the woods and what I thought about

I got a craigslist ride down I-5 and from there I hitched on a road that ran wide, narrow, wet, and then dry past a couple little towns and through some bottle-brush doug-firs to get to Paula, who’s living in the woods. The people who picked me up hitch-hiking were number one, a retired plumber with kidney failure and number two, a fourth-generation mill city logger and his handsome sons. The retired plumber with kidney failure drove an old, old oldsmobile and held a blond chihuahua on his lap that was as fat as a two-liter bottle and had a snout like a hedgehog. The old, old Oldsmobile smelled the way old, old, oldsmobiles ought to, like stale cigarettes and freezer burn, and the back seat was full of groceries, melting ice-cream and pizzas and such. The man had diabetes and all the medications he took for diabetes had made his kidneys fail, he said, and then shrugged like, oh well, one thing for another, I suppose. He’d moved to the area from California, because California had so much crime and was really like the end of the world, and in this area the air was fresh and green and you could pretend that the end of the world wasn’t happening yet. The road we drove in the oldsmobile traversed the fat cleft between two mountains, where the river had been dammed and the trees had been cut over and over again since before anyone could remember.

That man dropped me off and I waited awhile and watched the sun sink before the logger man and his handsome sons picked me up. I had to wait for them to get off work. But then they came, right at the strike of almosttoodarktohitchhike, Dude In A Pickup Truck and his sons who did not, yet, have their own pickup trucks, but worked extra hours at the window finishing factory to save up money. Dude eyed me warily through the car window and his little wife, Roxy, rolled it down. I got in the extended cab with his handsome sons who smelled of youth and wore their dirt-biking baseball caps low over their eyes, and pulled their cellphones from some crevice of their clothing now and then to text their girlfriends. The man told me that he and his wife had thirteen kids, eleven adopted, only two girls, and I listened hard to his dialect, noticed how he and his sons said “seen” instead of “saw”, “was” instead of “were”. Just like the people in rural Alaska. He even said “warsh”, like my grandpa. “My great-grandfather homesteaded just up that hill,” said Dude, pointing a big red finger across the road, “and that makes my son fifth-generation Mill City.” We turned off the road and he took me on a little tour through the three-street town, pointed out the boy scouts taking down the flag at city hall, waved at everyone. He cut logs, he said, his father cut logs, they had always cut logs…

He was going to drop me off at the gas station to await my fate in the gathering dark, but like they always do he said no, I’ll take you all the way. “I was an EMT here for seventeen years,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe the times I’ve had to scrape people up off this highway. We got drugs, we got… we got all kinds of things. It used to be safe here. I lived here forty-two years, all my life. There didn’t used to be so much crime. Salem told people that they couldn’t get assistance unless they lived so far from the city so they moved out here. It didn’t used to be like this.”

“I bet there aren’t jobs out here,” I said.

“Oh no,” said Dude, laughing and shaking his big red face. His sons laughed, as if I’d told a really good joke. I laughed too. “But you shouldn’t be out here hitchhiking. I don’t want to get a call in the middle of the night to come scrape you off the road.”

“I appreciate you concern,” I said, staring vaguely out the side window at the rain. “But most violence is contextual, it happens between people who know each other, and in families. I don’t believe in monsters, out cruzing the streets, looking to victimize somebody random. And anyway, the good news is that it’s almost always people like you that pick up hitch-hikers.” I think the man liked to hear that, but I couldn’t really tell. His wife was silent, sitting low in the seat in front of me. She swung her hand over, and offered us in back a plastic bag of cinnamon rolls. I said no thanks. They also offered me a diet pepsi, “had a whole cooler of them in the back,” and I said no, although afterwards I though I maybe should’ve said yes. One trick I’ve learned over the years is that although I don’t drink that shit, strangers are often greatly put at ease when you accept a gift of beverage from them, and you can always tuck a soda or a can of beer into your backpack “for later” and then ditch it somewhere after you get dropped off. As the road shrank into a ribbon of wet asphalt between walls of thick conifers I sent a few text messages and eavesdropped on the conversation between son and dad.

“I want to fish that stretch of river on so-and-so’s of property. Will you put in a good word for me?”

“Hmph. Put in a good word for you. You can fish it, isn’t nobody gonna care. He’s got twenty acres.”

“Well put in a good word for me.” (to me) “Great thing about tubing this river, you can find all the little spots where the fish hide.”

(dad)“It’s too late to tube the river.”

(me) “Water’s cold, huh?”

(son)“Water’s always cold. We get the bottom water from the dam. It’s the cold water from the bottom. You could do it in a full-body wetsuit! Or a dry suit!”

“Sounds fun.”

We got to the hippie hot springs resort where Paula works and Dude’s face was blank as he pulled down the darkened gravel road to the gate. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I wondered. This place had been here, had been a hippie hot springs resort since before he was born, it went back and back and back and he said he didn’t know the story of it, but I wondered. I wanted to ask him outright, ask him how he felt about the hippies and their hot springs, how he felt as a hunter, as a logger, as a rider of snow-machines (They won’t let us ride snow machines up this road, it’s too noisy, at least that’s what they say), as a Dude in a Pickup Truck, as a forth-generation mill-city resident. But instead I heaved my backpack out of the truck bed and said thank you and waved goodbye, wishing that I’d at least accepted the pepsi.

