what is left behind

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I go long stretches without writing. I remember how small I am, how much there already is. I go to Powell’s and see all the lonely books, seemingly without value, crowding the high wooden shelves. The bookstore almost begs you. Please, read our books. And even then, the creative industrial complex is astoundingly inefficient- so much brilliance is lost every moment, without document. Brilliance like radio waves in the air, moving through everything, dissipating. Like schools of fish. The ocean bottomless. Fishermen pulling up great nets of fish. Toiling to bring them to shore. And then leaving them to rot in the market because they cannot, even, be sold.

In the end it is not the book that has value. Day in and day out, it is not the book that is sold. What is a book? A bunch of paper that begins to decompose immediately. A dead thing. The book is not what is sold. What is sold is the answer to a question that has no answer. An antidote for a hunger that was never meant to be satiated. Life.

What has value and what does not have value. Why do we buy stuff.

I go to estate sales sometimes. Do you go to estate sales? This is what an estate sale is:

When you are small your mother dresses you for church in a cream-colored dress that she has made. Your mother is young, her face is like a lamp, and she wears rhinestone barrettes in her hair that have already begun to tarnish. Your father, who does not speak, smokes vanilla-scented tobacco in a pipe whose wood is dulled from the oil of his hands. Your grandmother likes to fuss over her collection of yellow crystal candy dishes and one day, when you are living alone, you will inherit them.

Your first husband has a closet of identical button-shirts from Sears. These shirts wear at the elbows and grow thin and soft until he is injured at his job, after which he spends his time in a white undershirt, carving small ducks from pieces of driftwood that he pulls from the river. You leave him because he will not stop drinking, and because his disappointment gets all over you, like ink.

You meet a man who is a painter, who paints boats. He has a small wooden shed full of paintings of boats. He has no silverware in his kitchen, and his canopener is dulled to the point of uselessness. You move into the painter’s house and order an expensive set of pots because, you say, you can pass them on to your grandchildren.

At some point you become infatuated with clowns. At some point you discover you are unable to become pregnant. At some point you conceive and have a son. The son grows up and disappears, as though the stage beyond adolescence was rays of light or static electricity. You had documented his existence in dozens of photo albums and the albums seem to laugh at you now, and so you leave them in their cardboard box, way up in the attic. The painter has a stroke followed by a long illness until his death, one week before the death of your mother. The last boat he painted, an aluminum skiff on the stormy pacific ocean, was never finished, and you have wedged it in the garage with the others.

It is hard, now, to find ways to feel important. Your final mission in life, the acquisition of clowns, grows to consume all of your time. A stray cat has kittens beneath the back deck and you abduct two of them, locking them in the house. You try to make them tame but they hide in the back of the linen closet and sometimes, at night, they crouch on either side of you in the bed, and make noises like the wind whistling before a hurricane. You cannot touch them, and their greasy fur lies on their bodies in an unnatural way. Still, you love them more than you can bear.

After your death, your son reappears. He’s been living in an ashram in India, and his only possessions are a wooden bowl and a journal, almost finished, which he forgets on the plane. He opens the thick curtains in your house, and drags the boxes, like corpses, from the attic. He can feel you everywhere but he cannot speak to you, and although he has sworn off regret like some might swear off alcohol, he stands before the rows of dusty clowns, huddled on the shelves that the boat-painter built for you, and he feels it pulling at his pantlegs like a needy child.

He slowly works his way through your house, inventorying the usefulness of things. When he finds the box of small wooden ducks, whittled by your previous husband, he is overcome. He meets an old friend, now working as a school teacher, for drinks, and the friend explains the usefulness of having an estate sale. During the sale your son sits on the lawn in a folding chair and watches, bewildered, as strangers clutch at his mother’s things. One woman, opening all the cabinets looking for old letters and stashes of half-dollar bills, finds the cats. They lunge at her face in terror, hissing like hellmouths. Your son wears oven mitts and puts them in a cardboard box, onto which he piles books. After the sale he takes them to the local animal shelter where, unadoptable, they are put to sleep.

The house is put onto the market, and your son becomes impatient. The small town holds so much meaning for him, and the memories drag at his ankles like bricks. He is eager to cover over these old memories with newer, more ideal memories, although, after a number of decades, he will realize that this was never really possible. He will attempt, and fail, to sail across the atlantic, and he will fall in love with a number of women that he will refuse to marry. He will tend an apple orchard in France and lose his first finger to a chainsaw, but the old memories will never really fade. In fact it is the opposite, and the old memories will always be the strongest, until one day they are the only memories left at all, like a stone chimney when the rest of the house has burned away.

