosh hides its febrile music from me.

I am getting acquainted with the pattern of rain on the gently corrugated plastic pounding out an unfathomable rhythm, I listen before I sleep.

I am reminded of San Francisco, when my raindrop reverie is interupted by the screaming of the trains. What do you call the cry of the trains, anyway? I don't remember, if I ever knew at all. I think I thought freight trains were some sort of antiquated notion, but they tear through Portland's midsection with a bombastic and persistent fury. I am reminded of home, when I first lived in the City, I remember being awakened by a constant lowing, what the fuck, I thought (that was in the days before we abbreviated such things) and so it went, until one foggy day I realized that what I was hearing was the fog horn.... And maybe such antiquated things don't work so well anymore, seeing as how that captain managed to ram the base of the Bay Bridge , maybe he was listening to his iPod, as I am now.

Perhaps there is a song there, the parallel between the lowing of the foghorn and the baying of the train, I might have tried to sing it during the middle reprieve of my Positively Shitty Week last Thursday.

I didn't get the job that I wanted, and I probably can't afford the house that I just bought.... but there is always a solution, or in my case a fortuitous consolation form of a possible temp to perm gig at the big hospital on the hill. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to oggle the cute doctors and monitor their schedules, next time I split my head open, just in case....

I was overdue for a good falling down, and so I did.

I was out on the front porch attempting to extinguish a cigarette after having consumed some of that vaguely illegal smokeweed when I went ass over tea-kettle and caught the cement backing of the stairs with my neck. Yes, my neck. Since it was nigh into my Positively Shitty Week, I just though to myself, well, at least I am not dead, but jeebus, that stings like some sort of unruly motherfucker. Subsequently I went to a cocktail party in a full length peach polyester dress trimmed in maribou with a rather unsightly case of road rash on my neck -- I told a young lady that it was due to a rather hirsute Italian gentlemen who took necking quite literally.... if only.

really, if only.

2007-11-26T22:47:00.000-08:00

Unrecognizable to myself

There I am buying expensive jeans on my lady of leisure non salary. I am not sure why I make this purchase, but I do.

Here I am buried under two pashminas because it is bloody cold out.

There I am on the sidewalk, talking to home while the rain is pouring down, I have a hat on and gloves, and the hood on my rain coat is flipped up. Have I mentioned how much I hate to have my ears covered, but it's freezing to my californian self and I have relented to wearing a hat. Here I am bitching about the climate on teh internets after such an extended absence, plenty of souls dwell in colder climates afflicted with long bouts of ice and snow, I should really shut the fuck up, hello Montreal denizens!

It's just like anything else, familiarity dons it's appropriate accessories, and I don't have any. I don't have suitable clothes for this climate, and my hair is in need of coloring and cutting, and I am profoundly lonely.

That said I am making friends and meeting really, really lovely people....

And *knocks wood* I think I have bought a house -- details to come possibly, but I am determined not to jinx it, likewise the job I am waiting on.

But jesus, I am tired of being aimless, I need a routine, I need something I can cleave to. I love my brother and bellesoeur to pieces but living with them just delineates the starkness of my aloneness, of my apartness, I think I have lived alone for too long and I can't wait to retreat back to that. It sort of breaks my heart to know that about myself, it sort of breaks my heart that I wake up in the morning and am surprised that no one is there, either.

No one ever said that this was going to be some glorious walk in the park, nobody ever said that it was going to be mad inexpensive to buy a house, sure housing is affordable here, but thanks to the collapse of the sub prime market obtaining a reasonable mortgage is like smoking a fucking rainbow, fuck you Alan Greenspan and fuck you too Countrywide and all the rest of you colossal assholes and your fucking billion dollar write downs....... oh but enough about the flagging economy, the chips will fall where they may, I'll try and be thankful for my reasonable good health, I'll try and be grateful period. I can't go home, I don't have one. I am like a shark in an acquarium, swimming in circles, riding my own wake, becoming increasingly wrathful with each circle, my patience with this little enterprise is waning, I am inclined to start ramming against the glass.

maybe this week will yield some results, if not this week, maybe next week.

2007-11-10T23:05:00.000-08:00

where the interstitial meets the wave

I sit for a long while in front of this blank page, sort of page, with pixels and images and guides, I sit against the dark back drop of an unlit kitchen, trying to pin a concise thought down in my agitated brain, searching for a pithy word or a delicate nuance, while Frere and Bellesoeur soak in the hot tub and I still haven't taken off my coat.

we came home from pinball and pool last night and drank light beer in the hot tub as the rain came down, it was some sort of magic. Can you possibly guess which of the statements in the above I thought I'd never utter. Light Beer. Things Fucking Change.

Names and faces swirl, names and faces blur.

I woke in a panic the other morning because I realized my potential house (knocks wood) has no closet space. I had been dreaming about being under water, tailed by a great white shark, I had turned so that I wouldn't see the inevitable attack. I woke up and though I wasn't disoriented, I wondered aloud what the hell am I doing here, what the hell have I done, as I stumble through the day without any specific routine to serve as a fundamental foundation, I know myself to be almost scarily malleable, but christ almighty, this is fucking nuts.

and yet.

and yet, I went with my new friends to the farmer's market at the crack of dawn, nearly, ok, it was nine. My new friends and their beautiful girl L. Dragonfly and it was a beautiful morning in Portland, the sun was shining wanly, but the day was full of welcome. I bought a bunch of things on strange whims, braising greens because they were beautiful, some local hard cider because I liked the bottle, rillettes, well porky goodness is irresistable, three pints of the best strawberries I have ever tasted, even going so far as to wager that they might trump the wild strawberries from the Dordogne - ok - pushing it, but still, fucking awesome.

I walked a mile in the rain to get to a bar last night, I had on my rain coat and flipped up the hood and found the walk to be less antagonistic than I would have thought. Maybe my San Francisco skin yields better to this new city than I could have anticipated.

This morning after the market, I went exploring, pulled along by the dog. At some point I realized that I was wildly happy, tromping through the leaves, admiring houses and trees, all of these alien structures and narrow streets with round abouts that we couldn't make fly in San Francisco, the absence of people on sidewalks, but mostly all of the autumn colors turning to mulch on the sidewalks and in the gutters, just walking and walking and walking, I knew that I had made the right decision. The house (knocks wood) will work if it's meant to, the job will work if it's meant to. I'll meet people, I might even make real friends, I think I already have.

Next internets, you will see me farting rainbows and falling in love, anything is possible, just you wait.

2007-11-07T22:32:00.000-08:00

The Good and The Bad

It gets tempered in the end, in the end it's all a wash.

The Runner ran out of the picture, but I put an offer on a bungalow and it's been accepted.

I had a really promising interview, and I am holding my breath.

My brother sent me out to rent the first disc of Battlestar Galactica, and I trundled down to open an account, and the lady was super nice and blah, blah, blah.

I parked the car, have I mentioned how very dark here it is, I opened my door and BAM. My worst nightmare, the sound of metal buckling, I was confused, I was frightened.

A cyclist plowed into me, I didn't see him and he didn't see me, when my faculties were coralled all I saw was a man draped over my door and I was sure I had just lived my worst nightmare, I'd killed a man over a DVD.

My car is hurt worse than he, I'm grateful for it. I'd rather swing into my vehicle all Dukes of Hazard like than worry that I had injured a father or a husband, or even just a man.

