I’ve been busy

 

Last night I was exhausted, and had the wildest dreams. Seamus and I were riding camels through a snowfield in space. There was a part of the snow that was thin, with a sort of crevasse underneath, a crevasse of space. Seamus’ camel stumbled over this part and he fell and punched his hand into the crevasse, and his hand was burned by space.

We went to a convenience store, where Seamus knew a man who could help him. We told the man that Seamus’ hand had been burned by space, and he gave Seamus a giant pill to take, from a bottle which he stored beneath the counter.

In the parking lot, Seamus’ truck was attacked by a biker gang! The biker gang’s daughter, who looked like Eponine from Les Miserables, almost succeeded in getting inside of the truck. We pulled out onto the road, knowing that several members of the biker gang had stashed themselves in the truck bed, with Seamus’ dog, Emy. It was snowing.

We drove over the mountains in the blinding snow. The directions, given to us by the man at the convenience store, were difficult to follow, and we found ourselves becoming more and more lost, on narrow, isolated, snow-covered roads. The pill that the man had given Seamus for his space-burned hand was making him intoxicated, and at last he let me drive. Then the truck was stuck in the snow and we got out of the truck and discovered that the truck bed held Emy, Eponine, and another young woman, who were drunk, along with fifty pounds of bright pink meth, to which was affixed a note.

The note told us how to get from where we were to a secret biker hangout in the form of an old, renovated barn, where we were to deposit the meth. However, said the note, we were currently navigating through a rival gang’s territory, and they were most likely in pursuit. At this, a number of other trucks appeared, and we got back into the truck and attempted to get it unstuck from the snow.

I don’t know what happens next because I woke up.

brightness, darkness, lightness, happiness

There’s nothing left to do in my day, the space heater is on and the yellow lamps are burning and my dogs need nothing from me. Outside it’s dusk, the bright fall day turned indistinct and then twilight blue, the damp cold air embracing everything. I ate parsnips and beef cooked in bacon grease and a pile of salad greens, if I lay down right now I’ll fall asleep.

I was thinking earlier, having just arrived home, sitting in my trailer and eating some chocolate, about the difference between the way it feels to be “home” and the way it feels to be “not home”. Both places exist in the same reality, with the same molecules and the same air, and there is no definable difference between them- but when I am tired, and I have been “not home” for a number of hours, walking the leafy streets and riding my bicycle and going in and out of various cubical buildings with their warmed, circulating air- and then I arrive “home”, and step across the threshold that is the busted metal step of my twenty-foot trailer, something magical happens. I am no longer “outside”; I am no longer “not home”. I am no longer plodding the weary paths of life, marking off the miles, scratching things off my lists and watching new lists grow in my hands like magic. I am “home”, and even though the only thing between “home” and “not home” is a piece of plywood and some siding, it feels absolutely different.

I put on sweatpants. I drink a mason jar of water. I stop holding my breath. I turn off most of my brain, and put a kettle on the stove to heat water for dishes. My heartrate has probably slowed.

I’m barefoot.

My dogs immediately curl into donut shapes on the bed, putting themselves into standby mode until they’re needed again.

While the water heats up I lay in my bed on the fuzzy tiger blanket that my dogs love so much, and stare at the copper plate of Pablo Neruda that hangs above my dying maidenhair fern. Potato sidles up next to me and lays against my thigh, but he won’t let me pet his scruffy face because I’ve got some hippie salve on my hands and he doesn’t like the way it smells. I wonder what it would’ve been like to be Pablo Neruda. I wonder if Pablo Neruda ever got tired of being Pablo Neruda. I wonder if Pablo Neruda ever got tired of writing poetry. I think about the things that’ve happened this week that I want to tell my friends about when I see them. That’s the upside of spending so much time alone- you have plenty of time to figure out just exactly what you want to say. I’d like to tell Seamus, for example, about the tripod yorkie that was at Fernhill park today. Cruising around on three legs, lopsided and oblivious. And then there was the squirrel I saw- I had just turned out of my driveway, and was biking away from my house sort of slowly- when a squirrel zipped out into the street, placed a walnut in its big green husk right in front of my bicycle tire, and zipped away again. This all happened in about a half second, and it made me laugh out loud. And this morning, when I was making a batch of chocolate candy, having suddenly become enamored with the alchemy that is dark chocolate, coconut oil, peppermint oil, and honey- and I spilled half the double boiler in the sink. Into the right side of my little avocado-colored enamel sink, the side where the dishes were piled up. I was running late so I left the whole mess, and when I returned this afternoon and pulled the dishes out the chocolate had hardened, and I had a chocolate-covered sink.