The mountains were cold. And black, like the very inside of the night. Amazing there are any pockets left, anywhere, without the pollution of electric light. A wrinkle in the earth, a gutter for the water to run through, a great river. Salmon. I carried my things across the footbridge into the hippie village, mist gathering around my ears, beading off the tip of my nose. In the dark all around was a lace of even darker, the lattice fingers of the doug-firs and cedars, hanging overhead and shaking, dripping, giving form and substance to the night. Paula’s cabin was a little A-frame way back in the woods, backed up against the ink-black dark, held close inside the moonless morning of the night. I found it arms out in front of me, stumbling over the wet matted alder leaves and through vague fallen fences whose borders I discerned by watching the way lighter black shadows made prison bars along the ground. The moon, I thought, was surely rising.

Paula’s A-frame was a dear wooden triangle with a small narrow porch, like a short hobbit’s house in the deep, dripping woods. I fumbled in the dark, found the lamp on the wall, cast a ring of yellow light, and fired up the propane heater the way she’d told me- turn on the valve on bottom, pump a few times, flick the pilot light. A blue flame leapt up and the pale window-curtain fluttered in the warm draft. I sat down on the futon and spread out my things, pulling out my book of stories that was new. Paula was working in the kitchen till eight, making gluten-free muffins and lentil soup, and massive steel carafes of cinnamon tea. Outside the trees dripped, and inside the air was still and quiet. Heat poured from the heater. Like the underside of the world, a forgotten fold… I felt the rubberband around my skull snap, and fall to the floor. I made a mound of pillows and leaned back, turning a page in my book. There was no longer anything but this.

When Paula got off work she fed me leftovers (cauliflower in almond sauce, gluten-free pot pie) and we sat on her futon and talked, and pulled books from her shelf, and put them back, and Paula had an old copy of the new york times spread on the floor that she was reading cover-to-cover, and I read a national geographic article in the yellow lamplight- it was about army ants. (ants are blind, did you know? as they walk their tidy routes, they rely entirely on scents and pheromones for communication. [I thought of you, of all the ways there were of talking that didn’t use words. Of when language fails me…])

Paula had a yoga class at seven a.m. and work after so she rose early and disappeared. I had no plans but to be a vessel for the quiet peace of the forest and so I burrowed deeper into the woolen blankets and slept for eleven hours, letting it fill and fill and fill me. When I rose the cabin was dim, and outside bars of yellow light cut through the clearing and burned up the shaking edges of the trees. The sun! The glorious sun! And the lichen! Swinging like mint-green Christmas tinsel. And the moss! A damp carpet, fresh on the bare soles of my feet. And the chanterelles! Gone slimy now and pumpkin-orange along the edges of the path. And the steam! Rising from rotted logs, hollow, mossed-over, sprouting frail alders- the steam! Rising up to meet the sun. Shot through with glory and morningtime, I put on my shoes and set off into the forest, eating the last of the cold leftovers first.

I walked all day in the forest, and it swept the city from my brain. The forest, forest, forest, said my feet. I picked up strands of false-usnea and pulled them apart. I hopped on top of steaming logs, I marveled at the light that bounced off stones in the bottom of the stream. Every other step I thought of you, a strand of golden thread, but the ones in between were mine. Boundaries! I thought, Imagine it! Focus! I thought. The cold clear waters of the morning! Oh if this was my life!

I got back as Paula was getting done in the kitchen, running teacups through the dishwasher, pressure-washing pots. We stripped and climbed into the hot springs, water like a smooth hot stone that you swallow, that warms your insides, the hidden crevasses of your bones. I dunked down to my chin, paddled my arms around, and thought of you. Paula is crazy so after we soaked we jumped into the freezing river, even though she has an ear infection. Then I got back in the tub while Paula stood watching the sunset, dripping naked in the cold evening air, as the light draped cherry-red and sweet orange in the cleft between the mountains. Who needs clothes, I thought, when you have this pie-shaped slice of sunset? A secret hollow all to yourself? Who needs anything but this…

For dinner we cooked beefalo and chard and spread it on corn tortillas, and had a salad of massaged kale, and a pomegranate split open, dripping red like blood on little plates. Various older hetero hippie men cycled in and out of the kitchen during our meal, talking with us about such subjects as crab fishing and electromagnetic radiation. One of them offered us wine and we offered him beefalo, and he settled down at the table, the three of us and an old copy of Joy of Cooking, from which I read post-dinner digestion stories titled How To Fill Thirty-Four Glasses Of Champagne At Once By Stacking Them In A Pyramid Shape and The Effects Of Hard Vs. Soft Water On Yeasted Breads, respectively.