What has value?

Hermitism, youth, and the goddess of decomposition.

It is springtime, I have springtime insomnia. I become furiously excited and then, it rains, and I wilt, and my excitement turns to cold fear, and I lay in bed and pick apart my brain, wondering what I am doing wrong and how I can fix it.

This afternoon, while standing over the sink in my trailer, drinking water from an old blue mason jar and watching the rain, I came to a realization-

There is always the same amount of suffering. If I lived in the forest, in a tree- if there was no electricity or plastic and I got to walk barefoot, all the time, in the forest- life would not be awful in the ways it is awful now, but it would be awful in its own, special way. Maybe this sounds obvious to you but I often tell myself that life is hard just because I am in the city, and blah blah blah, if there were enough people living on enough land I would live there and life would be so much better- but then today, drinking water from my jar, I admitted to myself that this is not true.

One year ago I heard the saying “One happy thing is every happy thing” and it struck me like a bell, and made me feel less fidgety. And then this afternoon I realized that one awful thing, too, is every awful thing- that there is no hierarchy of awful, there is no escaping awful.

The past three days I’ve been a little sick, and also depressed, I think, and I missed class and I walked my dog to the library, through the beautiful neighborhood with the huge trees leafing out and snowing blossoms everywhere, and I checked out Craig Thompson’s Habibi, and then, back at my trailer, that is what I did, read Habibi, for three days. Habibi is overwhelmingly beautiful, and if you haven’t read it, you should. It is expensive but if you remind yourself that the library exists, then you remember that life can be easy, too. Also, in my trailer, with the rain coming down, I read James Baldwin, and I started the Grapes of Wrath again. Then today I did writing exercises with my friend Sweethome, in her kitchen, and for our second prompt we each made a list and then exchanged lists, and wrote from that. In the list we had a dead person and I had put James Baldwin in mine, and Sweethome didn’t know who James Baldwin was, so in her piece she had James Baldwin dying on a rocky plateau in Russia, mourned by a boy with wheat-colored hair. I thought it was appropriate. Sweethome is a magical, shiny yoga teacher who makes me feel calm and who appears, as yoga teachers do, as though she will live forever.

I keep thinking of moving to the desert but then I think of the loneliness, of leaving all my friends behind. I think of a wind-swept expanse of cracked earth and just myself, alone, slowly going mad from the solitude. I tend towards hermitism as it is, here in this teeming city of extremely likeable people. There are so many friends I already do not see often enough, and I live less than two miles from most of them. I beat people back with sticks until they forget about me, and then I can approach them on my own terms, like a feral cat. I become overwhelmed, for some unfathomable reason, when people actually want to make plans with me. I don’t know what I am afraid of, but just thinking about it makes me want to lock the door of my trailer, turn up the space heater, climb in bed with a stack of books and my dog, and not leave for many days. I am, as you can imagine, the absolute worst person to get into a relationship with. And of course I tend to date people who want to hang out constantly. And I am always disappointing them, and they are forced to psycho-analyze my behavior in some attempt to find the “pattern” so that they can figure out my “intimacy issues”, as if existence were a tapestry woven neatly of tidy little threads. And the people that I date, the ones who want to hang out all the time, and be married, and have babies, forever, also tend to date people like me, who mostly just want to be by themselves. I don’t know why this is except that it’s the way that everything is.

Speaking of friends, my friend Madeline is moving away this summer and it makes me very sad. Madeline is my oldest Portland friend and also one of my closest friends. For nearly a decade our lives have been parallel, coming apart and then together again, like a braid. When I lived in a yurt on the Olympic peninsula she was my only friend out there, aside from the stars and the elk, who would huff, just beyond the yellow circle of my porchlight. That was a hard year for Madeline, and she spent much of the winter weeping in the pile of blankets that was her bed, on the upper floor of a hundred year-old farmhouse on a dark country road in the middle of the forest. I would visit her, and pet her cat, and sit in front of the woodstove. Her housemates would have made chicken soup and biscuits and the kitchen would be filled with steam. On sunny days Madeline would go to the barn, where a trapeze hung from the rafters and she would swing around and around on it, like a monkey.