It's only material. It's only material.

if you are out there and you are rooting for me, the licks I can take, I expect as much, but keep your fingers and your toes crossed, that this man is unharmed, that my future home with the veranda will pass inspection, that escrow will proceed, that these lovely people at this lovely little company will decide that I am the best fit. That the economy will not collapse, that we are safe in our states and in our States, that our families are safe, even if my father is suffering from some Inca bug in Lima, that we hold tight to our friends, that we hold tight in general, making allowances for breath and wonderment.

since my shoulders are hitched up to my earlobes I am going to warm them in the bath.

2007-10-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

A Blood Moon and Other Things

Without any discernable rhythm time just fluctuates, sometimes with a wink, some afternoons seem interminable.

I walk. I do half assed pilates in the living room. I make tentative phone calls in search of employment. I look at houses. Lots of houses.

On Saturday frere, bellesoeur and a few of their peers went out to see Broken Social Scene, first we went to low brow Mexican at some place that is one hundred percent fiesta one hundred percent of the time, what the beans lack is made up for in atmosphere and very large margaritas. But, the mariachi band was worth the price of admission, was perhaps better than the band.

I had a good time, I got high. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, as in high I mean a substance slightly more toothsome than you're great american green. Seemed even more brilliant-er to do more, after the show, what ho, thought I, I danced my pants off.

My real estate agent came to fetch me the following morning, where is was very clear to me that those carefree days of drugs taking were long over. I put on my good soldier face and carried on. I saw a few contenders, my litmus test seems to be can I envision myself in the kitchen in the morning in my slippers.

I met the Runner in the late afternoon, for late afternoon antics and a nice long walk. After tater tots, Portland I love you and your tater tots, we walked along the river in the dark under a blood moon.

It's dark here, at night. I am sure it's a function of ambient light, the streets are not coated in street lights and traffic like I am accustomed to... Driving home last night at nine on a Sunday there was nearly no traffic, like the city was deserted, it was really strange... I nearly said "back home", wait, I did, but in SF, there is noise and light, someone is always awake and someone is always driving, short of that there is MUNI rumbling past my former bedroom at 20 minute intervals at all hours, always.

I have been here 19 days. I keep trying to check in with myself, you know, all friendly like, as in how you doing girl, and finding myself largely evasive, but largely OK, it's impossible to articulate the disconnect, it's like trying to stick push pins through cumulus clouds, what I cleave to is this adamant certainty that everything is going to be alright and just surrender.

Walking by the river in the dark, I said to the Runner that I am not used to still water. I have seen the bay becalmed, but even then you can track the currents, this river, the Willamette, she is slow and dirty, she smells slightly swampy and I can taste the oil in the water. I miss brine. I miss the rightness of belonging.

2007-10-22T22:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-17T23:26:00.000-07:00

Update the second, free, untethered.

That is that, then, perfectly civilized over late evening sandwiches. I was pretty sure the spell was broken in that precious coffee joint a few weeks ago, but now I know.

Dear Engineer, my engineer, I loved you so, I loved you without reserve.

And I am not sorry.

Tonight, we warily assessed one another over sandwiches in raincoats (new! ha!) and scarves, and I am still not sorry, I am only sorry that all that good love is gone, I am even sorrier that you really had no idea, I still sorta half heartedly muttered under my breath after we parted that I hope she rips your heart out, because I still believe in parity, and because I did love you, and because you broke me, because I only wanted, I only wanted. A lot like the case of the green cottage.

Sweet jeebus, bring unto me sagacity and tenacity, an unflagging spirit and a balls-out sense of humour, and when the time is right, or even if it's wrong, if you could see fit to sneak in a little love, I promise I'd keep it to myself.

We can be friends, but you will never really know me, I'll never trust you enough. You will come at me again, with your doe eyes and you will want to atone, but it will be too late, it is already too late. You are not going to question my reticence, for what it's worth, this was our last evening out, over sandwiches, my questions have been resolved, I do not need to see you or speak to you again, I am at peace, and my never-quelled sea of love, will always love you at certain angles, in certain lights, and all of the lovely voluptuous tricks of memory, I will always love you best when your smile was closest to mine.

But the door slams shut, now.

2007-10-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

Update

some fucker put an offer in on MY green cottage.

then I had a fury inducing conversation with my father.

on the upside - tax free shopping is fun!

I got a swell rain parka, that is chic and watapoof! Then new jeans, because the best part of moving and trauma of stress is the weight loss!!

on the downside - my brother's house is situated not three blocks from the best goddamn chicken wings I have ever eaten. Frere & Bellesoeur are working late tonight, can you guess what I am having for dinner? Can you guess who is coming to dinner? The Engineer.

2007-10-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

Portland, day six

I fell in love with a house on Monday, it was, of course, the very first house I saw with the realtor. A green cottage. I thought, auspicious! as I am wearing a green coat! And then a happy brown dog came and nosed me as we were going in, and I thought, perfect! I love dogs and this house has warm vibes!

Then we went in. Charming! Cozy! Just my size! Within budget!!

Because I want it, because it's a house I can wear, I despair that it wont be mine. Also, the twin demons of realism and reason beckon. It was your first day out - I know, but! Your financial ducks aren't quite in a row - I know but! You need a job - I know, but, oh fucklesticks.

Patience beckons from her comfy perch, be steady girl, it will bear out - I know, but!

I know, but!

I have had too much coffee and not enough good sleep.

I have been practicing meditation in that I sit composed while my mind wheels like a pelican on crack.

Part of me is going about my day in SF, walking in the park, buying baked snap peas at Gus' (I can't find them here and that makes me weepy) fussing about my apartment, part of me is caught in the fever of driving forward, driving onward, frustrated by the lack of more lanes in Oregon, beguiled by the coast and the trees, part of me is sitting, here, in the kitchen of my brother's house using up his wifi (hey y'all, I'm not on dial-up! I'm growed!) As the clouds gather, and bright patches of sunlight, as the squirrels wage mortal combat with the crows over the walnuts that thump onto the deck outside my window.

I walked through Laurelhurst park the other day, and the breeze sent the yellow hued leaves downward and slantwise in a soft blizzard. I stopped, others stopped, it was beautiful and cinematic. Almost like, jesus, Nature, what a gorgeous cliche.

Today I am tasked with taking my brother's dying Saab into the mechanic. Then I am on the quest for a perfect rain coat. I have been too idle this morning and my thoughts are working the metaphorical worry beads, also, step away from the coffee! Now I know why I always went down to the cafe for my one cup of coffee, having a full pot at my disposal is making my shoulders creep up to my ears and my heart thrum a little stronger than it ought to.

red rain coat or bust!

2007-10-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Eagle has Landed

On my first morning in Portland I saw a little girl herding chickens with a saxophone.

The quest for homeownership begins in earnest tomorrow. Also I need a J.O.B.

2007-10-11T20:58:00.000-07:00

Notes from the Road

I don't want to talk about Tuesday, when the movers came.... Let's just say I had been on the phone in the bath until early Tuesday morning with the Runner (uh huh) and woke up for the last morning in my apartment with a hang over and a lot of lust.

Yeah, moving companies, a lot like a remodel, whatever they quote, just double.

Weds.

I wake up at two. bing!
I wake up at three. bing!
I wake up at four it's pissing rain. bing!

P wakes me up at seven. bing!
walking, coffee, breakfast, empty apartment, goodwill, mopping. bing! we labor over packing my car, somehow we make it all work, we high five, we embrace quickly, she says drive.

It's noon o'clock, I leave the City under strange skies, pelicans track me incuriously as I cross the bridge and wheel away. There is no ceremony, there is no trumpet playing taps, I am a little surprised, instead, out of the rearview mirror, the city is as still in profile as ever.