After dinner we retired to the A-frame to explore, once again, the world of printed matter that was Paula’s bookshelf, which, this dark and windless night, and in the light of my new-found focus, seemed an impossible treasure-trove of wealth and which held books that, suddenly, rang like bells to us, stories from far away and narratives that clipped along like galloping horses and poetry- Poetry! As if I had never imagined it before! A shelf of books, a shelf of books in which to fall…

We read, and Paula told me about her life. Up at dawn, yoga, maybe a run to the mountain-top if she has time, then to work in the kitchen, chopping carrots, kneading bread, stirring pots of steaming things with great wooden spoons. And after work, her little home, the yellow lamp-light, her art materials spread out across the floor, a rumpled yoga mat, books to read- so many books to read! And soaking! And then to bed, to sleep like a dark rock’s underside, a sleep to heal the weary soul, a sleep that builds, that calcifies, that grows solid as a stone.

Paula was reading Julie of the Wolves, my favorite book from childhood. We talked about befriending packs of wolves, whether or not we thought that was something that could really happen. Paula missed Pearl, suddenly. A few minutes later the book dropped from her hand and she was asleep. I switched out the light. The forest was still silent, the air still vastly dark. The world was not ending. I lay in the dark for a few moments and thought about my friends, our focus or lack thereof, our thoughts that fly like skittish birds, that refuse to touch down, feet that don’t believe in solid ground. I thought of how much was possible and where, and how to make it all fit together like Lincoln logs. I knew I was just sifting things, waiting for them to fall into some sort of pattern that made sense. I thought of the golden ratio, which is tattooed on my forearm and which guides me, like a magical sort of compass. One of the men in the kitchen during dinner had told us that our emotions, apparently, do, or maybe should, follow that ratio- which is approximately three-fifths. As in, three-fifths of our time should, in the end, be used up exalting over the magic and the beauty of the world, confounded at its brilliance, laughing uncontrollably in wonder at a single, inexplicable ray of light on the mossy forest floor- and the other two-fifths of our time should be used thinking about and attempting to process the really heavy shit- war, genocide, unrequited love, housemate drama. This made sense to me, and I clung to it in the dark, imagining the spiral turning round and round, time spinning off like a ball of string flung into the air. So much was unformed, and so much was already over- and here I was. Was I the spiral’s eye? Were we, each of us, the spiral’s eye? And was that history, falling below us into nothing- our tailings- and when we come around again, everything, every single thing, is different.

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how the woodz make me feel

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steaming log

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Paula

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colloidial silver

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bookshelf

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headstand at the portal to infinity

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INVISIBLE JUMPROPE

morning

 

I woke, and all the walls had fallen around the garden of my heart. I went to pile them up again, but I had lost my trowel. I had been spinning, blindfolding, your hand on my shoulder, and I no longer knew where I was at all. You told me that I made you feel drugged, your face on the pillow, half in and out of candlelight. You talked of addictions. But when you fucked me, I was so far gone I could hardly speak.

Is this as much as we can hope for, as flawed and mortal humans? Is this the sky, the top, the ceiling? This dumb naivety, this bright and burning belief- like a camera’s flash, it banishes all shade, it declares itself, it exposes us, and you are leaning backwards, and I am leaning backwards, and we are both, somehow, catching each other.

We met- you are fighting at the frontlines of the world, and it is wearing you down like an outcropping of rock blasted by the sea. I am doing the thing I am always doing- trying to make magic into something I can sell, and failing at it. We are, both, surprised to find another with such unfailing good humor, and strive, more than anything, to speak as though we are dying. Write, says Annie Dillard, as though you are dying. Write, says Annie Dillard, as though you are writing for the terminally ill. We are all, says Annie Dillard, terminally ill. I think of her, growing old. I track the rain across my garden, watch the boughs of the walnut tree shake outside my window, make up dialogue between a close-hearted prince and a stubborn, idealistic stable boy.

The thing is, I am realizing, not to believe in god- the thing is to believe in a single living human being, soft and dear and mortal, to believe, to believe, to believe- and everything, everything, everything is forgiven.

the parchment-like partitions of the pods of honesty

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Dear internet-

it’s been a minute. It rained today, internet. It hailed actually. I know they don’t have hail where you’re from, internet. Well I’ll tell you what it was like. It was like the sky fell down, but the sky was made of water, and then afterwards nothing was different at all, because the ground is made for those sorts of occasions, and the ground just funnels it all away and then throws it back up at the sky, and on and on, and I live in a little shack and so I watched it from inside, through the raspberry canes that bend outside my window. I was scrunched up in my reading chair, internet, sickness curled inside me like a tapeworm. A tapeworm that eats all light, a tapeworm that eats all hope. A tapeworm that makes me feel as though my life is over, already, and I am just a ghost watching the world carry on without me. And so I didn’t go to dance class, aka Thug Camp, because I felt so sick, even tho I really, really like dancing “thuggish”, which is not my adjective, but the instructor’s. And I like dancing “thuggish” in my dorky sweatpants, with all the women in huge baggy clothes and neon high-tops who swing their glossy, ironed hair around and when they stop dancing their glossy, ironed hair falls exactly into place.