Madeline and I met in 2003. I was twenty-one and we were both staying in a small peaked house that got so much traffic from overly-eager anarchists like ourselves that it felt more like a community center than a house, and the FBI would occasionally visit, which I thought was really, really cool. It was summer and Madeline wore short-shorts and a leopard-print top that she’d freeboxed. She was really tan and her hair was wild, like she’d been electrocuted. She carried the skin of a housecat with her everywhere, she’d found it in the road and she was slowly working it with her knife, to make it soft. That’s how we all were. There was nothing subtle about any of us. I, for my part, was just beginning to use freight trains and the fact that I could live without money to prove, once and for all, that I actually had an identity.

Of course young anarchists are the foot-soldiers of gentrification, and so it was no surprise when it turned out that our house was at the very center of the newest hip neighborhood of rapidly gentrifying Portland, like right at the exact intersection of the very center of the most desirable new neighborhood (where, of course, the black people have always lived). And so we were all evicted so that the landlord could sell our dilapidated, one-bedroom shotgun shack (that was never meant to house eleven people), and it could be painted a cheerful green, and it is now, somewhat inadequately, a storefront.

Madeline was also the inspiration for my story Madge and Pansy, which some nice person then made into an audio recording which you can listen to on your computer, part one and two.  She’s the inspiration for a lot of my writing, actually.

Madeline is moving to Bellingham, which is a place I know nothing about except it’s rainier than Portland, and much closer to Canada. And I have a cousin who lived there once, and he would smoke pot and drink coffee and go to the beach and have epiphanies. I want to say that I’ll visit Madeline in Bellingham, in the moldering old mansion where I imagine her living, but it’s hard, right now, to imagine going anywhere that is more rainy that this. I don’t, actually, want her to move to Bellingham. I want her to move to New Mexico with me. I want to take all my friends to New Mexico with me, in a caravan. We can gentrify a neighborhood somewhere in the desert, and start this process all over again. Or we’ll go out into the desert and build our own neighborhood, from old trailers. We’ll have chickens and goats and there will be babies and feral kittens and lots of life and death. And none of the trailers will have mold in them, because it will be the desert. In the desert, objects last forever. Here in the rainforest there is a vicious beast called Decomposition, and she stalks your houses, your buildings, your objects left out in the elements. She injects them with her seed, which is small droplets of water. Small droplets of water to feed the moss, the mycelium, the primary decomposers. Powerful forces to tumble your house of cards. Decomposition thinks that cities are just unruly leaf piles, she works her magic to turn them back into forest floor. We hammer away, prop things up, tie things together with twine. We are faster, more nimble, but still it feels almost impossible.

I am talking about the moss, of course, growing on the caulking that seals the outside edges of my trailer. This summer I will scrub my trailer, and paint it, but for now it is slowly being eaten.

One awful thing is every awful thing, and now, I think, I can sleep.

out of the fire into the fire

Spring is a tempest and daffodils are obscene, who went under the hood of the world and changed everything. Yellow sun, you cruel trickster, my life was fine until you came back. Now, in retrospect, everything was lacking. Why does the world have this power over me/why do I live in this rainy place. I think about moving to New Mexico- I have never stopped in New Mexico, only blasted through it on the freight train. When you are riding the sunset route from Alabama to LA there are no crew changes in New Mexico. The train barrels beneath thunderstorms at seventy miles an hour, way off in the desert can be seen ramshackle houses patched with plywood, laundry lines, spotted horses. You sit up and watch the empty desert. It is too windy to speak. The horizon is clay-colored mountains and at night, there are stars.

There is an acupuncture school in New Mexico, that is what I tell myself when I think about moving there. The school is arduous and expensive, as acupuncture schools tend to be, and the program lasts four years. But when I think about moving to New Mexico there are fears, and also I know that there is no greener grass, that reality is a weighted scale, that you can only move out of the fire into the fire. But oh, I am so tired of the rain! I want to move to New Mexico so that I can become tired of new, more novel things. Tired of the sun! I would like to be tired of the sun. I would like to ache for the rainforest, I would like to imagine the dripping cedars and the thick green moss. I would like to squint, instead, in the bright, endless daylight of the desert. Despite my longing for the rainforest, I would like to feel the optimism of the round yellow sun, every single day.