Up 101N to Cloverdale, I take the 128W. I stop for lunch in an old school weird place, in my quest for old school weird... Pasta Garden/ Burger Shack.... What a beautiful road, through the tail end of the Alexender Valley and through the highlands of the Anderson Valley, apples and grapes and pumpkins and no cars, and then redwoods and dappled light out to the coast, up the coast. I had intended to stay in Mendocino, but found it entirely too precious and decided to head to the more downmarket Fort Bragg. I hadn't been this far north (by car) since I was little girl, staying in funky places and the yollobolly wilderness with the train, you know, the train with the face.... I called my parents when I got to Ft. Bragg - I have a phone tree I am obliged to dial -- at least four numbers when I end up somewhere.

So last night, covered in late afternoon seaspray and the morning's last push of moving sweat, I pull into some AARP approved Inn called the Harbor Lite, this befuddled me to no end, I was all, what it's a diet friendly harbor for the blue haired set????? I elected to spend more money for the view of the harbor and the sea, and the sign posted on the door before my window very sternly warned me not to bring my freshly caught fish into the room.

I had dinner down in the old harbor, fish tacos and margaritas, there was a blue heron, and there were seals bobbing in the dusk, before the breakers were melting towards an untamed peach, before the sky went violet and I decided it was time to sleep.

----

Thurs.

The alarm sounds in darkness, black out kind of darkness, I hit snooze out of reflex, then I lie there coming to conciousness, I have no idea where I am. My last clear image is a salt sprayed beach somewhere, with things bobbing in the surf, I thought they were seals, but they might have been posts.

I tumble out of the extra large king, fall to the floor, try for a few half assed pilates moves, ignore the knot the size of lower manhattan in my back, eat a waffle, drink some old people coffee, check out and get in the car, and drive through the sporadic pockets of rain.

I still haven't wept.

I am still tense enough that the food and coffee just liquifies...

---

I've got more to tell, but have been on the phone with the Runner, and now suddenly it's 2:3o and I am in desperate need of sleep.

Still, it's undeniably savage in it's beauty, still the roads beg for double fisted driving and race car dreams, still there is the surf breaking to my left and the river to my right, still, still, wending my way through the trees after so many moss green hours, a girl starts to wonder when the road will end, when the road has only just begun.

Somewhere just past noon highway one came to a sudden end at the 101N juncture, I was grateful to rediscover two lanes and seventy (eighty-five). My but those trees are ancient and massive.

Stopped in Garberville for lunch, some place called the Eel River cafe, full of cows, wallpapered in the eighties, your lackadaisical waitress may or may not be interested in delivering your lemonade, but the french fries were good. P says I have got to talk to people on my road trip, honestly, I would rather eavesdrop, I got no business trying to talk to people I don't want to, I would much rather drive.

So I get back on the road, full of turkey and cheese and hybrid lemonade, I decide to wait out gasoline until I get to Eureka, sixty miles or so of nobody else on the road and my iPod assuming I am a gay man. Up, and up and north we go, with the eel river to my right and the coast just beyond my reach, up and up we go, I keep rubbing at my eyes. See my maps, they don't match, my California map ends at Ft Bragg, and I sort of thought that California ended there, but then there is Eureka, and Arcata and Crescent City, lonely towns in lonely places and all I thought is who but the hippies and the freaks and the misanthropes would live out here in the wilds of the Pacific, who indeed, the freaks, the misanthropes and the hippies all living in tenuous harmony.

P calls just before I get to Eureka, we talk for a minute, but my mind is on the road, also, I need gasoline. I fill up, sort of, my mind has some disconnect, and I sort of drive off before my tank is full, I think I must have it in the back of my mind that once I get to Oregon, they'll clean my windows and take my pulse, I mean check my pressure.....

And then, I am following the signs north, towards Arcata, towards Oregon, Sufijan Stevens comes on the iPaod and I have dual thoughts, one, I could turn east, here at the 299, make for the nearest airport and disappear, I have an eight hour lead before anyone would worry, and two, I am an american cliche, the stateless girl with no address, in the packed to gill vehicle, replete with random lampshade (the movers forgot, and the agave plant that travels with me) not six minutes later I got a speeding ticket, which only made me cry harder, from Klamath to Crescent City.

but I saw elk, and I saw beauty, I saw rocks jutting from the coast like giant primordial shark fins coming forth to take us all to sea.

I drove and I drove and I drove, through eight hours of topography, through mountains and valleys and dying seaside towns, and I landed here.

I am in Bandon, Oregon. Quaint old town on the harborlet where I will walk tomorrow. I had an excellent dinner at the wine bar, I ate baby artichokes and crab salad washed down with a lovely tuscan white, I decided that life - speeding ticket aside - was good.

I expect to reach Portland tomorrow, late afternoon.

2007-10-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

ungh-gah

adminstrative mumbo-jumbo but writing is likely to be light as I head into the holy crap I am moving to another state in four days, threeish/fourish days.

I am more addlepated than I have ever been, still amazed that I have not had a melt down.

This weekend is one of my favorites of the year, bluegrass and blue angels. Everything about today from the war planes to teddy thompson in his slept in suit, earnestly singing mysogynistic country songs, not a dry pussy in the park, god how we cannot ever resist a self aware cad -- even the doyenne Emmylou Harris squirmed a little in the presence of this feckless, pale Englishman with a big voice and a legacy.

But back to the weather, I am sunburned and windburned and deeply, deeply exhausted. Thanks to last night's tequila I woke up fully clothed again. I am grateful that I get to leave when the City is at it's most vibrant, here in early October, when every hour is the magic hour, nothing but jewel tones and expensive cocktails, slanting sunlight and the lyrics to songs you really ought to remember, but will soon forget. It's lovely, it's perfect, it's perfect and here I am prying my fingers loose, here I am letting go of the kite strings. I am going sailing, gone fishing, gone after the perfect cliche, sort of or almost. A few more boxes to fill, a few more goodbyes, a solid night of dreamless sleep, a memorial, hope springs eternal for a clement journey.

2007-10-05T01:51:00.000-07:00

Also, I miss you, whoever you are.

2007-10-04T23:14:00.000-07:00

Crumpets and Cobwebs and Starry Nights in Sausalito

I could get real used to this lady of leisure business, though I might get positively rotund if I keep this pace up.

I rolled out of bed tennish. Strolled down to the cafe in complete disarray, in last night's hair, with last night's liquor on my breath, for the biggest coffee they could serve me.

Then I threw out my kitchen, found skirry, skirry things there, and webs and ghosts of spices past. It's telling that the only things I am taking with me are my collection of salts and mustards. Everything else goes.

Met my friend PB at her house in Noe Valley, she was a lady of leisure for the day, after many pets with her dog we ambled down to Lovejoy's for high tea, where I ate my weight in tea sandwiches and drank far too much black chestnut tea. Caffeine addled and scone heavy (dear god, whoever invented Devonshire cream, I would like to worship You at the altar of Bacon) I tried to make for Marin for some tennis.

Except that I forgot about traffic. I am not used to traffic. I am never in it, what with my former reverse commute, I am used to breezing in. I don't like traffic, afterall. I was supposed to be there by 3:30, I made it by 4:30. B and I drank wine by the pool and played with the five dogs, got caught up. I am going to miss him and his partner and their crazy menagerie like mad. I love them, I love those animals.

Late for my hair appointment, behind schedule on my packing, running fast on too much tea and doped up on adrenelin. From San Rafael to Sausalito racing the sun, the music much too loud. Cut and blown, AW and I head to Poggio for burrata and pizza (like I need more cheese) a good, cold bottle of Sardengnian white, followed by a fernet, and a walk along the bay.