But then, internet, it turns out it was just the start of my period, not the end of the world, and now I feel much better. I left my shack and went inside and talked to Kristi about Halloween costumes while she cooked a bunch of meat. I don’t really feel inspired by Halloween, internet. I think the last time I felt inspired about it was in 2004 when I dressed up as my friend Wej. I put on clothes he liked to wear and someone drew his tattoos on my arms and legs and then I walked around all night pretending to be him. Everyone thought it was hilarious and we were friends so I thought it was ok, but then like three weeks ago he told me that it had hurt his feelings, which is crazy because nothing ever hurts his feelings. Except I wonder if him read me writing that nothing ever hurt his feelings, maybe it would hurt his feelings?

Sigh.

I had a really good idea last night, internet, right before I feel asleep, about how to actualize my insane privilege so that I really have as much money as I look like I should. Having that much money would be awesome, because I wouldn’t have to try and find a job in Portland. I’m sure you don’t know this, internet, but trying to find a job in Portland is like ten times harder than actually working. No, more like ten hundred times harder. Trying To Find A Job In Portland basically involves having a staring contest with the internet, i.e. Craigslist, and everyone knows that the Portland Craigslist job board is really just a two-dimensional manifestation of the Flaming Pits of Hell, Impossible Horrors, and Eternal Damnation. It’s kind of arty, actually, when you think about it that way. Really The Portland Craigslist Job Board should just be called the NO Board, because it’s where you go when you want the universe to say NO to you. Like- “oh what did you do today?”

“Oh, I spent a while on the NO Board.”

“Oh man! Is that why you look like such shit?”

“Yeah.”

But really it’s worse than that, because the Portland Craigslist Job Board doesn’t even say “NO”- it doesn’t say anything at all. It’s like lighting a candle and saying a little prayer, except instead of a candle you have a little tape player that just plays a soundtrack of people laughing at you. It’s like trying really, really hard, and then failing, but doing it every day. It’s like attempting to win the lottery. It’s like making crush art and then burning it. It’s like writing a really amazing story and then losing it. It’s like running on a treadmill that makes you more out of shape. It’s like having your computer stolen.

You think I’m joking, but everyone keeps saying that Portland and Detroit are like neck and neck as Worst Places In Country To Try And Find A Job, and I’ve never been to Detroit but I feel like I can imagine that the two job markets ARE sort of weird, insanely different but eerily alike, parallel-reality hell pits.

The NO Board ate three months of my last winter, and I refuse to give it any of this one. So I’m working really hard to manifest wealth the old-fashioned way- in my head. I also might try talking to people, like real humans who have faces and stuff, because sometimes they have information that is useful, if you can imagine it. Or I might even try setting out on my own two feet, an object propelled through space, and pushing open the rain-flung glass doors of three-dimensional shops and buildings, wherein there are more humans with faces. One could navigate the whole world this way, I think, if one set one’s mind to it.

The other things I did today, internet, besides re-apply for food stamps and think the world was ending, was think about Why I Love Alan Jackson With A Pure, Unself-conscious Love and discover a new plant called Honesty.

I discovered the plant called Honesty when I went to the IPRC to get stuff to make crafts and hang out with A.M. yesterday and in the big, flat drawers of big, flat paper there were all these insides of old books. The world has decided it likes the outsides of old books, to make journals and things from, but it doesn’t yet know what to do with the insides of old books, so it puts them in the big flat drawers of big, flat paper at the IPRC. I took one of the insides home, a thread-dangling, yellow-glued sheath of dictionary insides, and it turned out to be a book of words having to do with gardens. like Nut Weevils and Pepper-Root, and the RIGHT and WRONG ways to build a rock garden. And while dismembering the book’s insides even further I happened upon the plant called Honesty.

Perennial Honesty (Lunaria rediviva) is a tall, hairy-stemmed perennial found throughout Europe in damp woods, and on lime. It has large, pointed oval leaves with marked serrations. The common name “Honesty” arose in the sixteenth century and may be due to the translucent seed-pods which are like flattened pea-pods and borne on the plant through winter.

And then there was a little drawing, captioned- “the parchment-like partitions of the pods of honesty”.

Now, I don’t know if this Honesty plant is real, or if this yellowed, dismembered book came from an old cluttered junkshop and the old cluttered junkshop got it from a dusty box of things at an estate sale and all the dusty boxes of things at the estate sale had once belonged to a wealthy old recluse who had found a portal to a magical land in the back of his closet, and on one of his outings to the magical land he had picked up the book in a junkshop there. In which case, this magical land is definitely the sort of place that I would like to inhabit.

But maybe the portal is lost forever, and all I can do is try and cultivate the plant called Honesty in the magical, sun drenched backyard of my own heart, and encourage it to take over everything, and climb the wall like something fierce, invasive, and willful, and smother out any sort of truth-stifling socialization, until I am able to transcend every stubborn knot in the English language, and Honesty’s parchment-like seedpods rain down upon everything. Imagine what a writer I would be!

That must be how Augusten Burroughs did it.