I know that I cannot grow larger, that I can only hold so many things, and so every new thing I add pushes some other thing out. I lie in bed at night, with the sound of the rain on the roof of my trailer and I wonder, is it possible to be happy in the desert?

Do I have readers in the desert? Are you happy there? Tell me.

spreeeeeng!

Portland winter is the challenge, portland summer is the reward. I forget how much the sun fucking means to me. It’s so weird, to take something for granted like that, to not even know how much you miss it, to have it siphoned away in increments so that you don’t even know what it is that you’re missing, you just ache. And then, SUN! Real physical warmth from our bright friend in the sky! Withering light! To finally see all the colors again! Contrast and shadow!

Kinnikinnick and her Great Dane friend.

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The small dog and the sea.

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Also, I finally mailed your zines on Monday, so you should have them any second, if you haven’t already gotten yours. Sorry I got them out late! I changed the cover, I changed the title, I got shy and changed a bunch of stuff. Thanks so much to everyone who ordered one! Here is what they look like in their final form-

And if you haven’t ordered one yet, you still can! Take it to the beach with you! Get sand all over it! Real physical paper in your three dimensional hands!!!

I’ve made a zine!

Life has been so busy- I moved into a trailer, failed chemistry, and now, in this short spring break with its unending downpours, I have made a zine. As per your poll responses, I have made the zine thirty percent sex/romance/transition (secret things I feel too shy to blog about) and seventy percent parts of the book I am writing (a reckless decision, seeing as no-one else’s eyes have seen my manuscript, and it is guaranteed to be badly edited). The book is about a teenage girl who runs away from her abusive mother in Alaska and embarks on an epic quest across the wilderness, in search of her father. She has no other family and she thinks that if she can only know her father, it will finally place her, like an insect pinned to velvet, in the swirling kaleidoscope of the universe. On her journey she rides freight trains, catches fish, hitch-hikes, lies spellbound in sunbeams on the forest floor, and becomes hopelessly lost in the woods. She meets/is helped by a series of strange, magical people, and she becomes enmeshed in their dramas, until at last her fate becomes something that she can no longer control.

Do you want to read it?!!

The zine is 50 pages, and it costs ten dollars. I know, that’s a lot of money for a zine! But maybe eventually I’ll finish this book, and I’ll find a publisher who will quietly print some copies that no-one will buy, but then I’ll write another book, and that one will sell like hotcakes, and then I’ll be famous, in the way that writers are famous (which is to say not famous, but able to pay their bills on time), and then maybe this zine will be worth something? I’ll sign them, anyway, for what it’s worth. And, if you buy a zine within the next 24 hours, I’ll be able to pay my rent!

The zine is called IF YOU’RE BREATHING, YOU’RE WINNING, and to “buy” it, just click on the “donation” button on the right sidebar. I am not technically allowed to “sell” things on wordpress, and so I am “giving it away” for a “donation” of “ten dollars”. And if you give me more, like $20 or $30, I’ll know you want two and three zines, respectively. At one point in the paypal labyrinth you will have a chance to edit your mailing address, so make sure you’ve listed the right one! And then I will get an email saying you “donated”, and I will drop a little package off at the post office for you, first class mail. At you can take the zine with you when you go places, and read it when you’re out of cell-phone reception, like on the subway or at the top of Mt. Everest.

The zine is also available in bulk, if you’re interested in hoarding it.

And thanks for taking my poll re: zine content! That was really fun!!

A poll for my readers! I am going to make a zine for you, what should I include in it?

Dear readers! Thank you for reading my blog. Reading words on the internet is tolerable and often convenient, but imagine a zine, a real printed thing you can hold in your hands! That you can take in your bag to read in the park, in these springtime sunbeams! I want to make one this week- it’s been way too long, I’m not even sure where my glue sticks are. The only problem is, I’ve amassed so much writing on this blog in the last four years, I have no idea what to include. So please vote below for the subject matter you would be most interested in seeing in my zine, and if there’s something you’re interested in seeing that’s not listed, please mention it in the comments. Thank you!!

sandcastles

We had sex in the afternoon and then fell asleep, me pressed against you, you snoring, your body like a furnace. I marveled that your skin could feel so hot, that it wasn’t obvious when your clothes were on. I drifted off thinking about sunbeams and dandelions.