I can hear it now through the head phones, I can hear it in my nose, the briny lapping of the October calm bay, churning under the breakers, my City sparkling across the expanse of the water. With the undulation of the water came wavelet after gentle wavelet of sick making nostalgia, of being hopelessly homesick for the place I hadn't yet left.

That boy, the one I met at the wedding, for now I will call him The Runner, he called the other day to see if I had made it home alright, he said, I'll see you when you get home. Then there was a long pause, as I strove to reroute the disconnect I felt in that statement, because every hair on my body was standing on end hollering silently, NO! Here is Home, I am Home, then I realized, that this is only home for another six days, and I said, yes, I will see you when I get home. I felt like I was dissembling, like there was, like there is a fundamental, elemental mistatement in that. I am going to have to work on the notion of home. My home is not my home anymore, my walls and corners shorn of my possessions, it's just a shell with walls in serious need of paint.

My city, just another city, one where I know the short cuts, and the best parking spots, and the best views. AW said that since I am going to be newbee, she said I should screen all of my perspective dates by asking them to show me their favorite views of Portland. It's a grand and romantic idea, of course the cynic in me is all, Portland is nowhere near as dramatically panoramic as San Francisco, maybe I just need the right guide, maybe I need a different sort of romance. I am prepared to be amenable. I am, in fact, prepared for anything.

And, frankly, I am astonished at my own forebearance, as in holy shit, who is this clear eyed alien living in my body, and what have you done with my neurotic drama queen who dwells deep in the closet of my mind, I think the alien dined on her over a peaceable lunch, with a nice glass of wine, and just like that everything that was familiar got digested and disgorged. Where is my dervish? Where are my devils? Where are my sirens? Where is my love? well, that's easy, it's a blanket over my home, over my neighborhood, over my friends, over my family, over the headlands, and cautiously over my future wherever I might land.

Did I tell you that when I was leaving Portland, that I literally flew over the rainbow. I looked down upon the ends of the rainbow, I know where the pots of gold are, I think that's got to be auspicious.

2007-10-04T01:08:00.000-07:00

After the wedding, during the wedding

there are some days you drink like water, and there are stretches of days you drink like champagne. They go down smoothe, bubbles the slightest welcome tickle, an afternoon becomes a weekend, a rainy day becomes your lover.

On Thursday the plain alights, your almost sister-in-law fetches you and a her friend and makes alien driving manoeuvers , but all is well when the burgers and beer arrive in the late slanting sunlight. Later after the real estate agent, checked into the relentless hipness of the Ace Hotel, isn't ironic how I was paying sort of top dollar to snuggle into a flop house....

I cannot honorably do it justice, I cannot honorably do them justice, this one person I love more than most, my little brother, who got married and giggled and cried, and was the embodiement of sweetness and light, my little brother got married.

She's a good woman and she's lovely.

As for myself, well, after I had done my grateful duty freezing my invisible nuts off in turquoise chiffon, I quite unexpectedly got my rocks off, seems I might have dinner date lined up when I land in Portland a week and two days from now. I was this close to semi drunken dialling, I decided that might be decidedly unwise. So, yes, brother, I am a happy shit grinning little slut. I am armed in fleece and wellies and condoms and she stoops to conquer.

More later, when I have better gathered my wits.

2007-09-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

Our Parents Die

I was driving when I heard the news. She called me back after I had left a glib message, I can't meet you for lunch. Are you OK?

Her dad passed away last night, her disciplinarian softy dad who towed us on waterskis and cuffed us on the head. He used to call me George, as in Boy George, due to the electric blue eyeshadow I used to sport in those stupid-early days of adolescence. If I have any love of baseball, it's thanks to him, for meandering days of summer, idleness in each other's houses, and B always had on the game on the radio, and it never failed to lull me to sleep, crowds on the radio.

Now he's gone, she's a daddy's girl just like me, it fills me with undescribable loss, for her family, for him, going out pissed off til the end, for my parents, for my father. For those long ago long days of summer, we girls in the back of the truck when it was still legal, with the boat and the boom box, listening to Howard what's his face or Erasure, the wind in our eighties hair, and Buddy Senior with his cigar ribbing us and loving us.

Of our parents, those of us from our tight knit small town, his passing is the fourth, I hate this inevitable count down. Four shields passed out of this life, four guides gone. Scolds, fucking all of them, but in a gentle (well, memory distorts) still, we loved them.

I know you went out irracible, I hope you and your family, your daughter, my very old friend, got a little peace.

Heaven is for good men, and women. I think, at least I pray, if there is anything at all, let it be late summer, with baseball on the radio and all wet and windblown, the last ride on water skis, down in the water with the flag up, let it be bobbing there amid the swirling petrol rainbows, let it be quiet within the rope's circumference.

2007-09-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

Little by little

The drawers and closets disgorge. Thrown up into reject piles only to be sworn in again. I have tried so hard to be ruthless. I have entreated myself, I have begged myself, I have offered myself generous rewards of hamburgers, and my otherself has just laughed in our faces and pulled that tank top out of the goodwill pile and had a hamburger anyway.

I think I might be halfway done, dwelling in a city of mismatched boxes, and I am so tired, every last crevice of me aches, deep muscle ache, only alleviated by a good cathartic cry. But nothing comes. My eyes couldn't be more dry, I just get curiously zenner, uh huh, I just said zenner and meant it.

I thought I was well on my way to have a collassal melt down when I went to move my car the other day and discovered that THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS HAD BOOTED ME!!!!! and I came home totally prepared to throw shit and break things, at the very least stomp around and nearly drown in my tears of frustration, and bat blame around like a stinky wicket. Nope, nothing. The guru in me said only, you have assets, use them.

And I am fine, I am cool, goddamn me if I am not the coolest cookie in the history of upheaval, that doesn't mean that I want to make my bed, after my (hopefully) last visit to the crack laundromat.

I need a massage and a joint, I need to cry, I need to stop leaking money. I wake up every morning disoriented, but I am quite certain that if I could, I would never work for money again, if I could help it. I say this only because I haven't yet found the thing that I love. Short of that there are sad songs, which should so the trick..... except that they haven't.

This is my home I am boxing up, my stubborn, willfull home, I shift from forgotten closet to sealed box, so it can gather dust in another state, in another State. I, evidently, don't function on planet ruthless, I do the best I fucking can on planet Cass is a sentimental fool, I am pretty sure I wouldn't have it any other way.

2007-09-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

Eat, Snob, Love, or the Feminist conundrum

Two people, two women, who I admire have recently recommended that I read Eat, Pray, Love. It's been out for awhile and widely reviewed as a puff piece of post feminist self indulgence, at least according to the critics I generally admire and not all that well written to boot. Plus, according to the overlords of investigative snark at Gawker media she neglects to disclose she's cheating on her husband before she leaves him...

But they said, look past it, it speaks.

Full disclosure, some months ago, when I was coming apart at the seams, I was at the gym watching Oprah. This was when she was touting The Secret, so I thought what the fuck, I'll give it a shot. They had it at my video store and I swear to god you would think I was renting kiddie porn from the glances askance. I spent the next however long the running time was pitching expletives at the screen and wishing I had not misspent that precious time. What a boat load of hooey, preying on those who would gladly sacrifice hard earned dollars at the altar of a bunch of capitalist quasi-mystics regurgitating philosophy 101. My head exploded, also I am a snob.