I’ve been feeling appreciation lately for the little things. Maybe the tattered prayer flags in the courtyard of my yoga studio are working their magic on me, when I sit on the concrete bench after class and stare at them, steam rising off of me like a plume. I am loved. I let love in. I am kind to myself. Hot yoga is turning out to be a sort of magic in itself, like letting myself be melted down in a double-boiler and reshaped into a calmer, more pliable version of myself. And the way I’ve been eating- mountains of vegetables, browned in bacon grease or floating in chicken stock, mixing bowls of salad. Bacon, steak, roasted chicken. Plantains fried in coconut oil. Pears. And my sleep has been incredible, almost indescribable- ecstatic. Ecstatic sleep. Like when I was a kid and sleep was a magical journey to an enchanted land. The best. All in all, I feel calmer than I’ve felt in as long as I can remember. Maybe ever? Who’s to say. And what is linear time, anyway.

I can’t believe that just a little while ago, I was feeling apprehensive about the wintertime. I’d forgotten that, given the chance, winter can be so good- winter just wants to be good. Winter wants to be like the sweetest twilight, like introspection. Like rest. Why can’t we rest? As westerners, as modern civilization. Why can’t we let ourselves rest.

I came to peace today, while walking my dogs in the autumn sun, with the fact that this winter is going to be very restful for me. I could push myself really hard, I think, if I wanted it bad enough. I could start something hugely ambitious and get really stressed out and make myself really “busy”. I could consume lots of stimulants and tell myself I’m not good enough and set my alarm even on mornings when I don’t need it. If that’s what I wanted. But the problem is that I don’t want that. I don’t want it very much. I only want it a little bit, and not nearly as much as I want a lot of other things. I want, for example, to be in my body. Grounded on the real physical earth. I want to have roots that go down to the bedrock. I want to be as slow as the ocean. I want to be like a boulder at the edge of the sea.

Also, I want to learn how to be a person among people. I want to work to accept the irreconcilable contradictions of the people that I love as givens, instead of as puzzles that can somehow be solved. Also heartbreak, disappointment, disillusionment. Failure on both the microscopic and the macroscopic level. I want to let all of these things inside of my heart. I am the sea, my heart is the sea. The sea can hold everything.

And there is appreciation for how my heart is beating. Wildly. For the people that I love. How fucking lucky I am to know such brilliant stars in a dark and endless universe. How achingly sweet it is. Somehow communicating to those people how special it is that they are, how I can see it, like magic, like seeing the earth from space. That alone is a whole life’s work, the endless repetitions of love that wear down our daydreams of isolation. Like sand and wind wearing canyons away. Knowing what is important. This is what is important.

So that’s what I want, more than anything. To be in the world, to be in my body. And the sweet-dark of wintertime, with its questions and its mysteries, closer now like clusters of stars, seen from a clearing in the forest. Introspection that goes outward as it goes further inward, swirling across the sky like the milky way.

 

 

the enchanted valley and things that do not happen

Hello!

You may have read an early draft of this story, about the Duckabush Arson of last year, from a link on a hiking website. This early draft has been posted without my permission, and actually violates my publishing agreement with Amazon, and can get me in a lot of trouble. If you’re the one who posted this link, please take it down. And if you’d like to read the final, full-length version of the story in its entirety, you can find it here-

Duckabush Fire

And thanks for reading!

torrential rainfall and the disputed kingdom Protista

radiolaria

It’s been raining torrentially all day- this morning we took the dogs to kelly point park, the superfund site where the metallic Columbia meets the sewage-filled Willamette, and big cold drops began to pelt us as soon as we stepped from the car. We walked along the path through the woods, throwing Emy’s ball before us. The poplar trees, huge overhead, swayed ominously in the wind from the oncoming storm, and we watched in wonder as limbs broke off, now and then, and fell in slow motion to the ground. Let’s go to the beach? I said. A tree might fall on us? But the beach was too exposed, the wind beating us like a newspaper and the rain splatting us and the lights from the grain barges on the river. Back in the forest, we watched the trees. Woo woo, they said. The air was grey with condensation. Along the trail nettles grew hopefully, taking up nuclear waste from the soil.

