This Just In

Unbelievable. 5’o’clock local news, top story, this just in: it’s raining. No, really, that’s it. That’s the top story. Rain on December 30th in Portland, OR; who’d of thought? In other news, cops have shot a suicidal man carrying a 13” butcher knife. Wait, it’s raining. This just in: cops remind you that drinking and driving over the holiday will have consequences. Oh, and new at six: “as the rain keeps falling the flood levels continue to rise.” C’mon. It’s raining. Not flooding. It’s just raining.

What to write?

What to write? What to "blog"? Since jumping from MySpace blogging, everything I puke out seems so didactic. And so I've deleted it all. Why would anyone want to hear what I have to say? If they would, why would they want to hear me say what they could hear on cable news over and over and over?
What do I find inspiring? Maybe that's a start.
My friend Mark has a site with pictures he takes: doors, windows, landscapes. Somehow they all speak to the massive gentrification of globalization without detracting from the pure impact of each form's lines and color.
What else? Barns weighed down by the elements. The west. Tumbleweeds. Idaho. The scary, rapid growth of Portland,OR.
The characters of my life. The women of my life. The selfish and the selfless.
American and English Lit. Society. Decorum. The Custom of the Country.
Pure Language. Deconstruction. Translation. Miscommunication. Irony.
Rothko. Kahlo. Polke. Mondrian. Warhol.
Icons: Dean, Monroe, Queen Elizabeth, Kennedy, Lennon (John); how does this happen?
That transient, slightly opaque, milky sea glass blue-green like certain trucks I suspect have specks of rust like southwest rocks: a color always almost perfect, never quite right.
That's a start.

Snowmygod!

Damnit. I should be studying for my family law final. But, IT'S SNOWING! How can I study during WINTER STORM 2005?!! I mean, c'mon people, if you live in Portland then you know that even a dusting of snow means a MAJOR WEATHER CRISES. As such, every citizen of Portland must fulfill their duty as a snow-fearing person and do absolutly nothing but FREAK OUT and WATCH THE NEWS 24 HOURS A DAY. I mean shit, I look forward to this every year. We didn't get this last year. I don't want to study. I want to sit on my couch and watch never ending looped footage of cars sliding into other cars. I want my totally unjustified fear of driving in bad weather validated on a minute by minute basis. I want Tri-Met to fuck up, the Mayor to order me home and the city to shut down. This is Portland, home of the 1/2 inch snow week: and I LOVE IT!

July 7, etc.

I am thinking about London only all I am thinking is the part of the Clash song going "London Falling, London Falling."

2. Total disconnect between the thoughts in my head and the dear in headlights when I am put in front of a room of people and expected to speak.

3. I wish I could have said "your honor, I object to this pompous display of flowery language that is totally severed from any common sense, straight talking explanation of why plaintiff's testimony is relevant."

4. "Your honor, I object to counsel's ignorance of what colors look good on her."

5. "Your honor, I object to the impression that this girl wants to be a lawyer so she can say she is a lawyer and not because she gives a shit about anyone or anything."

6. "Your honor, I object to the fact that I am a good person but I have been bamboozeled by this bullshit display and so all that I have to say is 'your honor, I object to this testimony as irrelevant."

7. "Your honor, I object to anyone who gives a speech from a typed, single-spaced page when they could say what they mean much more clearly in a well spoken paragraph."

8. Good. Bad. The whole dichotomy. Today I buy it. Today I buy stock in it. Today I want it tattooed on every forehead at birth. And if I am bad I will be bad, and if I am good I will be ashamed or better. Island of good, Island of bad. Total segregation. Who bombed London? The bad guys. What do I object to? The bad things. The good things. Now, isn't that so much easier? Yes, quite efficient. I like that.

9. And what were they doing the evening of July 7th on their shiny laptops? Instant messaging, and watching baseball and checking Ebay, of course.

Live Strong, Die Hard

It started last summer with those yellow rubber Live Strong bracelets. Lance Armstrong dating Sheryl Crow. Dateline specials on the death of Katie Couric's husband. Within a month, every idiot on the street had bought their token of testicular approval. Obviously, they had all united behind the health of balls. No, this was not a fashion statement. This was definitely not a fashion statement.

I found myself wondering how long it took for each Live Strong bracelet to biodegrade. I imagined millions of Live Strong bracelets filling a dump the size of a football field. I imagined the fumes of millions of Live Strong bracelets as they burned. The question became, at the end of the day, do the proceeds benefiting testicular cancer from the sales of the Live Strong bracelets outweigh the cost to the environment?

A year later, Live Strong, and testicular cancer, have become, well, so last year. We have moved on, and past, the Kabala string bracelet (arguably more environmentally friendly). The pink Breast Cancer bracelet (which never quite caught on, making me wonder if people prefer yellow over pink, or balls over tits).

And just when I thought nothing could top the Live Strong craze, I began to see them. The plastic ribbon troop support car decals. We have passed a charitable line, I fear, where we support our own egos and fragile sense of morality more than any cause.