I am a snob. I do not buy books that have pink jackets. I am a snob. I do not purchase anything that is marketed to me as the One solution, the Ultimate diet, I vehemently, vehemently despise the genre known as chick-lit, even more than I despised Harlequin romance novels -- at least they weren't trying to be didactic, they just wanted to elicit a furtive soft core orgasm, and as far as I'm concerned that can't be all bad (even if it weren't my style)

So this book, I am three quarters into thanks to my extremely expensive day at the car dealership. Car+ tune-up + two new tires= a grand. I called my father, I was all, is this right? and he was all, no it's not, but you don't know dick about cars, do you. Right. And he got flustered on my behalf, which I find angry making and charming all at once. Oh fuck it, it was a nice enough day, I spent it at my favorite beach (after they gave me the truly troubling PT Cruiser to gallivant in) Rodeo beach, there were lot's of surfers, the sun was out, I had my iPod, I was calm.

Back on rant. Much poorer and back in the City and hungry, I took me and the book down to Magnolia for duck confit, and this is what came to me, envy. I was up in arms over a pink book because I was utterly envious. Even though her descriptions of depression and the desolution following the demise of a marriage and a relationship were succinct and pitch perfect, I was jealous. No one gave me advance when I got divorced, I didn't get to travel, no, I was mired in a poverty and a depression profound, and yet still, I muddled through -- and right along with the envy is the admiration, I (very) begrudgingly admit that the book does speak. There is nothing wrong with eating, and there is nothing wrong with praying, and she is careful about how she speaks of her relationship with the sublime, it's not cloying, best of all it's not pink, and there is certainly nothing wrong with loving.

I have issues with women. With the F word in particular, then again I have issues with men, with people in general, fair enough to state that I am a reasonable misanthope in an unreasonable world. But back to the fairer sex, my sex, let us just say that I have a certain horror of gaggles of females. It starts with my maternal grandmother, wends many years as my own mother's understudy, the high school trials, a study in venom and tampax, coellesces and explodes my first two years in college at hippieville ground zero, where at one point I was entreated to share my vagina with a bunch of hairy legged succubi, I politely declined and fled to France. It's a testament to my mother, that she survived her mother and does the best she can, it's a testament to my highschool girlfriends that these days we get together and air past grievances with good grace and mighty laughter. As to the succubi, they effectively turned me off for forever the politics of high feminism. No, you may not see my vulva, and no, I do not want to beat on a drum and howl at mother moon with you, thank you very much, no, I think Andrea Dworkin is a shoddy polemicist, go on, go ahead and ostracize me, you fucking raging pre-menopausal hypocrite. Also, shave your goddamn legs, all that fuzz is giving you mean cankles.

Speaking of raging non-premenopausal (we hope) hypocrites, hello! I am one.

I grew up in a household of peers, there was never any question of equality between my parents. It was a given, or a hard won war in a golden period of glasnost when I came to conscience. They certainly fought as equals, hard core scrappers, the both of them. Conceits were a solid victory. To their credit, the house was equally divided, to each his own domain, and in the middle an unflagging solidarity (isn't weird how I resort to the politspeak of my childhood). I resented the term feminist, as far as I could see it had no weight in my life, I was never taught that I couldn't do anything as well as a boy could, if I so chose (and if I didn't get an education I was certainly going to end up pumping gas, a unisex fate worse than death in my family). Which must be the reason that neither me or my brother knows dick about automobiles, while my father is one of the last of his age, the man knows how to tinker (sometimes to our great detriment) while the children of this generation surrender our plastic and leave it to the extortionists masquerading as professionals. I swear the dude at the dealership wrung his hands in anticipation, here comes a girl who freely admits her total ignorance and says, well, do what you need to do now, I'd rather pay now then break down in the dark on a lonely stretch on highway one, where the sharks and the serial killers lurk.

Back on rant. For many years I forsook feminism as a sixties throw back, with a certain nostalgia, like gloves and hats and further back, corsets. I suppose I should thank our feckless leader and the ensuing elections for making me take up the Feminist mantle, with the caveat that it's a different sort of feminism, if such a thing could be had..... Most of it has to do with the pro-choice movement, and if you are not, stop reading me now, I spend an ungodly amount of time writing to my navel, but as the political season wratchets up, expect me to comment here more.

Back on rant. The other driver in my fledgling feminism is our world wide web of the internets, which has sparked me to donate to the South Dakota indian reservation to provide abortion services and which has sparked me to donate to medicins sans frontiers to the campaign for women who most likely have suffered through excision and after child birth develop fistula - if you don't know what I am talking about Nicholas Kristoff at the NYT has written extensively on the women who are banished for suffering after mutilation.

Closer to home, it started when Salon started publishing the Broad Sheet, which I read in conjunction with their political blog the War Room, and then Gawker Media got wise and started publishing Jezebel.com which is my favoritist site on all of the internets, even more that Icanhasacheezburger, yes even better than that.

I am not sure why I have never been discriminated against, I had my share of "grey rape" in my sexually precocious youth, but I always figured that half the responsability was my own, it's possible that I am making large allowances, but I never felt undone. Let's face it, pre-breast reduction I was built like a blonde shit brickhouse, in the best sense, and I am still stacked to the heavens with tits and ass. The one time in my early twenties when I was working in a hotel a sales person placed his hand on my ass, I made such an almighty stink, that subsequently no one has dared. This where I get into trouble with the feminists, take it between your two hands and raise a stink. Some assclown decides that it's his right to clap you on the ass and speculate about your future sex life, make and almighty stink. But here's where it gets treacherous, you can't do it as an animal, you have to do as a lady, a lady whose virtue has been called into question, you have do it as they expect you to. As my paternal grandmother (who never identified as a feminist, but will gladly take all your money at bridge while affably drinking you under the table) said, disarm with charm, mollify, manipulate, attack. If it's a man's world afterall, that advice has served me well. Sorry ladies, all you furry legged and up in arms ladies, I respect where you are coming from, I hear you, I hear you well, we are all on your side. We want education, we want, we all want for these girls in the age of Paris and Britney to not suffer the indignities and embarrassments that we all suffered at the hands of our peers and at the hands of boys, no matter where you landed on the social scale, it was all equally horrible. Can we all just agree on that and go from there?

Because at the end of the day we all want the same thing, the same fundamental things. Choice, access to education, wage equality, a chance at life, a chance at happiness. Dare I say it, a chance at love, she-love, man-love, girl and boy love, just plain old confounding love.

End rant.

2007-09-17T23:00:00.000-07:00

The Season of Lasts

Friday was my last day of work.

Sunday was the last time that J will color my hair.

Saturday was the last night I'll have all my friends in one room together, so I went and negated by getting blindly, wildly drunk. So I am left with impressions, a patchwork of faces, and snippets of converstations. I am certain I showed off my new boobs to a particular Anna (hi! honestly I think you and Bob are best, how come life gets in the way?)

Just this evening I found out that a very heavy last is resolved, this morning I twirled around my apartment instead of packing and found myself utterly directionless for lack of structure. So it's all really real now, I've got no job, all my stays have been systematically cut. I keep waiting for the tears, but they have yet to manifest, no doubt due to all the liquor and cheese. I've traded in my imaginary cigarettes for the real thing and I have been smoking up a storm. I know it's no good, but it's better than cocaine, and I am fine with that for the moment. I am pretty much fine with anything.

P and I had pilates this evening, a near last, but not quite yet. We parted on the corner and a young woman of indeterminate accent asked me for directions to Amoeba, and I pointed up the Panhandle where the evening light was cascading through the tallest Eucalyptus, and I couldn't speak for a moment, I nearly said follow the light westward, and turn right at the line of trees, swallow the dusk as you run, but I thought that might be inappropriate, so I gave her proper directions and swallowed the dusk ensconced in my own private universe of the iPod.