The other amazing thing that happened at the IPRC, besides finding a book from another land, was that I hung out with A.M. A.M. is amazing because she’s one of the only people I know who laughs as hard as I do at how fucked up things always are. Some people don’t think it’s funny that everyone is always broke or really depressed or getting injured and not being able to pay for it or even worse, being sick and not knowing why, but man, those people are not me and A.M. I mean, just in her personal life alone, there is so much unbelievably fucked-up and broken and sad right now that we don’t even have to talk about me, A.M. just opens her mouth and we laugh, and laugh, and laugh. And if we run out of stuff to laugh about we just talk about how Annie Dillard is getting old and won’t live forever and we might not get the chance to convince her to be our mentor or even talk to her in person and she might never write another word, and that’s so sad that we could probably laugh until we throw up.

I just love A.M. And I haven’t told her this, internet, but she is part of my imaginary queer-writer dream-team, which is made up of friends from all over the country, and in my fantasies the five or six of us buy a van and go on a reading tour together and it’s an amazing use of resources because none of us suck. The newest recruit to my imaginary queer-writer dream-team might be Aimee from Desark. I don’t know if you know this, internet, but she has a blog, and it turns out she’s not only a brilliant song-writer with a heart-breaking voice, but writing comes as naturally to her as bees to a hive, and yes I know that is a stupid analogy, but sometimes it takes me a really long time to come up with these things and I don’t want to spend any more time on that one.

And I guess that brings us to Why I Love Alan Jackson With A Pure, Un-self-conscious Love. The thing is, internet, is that Alan Jackson writes really stupid songs, about being crazy for a mercury and love making a diamond shine. And you may not like those kinds of songs. And if you don’t, it’s probably because you have a Healthy Musical Immune System, and your brain rejects Alan Jackson’s songs as Bad Music Not Fit For Listening To. But I have to tell you, internet. If you can just override that internal system, you might just find that you like Alan Jackson’s songs more than almost anything. It can be pretty hard to override that internal musical immune system, but I find that Repetition works pretty well for me. Like, for example, my friend gave me a country mix CD a few years ago that had the Alan Jackson song “Don’t love make a diamond shine” on it, and I listened to the CD a whole lot, and at first what happened is that I liked all the other country songs but the Alan Jackson one, but THEN what happened was that I eventually grew tired of all the songs BUT the Alan Jackson one, and I NEVER grew tired of that song, never ever EVER, no matter how many times I played it, until I loved it almost more than any other country song ever. And I don’t know why Alan Jackson songs are like this, but I’m telling you, just ratchet open your brain like you are doing brain-yoga, and maybe don’t look at the screen, and listen to the Alan Jackson song below, and try and let it get in. Just unfocus your eyes and let it in. He wrote it about his maid, when she died in an accident.

And after you’re done with that, go look at Virginia’s comic Milkyboots. If you go back in the archives, you can read about the five months it took her to get a coffeeshop job after moving to portland. And I even got to appear in the comic a few weeks ago!

yes

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The rain is coming down. It pours like a pitcher of water on the roof, pouring, and pouring, and pouring. We are underwater. I am the goldfish in the rain barrel, here is my lichen-covered stick. I eat mosquito larvae to live.

This bed is a ship, a grassy plain, an inland tundra. It was built by two fags in the southeast in their dark-wooded, glossy apartment. They brought the two-by-sixes in, stick by stick, and fastened them together with tools and bits of metal until they had a thing more sturdy than anything that had ever existed, ever. The lived in it, did whatever it is that people do in their lives, looked out the high windows at the courtyard and the apartments on the other side, fancy people or people who smoked indoors, money and sadness. Then the crew fell apart, flew like starlings to all corners of the earth, and the apartment was emptied of things, and the ship had to be sawed short, legs cut off at the knee, just to get it out the door. They gave it to me, we carried it down three flights of stairs, me in my butch flannel and two small-hipped fags in keds, one of them on the front end, the other dancing around in his tiny pink sweater, lifting here, lifting there, on his tip-toes as if barely tethered to the earth. At the sidewalk we heaved it into the back of my housemate’s small yellow truck and grinned our last goodbyes. I drove home, pushing wind beneath the trees that rattled now, just a little, blew their leaves about like electric pink confetti, end-of-the-world orange. Were it not for photosynthesis, I think, what color would everything be?