From a high point somewhere, Derrida views a junk yard of immortal rubber symbols, howling with laughter to the lull of "Live Strong: Die Hard, Live Strong: Die Hard."

Fragments

Shelley and I were talking the other night about that child poet who died and was memorialized on such manipulating shows as Oparah and Larry King Live and how prophetic he seemed and she said he strangely restored her belief that maybe when you become a self-actualized person you just die.

After that massive train wreck the cable news channels repeatedly show an interview of a local police officer of some sort. I don't remember anything he said except "I'm not too proud to cry." I'm not too proud to cry, I'm not too proud too cry: I'm too scared to cry.

This just in: Wolf Blitzer Reports: Was Lincoln Gay?

This week I have found fragments of the perfect hue of blue in: a tsunami crashing into a small Southeast Asian town, The Life Aquatic, a building on the Portland waterfront, his eyes.

I've invited my mother to come visit my school. I hesitate too long when she asks if she can sleep on my couch for the night. My voice is echoing into the phone and I feel like I'm yelling into a well.

Sometimes experiences feel united, sometimes they feel terribly divided. I idealize growing up as some gelled communal experience. Not you over there and you over here, but all of us in the same room.

I start school on Monday. I'm ready to be busy: I'm not ready to be back in that crowd. When I'm there, I feel like I'm living two lives.

I don't want to complain. I want to want. And I also want room for it all.

Inside Out

Maybe we are not who we think we are: is there ever a perfect intersection of our perception of ourselves and others' of us?

Last week Shelley and I talked about how we construct memories. She told me about a theory positing that a memory exists perfectly intact until we recall it. Then, every time we pull that memory from the file of our minds, we mar it a bit in the way we latch on to bits and pieces, filing it back just a bit warped. The more we take it out of the file and examine it, the more we rewrite it. The memories we feel most certain about, the ones we cling fastest to, we're actually the farthest removed from factually.

This morning's fog lay over the pavement opaquely greenish-grey. I wondered how each of us identified ourselves; how far removed we each are from the way we are perceived. Which of the very experiences that have defined us have been completely erased from public perception? All the little pieces that each of us feel are crucial to anyone "truly understanding us" which make us feel isolated because no one recognizes. The dark pits of the nerve centers that no longer move into our behavior yet gently pulse in the pools of our eyes. The things I know you think about you. You still think: I am a junkie. I am his girlfriend. I am a bastard. I am crazy. I am a drunk. I will never graduate. I am white trash. I am the fat girl. I am the faggot out-cast. I am the sinner.

I remember the first moment when I realized my outsides had far outrun my past and my insides. I was 20. I'd just moved to Portland. I worked at Restoration Hardware. On a break, I lit a cigarette, and one of my coworkers said "Oh my god, you so don't seem like a smoker." "What?" "You're so, good," she said. This seemed hilarious to me. I'd left California, in part, to clean up. I'd been prescribed Neorontin to make me nauseous any time I drank before I left. Done enough drugs that I didn't ask when I was offered. Just left the man I lived with after my mother had called the cops from Washington because he wouldn't let me leave the house. Spent months taking handfuls of prescription pills so I could tolerate night long shouting matches. But, to anyone who couldn't see my past, I seemed like the "good girl" type.

How and why do we remember what we remember? What are we facilitating? Are we? Are memories like pictures, or are they more like the pictures we wish we'd taken, but didn't?

Who are you today?

Walking Home

"Is it going to snow?" "No."

Only cold rain pattering cement and sometimes dinging against metal as I walk my walk home. Someone on NW 20th has hung blue lights and a white lit star on their balcony, and I think "some people can make the holidays." The air feels less cold than damp, and I feel too warm for once in my jacket and scarf. Past the Starbucks and wished for summer and stealing morning papers from their entrance. I miss walking through the neighborhood and being able to point to the windows of everyone I know: our neighborhood. But you are gone, and you are gone, and I remain. The parameter of the power plant remains embarrassingly naked and sterile and can I miss what I never missed? I remember talking in the garden last August. She says it's almost fall, and will she fall in love?

I want snow. Still air. Everything frozen. Crisp. Somehow this reminds me of the cherry trees in bloom, as though summer approaches. I'm thinking of why the didn't works didn't work. I cannot decide if I have loved once or twice. I used to think that love felt like breathing. I always think of breathing. I used to think that the measure of love was whether you continue to love someone, even as you can no longer be in love with them. I do not know what I think now.

I can remember the mark of our loss of innocence. Not that. Years past; the first time we lied.

Last night he wore a t-shirt that said "Love has no opposite." I do not remember love, I do not know, but that sounds right.

Someone signed a letter today with the admission that they are lonely. I remember saying out loud "I feel so alone," only to discover he had fallen asleep. And I just cried.

Walking past Mark's old apartment I realize I miss the camaraderie of the first term of law school. I worry that we have moved past that. I worry that I just don't care anymore.

In the kitchen, I think that I don't trust people who are too idealistic. And I wonder.

I wish that someone was pulling me into their body as I faced the wall falling asleep. But I don't know if you can trust even this. It always feels like a new language.

I’m wondering how we trust and when we feel less alone.