And a propos de rien why do I cleave so much to scraps of paper, I have scraps of paper, mounting scraps of paper, with scribbles, hillcocks of scraps of paper, dribbling out of drawers, quasi indeciperable, for the life of me I cannot part with them. Like old photos of people whose names have passed beyond recollection, so I have old notebooks with old phone numbers that pre-date the cell phone age, yet I filled a box today with scraps of paper. I labelled it personal, but on the day I move into my new house, my house that I will own, that box, like its many mates will get jostled into a corner and get forgotten, get added to, I figure it's for the archivists of the future, as if those scraps could constitute a life, an approximate snow angel of my history, details of a life I can hardly even figure on my own. Besides who needs them in the age of blogging, as if I could even get even navel-gazier, yes, I did just write that.

next up on the moving train, take the car for a tune up so I can bleed more cash.

2007-09-12T22:34:00.000-07:00

So nearly gone, or my real name is Cassandra

The Irish in the lightwell, I'm convinced are waging a passive war against me. This because I have taken to banging on the window when they host their Wednesday night parties - I am only patient past two AM, and then I get my shrew on. They are moving and have taken to leaving the kitchen light on all night long. I shouldn't care, they are nearly gone and so am I, yet my provoked ire simmers, and I have started to fantasize about throwing rocks. Then again, I have an undercurrent of anger and grief coursing through me, and I think I'd like to be armed with skipping rocks to throw, pointedly and accurately and decidedly blindly at things, at things, at ideals and at ideas and at politics and religions and inattentive drivers, at the hills and at the oceans, just because.

The minutae of such a big move are wearing me down, I get fogged in the details, I want to twitch my nose and be gone already. It's not that I don't secretly love the extra attention, and I have been dining out on my departure for weeks, it's not that I am not grateful for that last reconnection, that last validation of neglected friendships (we get, well, life just happens) I have always been a happy wallflower, and to slink quietly away would have been my first choice. I was secretly pleased when P said I was being an ass, I'll throw you a party. I want to be gone, I don't want to leave.

It's been fifteen years this August, that I have been rooted here in this City of my choosing. I could never, ever hate it. There is too much memory and too much of my exaggeratedly misspent youth still trembling on corners and under mouldering bars, there is too much of me in the skyline, what I see is that here is where I will always be. I told a friend that I was taking days to make the journey to Portland when my apartment has been emptied and the movers have gone, that I expected to weep until Mendocino, tread the sands of savage northern beaches until I had sloughed off the last of my California skin. But that will never happen, I'll be an expat and that is that. I've been an expat before, it was a guise that I flourished in. Besides deciding that I really hate my apartment, yet it's my own, my gilded, dusty cage, I really hate the Irish in the lightwell and their damned kitchen light. Could I be projecting, possibly, likely.

Friday is my last day at work, I am glad that I opted for the time and not the money (how can my brother not have any Blur or any Joy Division in his music collection) all the scattershot and careful weeding I have done in drawers and forgotten crevices begins in earnest on Monday after my massage, fifteen years piled into boxes or left on the sidewalk for the life collectors. If you ask me what I'll miss most, I'll tell you it will be my commute from the City to Marin, across the Golden Gate under varied skies, pelicans and light and quiet waters or rough waters, with that old bitch NPR in the background baiting my tears or angry indifference depending on the state of my hormones. I could have worked another week or so, fuck the money, I want the last, asthmathic breaths of summer, turning ideally into the perfect cornsilk softness that is our Indian Summer, I want days of pearl and evenings of sapphire perfumed by skittering leaves and the sumptuous death of a season, for me it's been a long and lovely and painful season, fifteen seasons, to be precise, fraught with loves and little deaths. I am not sure that I remember it all, there was a fair amount of reckless dancing on bars, and a marriage, a deep bucket of pain, a lot of narcotics, a slew of souls forgotten and a few banished forever. I've been banished myself.

It's getting late, it's always late where I am. I could give two shits about showing up for work as I have a severe case of short-termers disease, besides it's only me and the nineteen year old republican intern in the office tomorrow, happy new year for all you chosen ones. The dirty old lady in me would happily fuck his brains out on the trading floor, perhaps some restraint is called for. Or not...

uh yeah, there is that, too. The fast and furious return of my desire to be heartbroken again, which has blossomed into full fledged she-letchory... starting with my take down of the hair dresser, and not ending with my pornographic love dreams, I think it must register on the level of our primordial pheromones, because walking in the park I got all kinds of attention, I don't think it was strictly my new fabulous tits, but as a buffer they will no doubt serve me well, it was something else, I can only say it was two ounces of mojo, and two ounces of not giving a fuck, shaken and served up with a garnish of open road and zero expectations. Somehow that makes me more desirable than all of my blonde curls and the grief and beauty I carry in the blue and green light of my eyes. I've got a lot to learn from the garishness of confidence. Well, that and the right shoe, and a the understatement of proper foundation garments.

2007-08-25T21:58:00.000-07:00

All the songs I will not write, hurtling towards October

Sometimes you calculate where you will land, flat on your back between someone else's sheets. Since my run away date looms just over the horizon of the following month, I decided to recycle the hairdresser if he would have me. He would and did.

According to the mile stones I watch it's been four years and and several skins since I set foot in his loft. I am not sorry, not at all. Not sorry that he didn't love me afterall, not sorry that I left, nor am I sorry that I got that last taste of vigorous, acrobatic sex to realize once and for all, that I am fundamentally not the same girl I was four years ago, and he wallows in his self same wondering why it gets harder and harder to captivate at 45 -- I bit my tongue, and inwardly thought perhaps if you could slough that thick sheen of selfishness you might have a shot, but you fuck with your dick and not with your soul, I didn't see it then because I was beguiled. It's a blessing and a curse to have the stars struck from your eyes as a true romantic, what girl of clear nights doesn't want to be dazzled by the evening sky and be wrapped in and blissfully muzzled by it's stellar embrace, swirls of musk and night blooming jasmine billowing in the wake of that shuddering trip across the heavens and time and wordlessness.

Then he's done and you haven't come, the heady mists recede, and it's two people in a very comfortable bed making jokes about a relationship four years gone, one goes quiet and gets serious about consequences and what the other might be wanting (hint - not I) as the other would really like to return to her own bed, I can never sleep when I am not used to sharing a mattress and limbs crossing, I light up and flame like a roman candle, I try to exercise will over my heat, moving it from the spot where his arm lies over my lower back to the foot I have slid out from under the duvet into the stillness of the room, fifty feet above the muffled freeway and the red stream of tail lights. It never works. I have woken with hand prints and seams, and wrinkled pillow cases seared onto my skin, and the strange case in a bitterly cold january night in New York after far too much scotch where I became one with my pyjama bottoms and spent an unhappy morning chipping them from my thighs.

I digress.

I have digressed so far from my original thoughts that I should be off to the serenity of my sheets.

2007-08-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

Things I did in Portland this weekend that are unlike me

I wore a dress without a bra.
I rode a bike and liked it.
I drank beer and liked it.
I made some good shots whilst playing pool.

I was naturally friendly, and I liked it.
I went to Home Depot.

I bought an Ipod and reluctantly joined the 21st century.
My brother loaded it with a boggling number of songs.

I looked at houses with a real estate agent - three I coveted, three were awful.
I met a nice girl on the plane.

I caught a glimpse of wide open possibility and was not afraid.

I was genuinely surprised at the ease with which I slid into a new skin, I was genuinely surprised at how I was enchanted with notion of a new place. I was even more surprised that I didn't cry in the bathroom at the airport, like I have on every flight back to San Francisco.