When we woke, daylight savings time had made it evening. We walked east, into the neighborhood where the backyards go way back into some sort of ravine, and the houses are small and crumbling and different from each other. The sky was heavy and grey but bright at the edges, like it was lined in fire. A harbinger of spring. Portland is green all winter but now there were new shades of green, minty greens and milky greens and glowing, transient greens, the parts of plants that fall away and leave sturdier, longer-lasting parts. In the new foliage was the tweedling of birds whose absence I had not noticed until now. Summer birds, who sing in the evening. Along the roadside was the small burning of daffodils.

“In fantasy land I want to buy a house in this neighborhood,” I said. “One of those ones whose backyards goes way back.” We were walking past a house whose yard was filled with junk. Behind the house was an outbuilding that had stovepipe sticking out. “There’s birdsong out here.” I said. “I think I could live in the city for a long time if I lived out here.”

After our walk the dogs were not tired, because they are never tired. They have only been around for two and three years, respectively, and their mitochondria are furiously pumping out ATP, and they are furiously, ecstatically alive. My dog has little shining lights inside of her, and she shoots them out at everything via her eyeballs, like hyper-focused laser beams of energy. Sometimes I envy her sparkly newness, but then I remember that she will grow old too one day, and then I feel sad, because I don’t ever want her to lose her bright shinyness, ever.

On second thought, I don’t think that my dog will ever grow old. I think that she will live forever. And everyone knows that Chihuahuas are infinite beings. That’s why there’s so many of them.

After our walk we went to get tacos, and while we ate it began to rain again, even harder this time, the water pooling in the streets and splatting against the pavement. You drank real soda and tried to kiss me in the restaurant but I felt self-conscious, because I have a fear of being seen as a gay man having PDA with his boyfriend. Even though I know that gay men do not really have PDA, and so as soon as we kiss the hipsters sitting next to us will decide that we are lesbians. I do not know why I care, except I am always afraid of doing the wrong thing, socially. One day when I am old I am going to look back, and wish that I hadn’t given such a damn about what other people thought of me. Or maybe I can figure it out before then.

After dinner we should’ve studied for our finals, but instead we ate chocolate peanut butter ice-cream and watched gossip girl, because school is, among other things, stupid, and relaxing extends one’s lifespan and makes one much nicer to be around. You watch gossip girl alone, sometimes, in between when we watch it together, and so I am always having to catch up, pausing the show to ask you why chuck and blair are mad at each other? And are lilly and rufus still together. Of course nobody cares about serena, although the show’s creators obviously intend that we should. I can’t ever keep track of what the characters are doing or how I am supposed to feel about it, but I like the clothes and I like how eerily shiny blair’s lip gloss is. And I like how chuck is always posing narcissistically, and that he has only one expression. And of course it’s fun to laugh at fictional rich people and their bad integrity, and to feel superior as a poor person.

Now it’s late and I should be sleeping, but I slept in the afternoon so now I can’t, yet. I like writing like this, though, in the middle of the night, with you snoring. Sometimes I lay in bed to sleep and instead I start to write in my head, making sentences like little sandcastles at the beach. Scooping sand into my little bucket, inverting it. Patting it. It’s nice to get up then and write until I get tired, wring it all out of me, use up all my thoughts. It’s cold in your room, anyway, since your space heater burst into flames. It’s a little disturbing that we live in a world where one’s space heater can do that, burst into flames. I think about how you told me that when it happened you were studying, and you blew the flame out, and then you put the space heater in your closet. I think about the space heater in my trailer that I leave on low when I’m not there, mostly for my plants. Now it’s not just a space heater, it’s a place for my anxiety to go. I kind of wish, now, that I hadn’t eaten icecream before bed.

Tomorrow in the morning I’ll take the dogs to forest park, and we’ll run in the mud. If I’m lucky it’ll be raining too, and there’ll be no-one else there, and I’ll feel like some sort of wild creature, traveling through the misty forest with some serum or something I’ve got to get to the next village in a hurry. The dogs running up and back, crashing through the underbrush. All those breathing plants, the thick cold oxygen. Then I’ll come back to your house in my rain-drenched sweatpants and you’ll feed me breakfast, even though you’ve already eaten. Eggs and tortillas and some cold leftovers from your fridge. And then I’ll go to school and do the first of my four finals for the term, for which I am extremely unprepared, and then the term will be a little more over than it was the day before. And summer will be a little closer, with all of the bright warm treasures that it brings.