These days, now, I am putting all in order, these days I am taking care. At this point I know that many things could get better- I know that I could get my gut back, I could get my sleep back, uninterrupted, and how wonderful would that be! I could have so many things! and so I cry, my gut an anvil, at the possibility of wanting something. At the possibility of wanting anything, ever, of acknowledging my existence on this planet, of accepting the fact that I am here and will continue to be here for any number of days, of new moons, of things too large and much too small, of mornings and middle-of-the-nights, of bucket-of-water endless rainy days like this one. I cry on the back deck and Macon finds me, does that thing that she does so well, that thing that people know how to do when they make a steadfast friend of sadness, a best friend of sadness, sadness as one’s own inland sea. As I cry I am grateful that sadness only comes to me in moments, like a hot fast burning, and burns up all the underbrush, the accumulated windfall, the small sticks like ladders up the bottom of the dry spruces, and is gone. Macon rubs my back and I can see into her soul and I think how hard this thing can be, how hope is like making a promise to the very earth you stand on, the deck where you sit, like making a promise to your lunch you tried to eat, but couldn’t, like saying Yes, Yes, Yes, to the slanted sun of afternoon, to the laundry tumbling in the dryer, it’s like saying everything out loud that you swore you’d never say, like gathering all the people in a huddled mass and promising them that the sun will rise tomorrow, waving your arms and promising to them that everything they ever wanted will come true, it’s like taking up a megaphone the size of Jupiter and declaring to the entire milky way that there is, all of a sudden, a thing other than this very moment, as if there has ever been anything other than this moment. Yes, hope is saying, I Will Try, I Will Try, I Will Try.

Everything that’s wrong

This morning I straddle my bike and ride to Sellwood, eleven miles with the wind at my face. My naturopath meets me at the door with a hot cup of nettle tea, invites me into her stucco kitchen, toys strewn across the floor. You see, my child has been playing. Then we sit at her desk as she gathers her papers, small hands fluttering, white sweater pushed up on her forearms. We’d sent various bodily fluids of mine into the lab for testing a few weeks ago and the results have just come in. After four months, five years, three hundred full moons, a century of waiting, now she has the papers, now she knows everything there is to know about everything that is wrong, and has ever been wrong, with me.

MY PANCREAS. My pancreas is broken. I’d always suspected that it was held together with baling wire, plugging along on one rusty cylinder, and now I have the science to back it up.

“Chymotrypsin is a marker enzyme for pancreatic endocrine output. A low Chymotrypsin value is suggestive of poor pancreatic output of all enzymes.”

The “low” rating is 4 to 9. “Abnormally low” is <4. My rating is <3.

Basically, my body no longer makes digestive enzymes, so now I have to take them. A lot.

Parasites- Blastocystis and Endolimax, single-celled organisms that took up residence in my colon back in June, when I accidentally swallowed some water while swimming in my favorite Alaskan lake, the lake which I had nicknamed “lake lonesome”, because it had no name of its own. The lake where I swam every hot afternoon, where I parked my van after work, in the dust, and stripped down to nothing and swam the entire circumference of the lake, every day for six weeks, the lake where bank swallows fly low over the water, flashing their white undersides, and mallards raise their young, and the red-tailed hawk (sometimes two) will watch the ducklings from the top of a bunched and knotted spruce, and sometimes it would be windy and there would be little waves, and the waves would hit me in the face as I swam, and I would swallow water.

Funguses- also in my colon. A rhodotorula species and two saprophytic species. We look up “saprophytic fungi” on wikipedia, me leaning over the desk at Adriana’s computer as she clicks, and it says that saprophytic fungi are fungi that grow on felled trees, cow patties and fallen leaves. I imagine fruiting bodies in my colon, bulbous red with white spots, smurfs-styles. A forest! A forest in my colon. Felled trees and fallen leaves. Dappled shade.

Adrenals- My cortisal and DHEA are depressed, no, exhausted, and as a result, my body is overcompensating with norepinephrine, also as a way to regulate my blood sugar, which my pancreas is struggling with- and too much norepinephrine can cause, among other things, anxiety and insomnia, both of which I have struggled with chronically for the last four years. Also, according to wikipedia, norepinephrine can cause a decreased heart rate, which the chiropractor noticed, listening to her cold metal stethoscope, when I went in a few weeks ago to at last, AT LAST get my spine checked out, my spine which is doing some weird things that can also, according to said chiropractor, be attributed to adrenal exhaustion.

As my naturopath finishes telling me these things she pulls out a paper scrawled with notes and I say,

“Can a lot of trauma in a person’s childhood exhaust their adrenals early on? Like, exhaust them for the rest of their life?”

“Yes,” she says, looking at me. “yes, yes, yes.” She turns away to open a file cabinet. “yes, yes, yes.” she keeps saying it. She looks back up at me. “yes, yes.”

I want to cry.

“I had a really traumatic childhood,” I say. “I don’t even remember nine years of it. I ate trauma for breakfast, and pixie sticks for dinner. I always figured that was why my pancreas was busted, too.”

“Yes,” she says again. “Yes, yes. I know. I know! I had a traumatic childhood too. I know.” She puts the papers down on the desk. “I know.” Adriana is from Mexico City. Her mother was here last time I was over, making tamales in the kitchen. I’d asked her, then, how it was growing up in that city. “You get used to it,” she’d said. “you get used to it.”

Now I look over the paper she’s set in front of me. She zips up her black down vest, refills her teacup from a small ceramic pot. “The side door was banging open,” she says. “It took all the heat from the house.” She reaches out and runs a manicured fingernail over the words on the paper and explains each line to me, what the supplement is, how much I am supposed to take, and why. She stops halfway down, asks if its alright to go on. “I don’t want you to get overwhelmed,” she says. “this is a lot of stuff. If it’s too much we can just do some now and work on other things later.”