On the flight up I was watching the topography of California out the window, how well I know it. I got lost after Crater Lake, how I know it from the air like the lines of my palm, so surprisingly well, because who but the deviners of the future ever pays any attention to life lines and love lines. I kept an ear cocked for the underpinnings of grief, but they never came, still haven't come, now that I am back in my apartment, listening to my gadget as the tendrils of fog embalm my car and seep through my walls, feeling positively unluddite-like. I am befuddled by the relentless possitivity, I keep sending probing fingers to the sensitive spots and insecure organs to test for tenderness, yet the metaphysical flesh is resilient, radiating some foreign perfume of sublime hopefulness, it's so alien and feels so good, that though it's late and I have to go to work in the morning, I feel obliged to capture this oddidity and describe it, before the night ghasts and the burden of the quotidien come and strip it from me.

I think, that upon my return from my future city, and as the plane banked over the twin rivers, over the span of that sliver of a city, that I just might be brightly happy.

I think I owe it to my brother, who seems to really want me there, and to his lovely future wife for their enthusiastic welcome.

Alors merci, mon frere, quelque part il y a une belle chanson qui t'attends.

The weather wasn't gorgeous, it rained, but it was a warm rain. I found it to be romantic.

p.s. earbuds hurt my ears.

2007-08-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

The Fair, The Fair

I don't know how many of you out there grew up in a small town, but if you did chances are, you know all about the county fair.

It was the fairy tale ending to my adolescent summers, I held out my virtue and my allowance for that extravagenza, mind you, this was in the days before the immediacy of the internets and cell phones, only a smattering of the well to do had answering machines.

In some ways it's heartbreaking to see it through grown up eyes, the midway so small, so small town and dusty, when at the cherry height of adolescence it was vast and full of noisy and bright promise.

(in an email to my girlfriends I said we should hit the midway as we did, as a pack of feral girls) in truth I lasted a half hour, shaken by the smallness, overwhelmed by the 'necks with beers in hand, the scent of brawl heavy in the air, and my name called out, emma here and emma there, all the people you really never want to have to say hello to, but the laws of small town means you have to stop there in the middle of the pigshit, next to the monster truck venue to make polite with a mother of five in your class... and the connections get evermore glasscene and politic.

which by way of a long story short was how I wound up at the 20th reunion of the class of '87. How I really didn't want to be there. Everybody is married quasi locally, everybody has the requisite 2.5 kids, even the dorks, jesus christ the interloper junior that is I.... so, where are you. san francisco. lovely. kids? no. hapless marriage, no kids.... oh.... have you seen little junior?? feign cooing over little junior, run off to smoke outlawed cigarette in quiet corner.... make note to whomever is going to undertake my 20th, please have an open bar and a better DJ.

I't s not that I can't empathize with their inability to categorize me, (or not) gay, urban, divorcee, sad sack, fundamentally unable to land a man -- where I had to remind myself, unto myself, you, long time shiny girl, I shot down your future husband, BECAUSE I WAS TOO URBANE...... and then last night since I wasn't anywhere drunk, but I was watching closely I had a minor epiphany that has everything to do with being from a small town, and staying in a small town. This man was hungry for a partner, and I was too young and too full of the promise of city, plus he had a kid, but what I think they saw in each other was not love but recognition, so they got married and had a kid. Maybe they are the richer for it.

And then speeding back to my city, after the fair, and after the reunion, unencumbered by fog, in the majesty of late afternoon sunlight, to the gays, to the gays. To home, sweet, steep hills, squeezed between bridges, with all of those friends in between.

Heaven help me but I still can't fall out of love, not with this city, not with this, not with him. heaven help me, because I am pretty close to surrendering up my flushed coattails and shout to the world from my flushed cheeks that I really am almost ready to be heartbroken again, really, really. but not yet.

_____________

and on the flip side.
no more rumination, cold hard reasoning.

I'll have to get out and throw my charm on.

But before the unsavory, savage edge of an unfamiliar, future reality there is the hopeless gold of prospect, my blue heaven just beyond my grasp somewhere between upsideown karaoke and pinball and the hope and the hope that my world will be turned on it's heel and out of the darkness and the blur of neon you might come and love me, and it would just be us in the middle of the river without life jackets on, but that is only really just a pleasant day dream. Aint no love coming for me, aint no man hanging on my periphery, whatever love I drill I'll have to capture in the dust motes, I, well armed for the etherial, I only ever hope to be noticed with all of this tactile and forgiving armour, I only ask to be noticed, I only ask to be heard, that and I miss you, and I do and always on the back roads of my father's maps, mostly I just miss your absence, who ever you are on the left side of the bed.

2007-08-06T22:20:00.001-07:00

Better living through plastic surgery - part II

In a very literal sense I have been fog bound. In the metaphysical sense I am fog bound. I cry easily and yet I am mostly peaceable, me and my scars are moving forward on some great tide of my own making, I surf the crest with my newly gravity defying breasts, in search of a great, soft sandy dune to crash into.

I drove to my parents two mondays ago for phase II of my remodel, in which the girls get redone.... And then my mother called as I was crawling across the super heated floor of the Sacramento Valley - well, I called Dr. Boob and he says he can do your eyes too. Me, stupefied. She - well it makes sense since you are going to be in recovery, also, economically. Me, still stupefied. She - so see him on your way up, are you there? Me, jeebus, mother!!

(I have had deep bags under my eyes since I was twelve, I get that congenital puffiness and permanent purpling about my eyes - so yes, it's true I was strong-armed to having a lower eye lift by mother, and no, I won't be sorry)

Same drill, wake up the following morning just before the break of dawn, wind up late anyway, look forward to the narcotic, skeeved out by the chill of the IV, getting marked up, the nurse fiddling with the music, mmmm more narco......

..... it's seven hours later, when they jolt my system out of it's ether, I get tugged at wrassled with, no idea which end is up, and they shoot me full of demerol, I will wake up 36 hours later.
I will think I need to pee, I will think I should be hungry, but I am nothing but inert and will remain so for awhile. And for awhile I freaked out silently, but good and hard, because I was fairly certain that a vital part of me hadn't returned and was forever lost to anesthesia.

This was hard, I am not in unbearable pain, but my pain gauge is such that I trudge though it, the only thing that truly wracks me is a migraine. But three surgeries and the evil anesthesia and the equally evil and constipating vicodin, really knocked my way off my axis, and thoroughly ravaged all of my short term recall. I can hardly remember what I had for dinner.

Let us not speak of my physical state, when I was finally able to focus my gaze on my reflection. Monstrous, truly, horribly monstrous, had I been capable of expressing anything but half a grunt and half a moan, I would have surely wailed and shattered every mirror in the house.... Two blackened, swollen shiners, two drains, filling with brackish, bloody pinned to my bandages, and the horror of knowing that beneath the gauze, I'd been cut and sewn, and I'd done it gladly and paid many, many dollars for the priviledge of being mutilated, and I was pissed, and sullen and freely blamed my mother. Oh yes I did. I blamed her for my black eyes and my loss of sense of self, I blamed her for being a poor nurse to my sullen patient, I blamed her for my inability to read or concentrate on the television, I blamed her for the damn bird that died at my feet. And I spent a good amount of time sitting by the pool, under the umbrella, no sunshine for me, what with all the antibiotic coursing through my veins, fending off infection, I blamed her for not being able to tan, too, but I sat under the umbrella and had pleasant hallucinations watching the wind in the trees and slowly I came back to myself. I ate a lot of tomatoes. And drank a lot of water, and slept dreamlessly, at great lengths.