“No, no!” I say. “I’m not overwhelmed. I’m excited!” I want to dive headfirst into the paper like it is some warm secret bay and my seat is a barnacled, salt-crusted pier, half rotted into the sea. I want to savor this moment, draw it out, milk it for hours like an unexpected Christmas in mid October. I have been lost! I am stumbling, I have been lost in the wind-blown mountains, sheer rock all around me, and this is my topo map, the only topo map than anyone has ever offered.

Adriana resumes reading, and this is what she tells me-

THINGS I MUST DO

Take L-glutamine, five grams a day, six white capsules, for four weeks. it is the precursor to such-and-such and just might fix my stress hormones. (did you know, says Adriana, that most of our serotonin is stored in our gut? Did you know, that our gut is our “second brain”?) (If I feel wired after taking it I must stop immediately, a magnesium deficiency is possible)

Digestive Enzymes- always and forever, because I do not make my own. 1 with each meal and 2 on waking and 2 before bed without food and also 30 minutes before each meal and 1 ½ hour after also

Oil of Oregano- The most burniest stuff that every came from plants. See below.

Broad Spectrum Complex- small white bottle. Contains barberry bark, goldenseal, wormwood, garlic. Used in conjunction with Oil of Oregano. A barrel of gasoline to toss upon the quaint thatched homes of the protozoa, a book of matches with which to light them afire.

Fish Oil- is the Magic Snake Oil of 2009. I already take it, and will continue to do so.

Apple Cider Vinegar- 1 teaspoon ten minutes before each meal. To acidify the stomach, and to coax a few frail thrusts from the last rusted piston of my pancreas.

Probiotics- All the way baby, as intensive as it gets. Small foil packets sold in the refrigerator section, 25 bucks for seven. Each packet contains ten billion microscopic foot soldiers, strong young country boys from good homes, raised on yogurt and sauerkraut, armed to the teeth with munitions, ready to do battle in the only place it matters, anymore- your colon. Take no prisoners, raze those protozoa villages to the ground.

Tea- made from slippery elm bark, chamomile, fennel seeds, thyme leaves, the curled sticks of cinnamon. The consistency of egg whites, tastes surprisingly hot and good going down, reminds me of the time I made lube from flax seeds. 4 to 5 glasses a day.

Licorice tincture- for my dear adrenals. Two droppers in the morning for two months. Also, any and all adaptogens I can get my hands on- ashwaganda, astragalus, devil’s club (this one I can harvest myself), ginseng, gotu kola, Rheidol, rhemania, alma, Indian gooseberry.

And last but not least,

The Most Incredible Multivitamin I Have Ever Seen.

Adriana pulls it out from beneath her desk, a great hulking bottle, and pours me some in the bottom of a teacup. I drink it- it tastes, amazingly, like cloudberries- these small, dimpled, salmon-colored berries which grow here and there in the bogs of interior Alaska and actually, I noticed this summer, taste quite a bit like rhubarb pie- and instantly I get a bit of a body high.

“You need a good quality liquid multi-vitamin. This is what I take.” Adriana rotates the bottle on the table in front of me. “I don’t sell it to my patients because it’s too expensive and I don’t want to feel like I’m ripping them off. But this is very, very good.” I take the bottle from her and turn it over, squinting my eyes to read the ingredients. My brain has suddenly, somehow, cleared, and I feel GREAT. According to the label, the multivitamin contains, among other things, mustard greens, oxygen, and gold.

“I’ll take it,” I say, clapping my hands together. “How much?”

“Fifty-five dollars,” says Adriana.

I grin and nod, somehow happy, no, elated, to be spending this much money on a multivitamin. I cannot WAIT to drink my two tablespoons, first thing in the morning, just like Adriana. I cannot WAIT to see what happens.

I push money towards my naturopath and lift up the sheet with my lab results on it.

“Can I have a copy of this?”

“Yes,” she says, and slides it through her printer. I stuff my new supplements in my backpack and she hands me my copy, walking me to the front door. I hug her puffy down jacket.

“Let me know how you are,” she says. “I want to know how things are working out. I want to know what happens!”

“I’ll let you know,” I say, as I walk through her garden to the street.

“Where’s your bike?” she asks.

“It’s locked at the corner.”

“You know you can always bring it in the backyard.” she says, from the doorway.

“Ok,” I say.

I smile again as I cross the street to my bike. I turn the lab results over in my hand, and see that she’s copied them onto paper from her recycling, and on the back is an article on “Columbus’s role in constructing the fabricated history of the indigenous religions of the Caribbean”.  Adriana’s clicking accent is still ringing in my head, the cadence like a two-step. The sun has come out for a moment, through the blustery clouds, and I am crossing the street in Sellwood with the big sunflower painted in the intersection, and there are ridiculously cute cob benches there, and ornate glass-paned free-boxes, and even a thermos of coffee and chipped old mugs that hang from little cob hooks, and a blackboard with some chalk on which, last time I was here, I wrote my favorite quote, from Keats, and which is now scrawled all over with hearts, and endearing, rain-faded hippie clichés- and I smile, and my chest is like a flock of crows, and I know that there is nothing wrong, I know that there is absolutely nothing wrong at all.

For Pearl, who is leaving to go east

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For the moon

Dear moon, I am fading
How many of you are there left?
What are you, moon?
I do not know if you are hollow, or made of solid gold

Dear moon, I am fading. I am not like you, moon.
I fade in and out, I melt into the sea, I rise up again like fields of wheat.
I come together, molten, and burn for a number of years-
And what is a year?
You are a year, moon.
Moon, god of moments!
I’ll build an altar to you,
I’ll throw a black cloth with red fleur-de-lis onto a corner table and on it I’ll put rocks thrown up from the bottom of the sea, grains of rice, and other things that mean nothing.
Friends will bring crystals, and feathers, and lavender pulled from neighbors’ yards. We’ll light ten hundred votives and sink them into mason jars.
Moon, god of moments!
I do not know what you are made of, moon. I do not know if you are hollow, or made of solid gold-
But I do know what I am made of, and I am made of you.

Jasper

My good friend Jasper was in town. Jasper, I have decided, was put on this earth to be my personal fashion model. We did a photo shoot.

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What is it

What is it, to know the value of a thing?

What is it, to crush a bit of western redcedar in your hand and smell everything you’ve been missing, and everything you’ve ever wanted, besides?

One full moon, one unbroken block of time?

A week without anxiety? Your guts like a grandfather clock, time immemorial, This is the way things always should be, this is the way things always should be, or nothing,

The faint taste of rosemary, rainwater, dried figs,

A bunch of lavender gone dusty in a newspaper cone

A single beating, human heart

And you know that something is wrong, you know that things are still, wrong,

But put a handful of western redcedar in a mason jar of water, suspended at the mouth with a crumpled twist-tie

And let it sit for a day and then drink it, and it will taste like six months of rain, like the forest floor, an impossible clearing, like the morning of the world

Is this the morning of the world?

And what is it, to know the value of a thing?

why I can’t focus on anything

It would make sense, these days, for me to be writing. I am so full of love, filled up with companionship, my larders stocked with beautiful things. Sleep is furiously regular, easy, and alarmingly restful- the dark of my shack, my ten hundred blankets, the long-bodied cellar spiders that leave their dim corners and dance on my chest- mysterious spiders, shy and pale, and if you put a finger in their webs they spin, and spin, and spin, like a gyroscope.

I do not know where I have been. Where, where, where have I been? What have I done? I pulled a mattress to the curb, today, I pulled the bones from the beefstock and put the beefstock in the freezer, the beefstock I cooked all yesterday, skin of tallow on the surface like cream, gelatin at the bottom. I ate goat cheese and bacon for breakfast. Yesterday I looked up spiders at Powells- put names to my bedroom spiders and also the yellow garden spider, simply named Yellow Garden Spider, sentinel of the backyard, builder of eye-level webs on the path to where I put my bicycle, I am clawing him off my sunglass lens on the daily, he is screaming, I am screaming. Yesterday I also made a pot of mung beans and danced alone in my room, rode my bicycle three times around the circumference of the earth, and attempted to read a book from my stack of unread books that have gone so long without reading that they have begun to seem like props. Oh, but it’s the thought that counts. Isn’t it?

The day before yesterday I had a dance hangover, not enough sleep and my whole body sore besides. The day before that I had danced for twenty-four hours straight, alone and with friends, in the living room, at a birthday party, uncaring, in a long run of dancing that climaxed at two a.m. in the club with a feeling of such pure, beautiful, unselfconscious fun that I realized that I had transcended cynicism entirely and suddenly knew that from then until the day I die I will never feel cynical about anything, ever again.

And other things have happened, incredible things, none of them writing-

Like the bluffs, at sunset! Eating concord grapes, whole clusters, ripe and dusty purple, plucked from the vine that grows up the telephone pole, and there is no elegant way to eat them, with their little seeds! And the orange sunset! And the new hipsters in their flowered dresses drinking wine on picnic blankets and pulling cheese from wicker baskets, or the old hipsters (us) in our many variations- drinking beer from bottles, taking photographs, swinging on the rope in the apple tree. And the sunset! Turn away for a moment, and you’ll miss it! And night will come, and all the glittering lights of the west hills, and the shining Willamette, and the thundering trainyard, the reassuring heartbeat of commerce.

I left my cynicism in the ocean, on the equinox. We put our fingers in the tide and we felt it sucking the sand away, the tiny crustaceans that burrow, the clear bodies of jellyfish which are not like bodies but more like auras, and I wished that I could be a jellyfish, I wished for home, I wrote the word HOME in the sand and let the tide swallow it. And my hands were in the sand, my fingers were in the ocean, I was listening to its steady heartbeat, more steady, maybe, than anything- and the ocean said This planet is your home. You are home.

I have many feelings about Portland, but the dominant one is currently this:
My friends are all brilliant and none of them have their shit together. And I am just one among many.