To her credit, she washed my hair in the sink, and shouldered my ill will with as much grace as she could muster. Neither I or my mother are nursey types, we don't puke at fluids or effluvia, but we aren't huggy and we don't croon, we tend to be businesslike about the business of healing, which means I was left to my solitude for the most part, which generally suits me just fine, I withdrew, and have remained withdrawn to the fronts where I am healing, concentrating on cells and tissue, and I am plum fucking worn out. Fighting on three fronts, I get back from work and nap.

I got back on Tuesday and by Thursday I took my and my new girls and my black eyes out to dinner at Ame, I figured I could hide or I could own it, if anyone looked askance I would tell them the dude lost.

As of tomorrow it will have been two weeks, I still have a long way to go to be right and I am trying to be patient.

The bruising is mostly gone from my eyes and I think they are going to be great, as for the girls, well.... honestly, I couldn't be more pleased, they are going to be pretty fucking righteous and perky. I can see that my tennis serve will be served well, I will be able to go out into the night with the scantest of panties and no bra...... the scarring is mostly hidden, I should have done this years ago..... And good lord, I close my eyes and start dreaming of sex and all is well is good until my new breasts fall off and I awake with a jolt - what the fuck is that about?

Oh yeah - I lost count at two hundred when the sutures came out -- pretty crazy, I drove home across the still super heated valley floor into the freezing fog feeling pretty glib and calling myself frankenboob, it's been murky, foggy ever since, I miss the sun, even if I can't be in it, it's fucking August, end of summer after all.

2007-07-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

Prelude

I was sitting in my father's study earlier, trying to wrest my thoughts from the murk of anesthesia when a bird flew into the window at my eye line just beyond the monitor.

I threw open the door and ran down the stairs and there it was a gross beak, a beautiful little bird, yellow striations and white spots, a fierce little mask and it was dying.

I ran back into the house and grabbed a wad of paper towels and a zip lock bag and I thought I should take the kitchen mallet, but I couldn't.

I ran back down the stairs to where the bird lay, and I wept uncontrollably, inconsolably because I could not kill it, I could not kill this frail, lovely creature and ease it's pain. I watched it die, helpless and angry that I could not order my clumsy fingers to be quick and throrough, and I cried and I cried. It flipped onto it's side, it's tiny claws already in rictus and then it's light blinked out and the bird was gone.

My mother found me there, at the base of the stairs, in the heat with the corpse of a small bird at my feet, sweating through my sutures, furious at my lack of stoicism to be able to grant these small mercies.

More later on the surgery, suffice it to say the old girls are off and the new ones are stitched. I can't say more than that because I have not had the courage to look, and can't really as I am bandaged like a mummy....

2007-07-22T21:12:00.000-07:00

The goodbye girls

I should be packing, I should have been packing, doing things, like cleaning and weeding books. But I haven't. In my sincerest dorktasticness, I went to hit balls in Marin and ended up reading Harry Potter poolside, could not be wrenched from the story. Had intended to save it for the recovery after the completion of my remodel, operation new tits on Tuesday. Instead I finished it last night, then my eyeballs fell out and sought respite under the bed.

No spoilers here, but I was satisfied with the epic's conclusion.

I should have been packing and I should be packing.

Instead I spent hours with foils on my head and insufferable minutes under the dryer and spent many dollars on strands of hair. I am quite perfectly blonde with undertones of strawberry to perfume my ego. And then I wrote a sizeable check. Does anyone know of a really, really good colorist in Portland? Also someone who can manage my curls? also a good manicurist? Do they have chinese ladies in portland who speak incessantly as they competently file my rapidly growing claws - everything on me grows fast, hair, nails, ass.... How about pilates? anyone know a good pilates studio in portland? Oregon, that is.

I was thinking about driver's licenses as I was walking in the park this morning. I have several of my old boyfriend's licenses, which is probably silly in the age of identity theft, still I thought it was grandly romantic to take up that which the beloved was going to discard. Infact I have the drunk dialer's license, I looked at it this afternoon -- circa 1986, you know, back when the fax was revelutionary and we all scoffed at the nerds hunched over the apple IIe's. I have a my old passports, but I never kept any driver's licenses, there is a student ID or two floating around, from this institution or that, but as a driver, I have only ever been a californian. It occurs to me that I will have to have an Oregon driver's license. It occurs to me that I will have to register my car for new plates and as much as I have been having fun in my head playing grown up dress up with real estate online I can't imagine driving a car that belongs in Oregon, flashing my ID in a state that doesn't have sales tax nor sell liquor on Sundays. I can't imagine not being a Californian, it's the only skin I know. The years I spent in France I was an ardent and defensive Californian before I was ever an American. D'ou viens-tu? La Californie, et surtout pas LA.

I have trouble thinking that identity is as simple as a mantle to don or to shed, a sense of place is as deeply ingrained as my name, though I have long lived away from the town that I grew up in, it will always be home. I think even if my parents were no longer there, it would still be home, even if I never saw it again, it would still be home, if not in the definitive sense, then in something abstract, the notion of place. Where I could return to, and not even necessarily be welcome, but the pavement and the trees and long gone shops hold some vestage of me, like sap, like tar, like memory.

Or maybe I just haven't found it yet, the other home, in a person or a place.

I realize that most of what I have just written is the product of a relatively fortunate and happy childhood. Growing up in a small town the first thing I wanted to do was leave, but I left under an umbrella of benevolence and a rather large dollop of idyll. I was speaking to someone I had just met at a party this afternoon and we were swapping so-you-think-you-grew-up-in-a-small- town stories and his were full of a sort of abject bloodless horror and mine are full of meanderings in cars with the friends I am still close with, minus the casualties that the road and booze took, and combined they took many.

I had a point, and the point was that I should be packing, I dunno, non binding tee shirts and the like for phase II. In truth I am prevaricating because I am a little bit terrified. Now that I know what I am in for, now that I have experienced, continue to experience the trauma of alteration. Like how my sides still feel like modelling clay and as my flesh revives it fucking stings and clothes chaffe, and I should like to be suspended in jello or outer-space. So great in addition to my core having been supremely pummeled, now I get the countless sutures.....

I am not sure why I am so worked up, I want this, I am ready for it and all the rest, it's not the pain and it's not even the scarring, it's maybe the definitiveness. In terms of embracing change, this will be the herald that I carry, even if no one else can see it, it will be imprinted on my skin, it will be a talisman, more meaningfull than a tatoo. When they revive my inert system and hustle me out to my mother's car that ephemeral point of demarcation will have been penetrated. This is just me and my arbitrary set of milestones and adjustable morality, but this beyond moving to another state, this is huge. So you will pardon me if I hesitate, and if I grieve, perhaps some of you out there and far away can empathize, other will think I am just a silly, spoiled girl with body issues, all of you would be right.

For all my florid virtuousity I couldn't quite ever succinctly, efficiently verbalize that twin states of terror and hopefulness that have pitching me hither and thither, I could never effectively relay how my tits are involved, you will just have to trust me when I say that when you begin to molt all the casual markers of identity, like skins and places and breasts, it's very disconcerting to someone who is by her nature deeply loyal, and perhaps to her discredit, imagine it this way, I'd be the last mussel adhering to the dying pier that she loved for no reason other than it was the only thing that she knew.

So the letting go is in places surprisingly slippery in other it's scaling tall mountains perfectly naked and without ropes.

ps. I took pictures tonight of my goodbye girls for posteritie's sake, maybe someday when I am proficient in the internets I will post them.