Now I’m in my trailer with the space heater up too high, and it’s still raining torrentially. Earlier I tried to study, laying in bed with my big floppy biology book, watching the water run in rivulets down the little trailer-window, but I fell asleep instead. Before I fell asleep I’d been trying to focus on the disputed kingdom Protista, but instead I was thinking indulgently about summertime, and houses I used to live in, and meadows I have known.

I’ve been feeling a lot of nostalgia lately. Maybe because it is the wet end of the wintertime, maybe because I have been in the city too long with only crowded backyards and superfund sites to retreat to. And it’s funny, because when you finally let a thing go, sometimes years after you first realize that you should be done with it, you never think that it will come back all draped in the soft colors of nostalgia. But that is how I feel today, tonight, about all sorts of things- and I am thinking of them longingly, here in my little driveway-house full of warmth with the rain pounding on the aluminum roof.

Where do they go, these things that happen? Our experiences, our disembodied stories? Apparently there is a compost heap in my brain where they are recycled into magic treasures, more whole then they ever actually were.

I think of North Dakota often, it is one of my muses, if I am using muse in the correct sense, if a muse can be a thing other than a person. Also my friends are muses, people I have known, mostly old friends who cannot get their shit together, who are propelled helplessly through life by their own irreconcilable contradictions, who are moved about as if by mystery. Who do not use logic. Who are painfully beautiful. Who always seem more alive than other people but also more ungrounded. Which is maybe the same thing.

And North Dakota. North Dakota from a freight train- the train goes fast, because north Dakota is wide open. The train could be said to hurtle. On both sides of the train, the soft gold grass. Bent at the tops, like an ocean. The native prairie that grew back after people fled to the cities. Just the grass and the train and above you, the glass observatory of the sky. Now and then a broken down barn, melting into the grass. A stone fence, half-finished, built from stones fished from the ground. A shiny ribbon in the prairie is a stream, flat and clear, like you could float down it on your back. Wind, and sometimes clouds, charging from the east. Lightning.

I used to do whatever I wanted. Travel all the time, move back and forth. I ate dumpstered birthday cake and slept outside under forgotten clumps of trees and that was ok, because I was young and needed nothing. I thought that everything was too fucked up to invest in anything, but then investing in nothing made me feel like I was already dead, and that made me wish that I was, and that feeling was confusing because I had no reason to want to be dead. It was like I wanted to be free so bad but then when I was free I realized that there was nothing else. Like when I was little and I would try and play the video games my brother liked so much but all I cared about was finding the edge of the world, moving my little man into all the corners of the screen to try and find some place beyond what you could see. But there’s nothing else, there’s just the tunnel or whatever, and it’s all set up for you, you’re supposed to jump and get the coin and stomp the mushroom and it’s supposed to make you feel good.

When I was younger, I never thought about what would happen. I figured that the world would just end soon so there was no point in thinking about it. The world felt old, tense, used up, on the brink of something. Everything felt so extremely precarious, like if I touched it it would fall over. It didn’t make any sense to me to put my efforts into something that would just end anyway. I didn’t know then that things that fall over build themselves up again, over and over like magic. It took me a long time to see that.

I used to not need anything- not money, not a home, not any specific food. But there’s a lot of stress in that lifestyle, and loneliness, and eventually your adrenals get worn out and you wake up one day and your body hurts and you can’t do it anymore and you need things. Or you throw yourself off a bridge, because the world hasn’t ended yet and you can’t keep bluffing.

I’ve been in Portland for a year and a half straight. I used to leave for about half of every year. Also notable- I’ve had my dog for a year and a half, I’m starting my second year of undergrad next term, and March 18th is my one-year anniversary with Seamus. I turn thirty this year, and I’m so grateful that this shit is getting easier. And it feels sweet, this nostalgia for the way I lived for so long, tonight, sitting in my trailer with the rain coming down- memories, dreams, popping up like treasures from underwater. Sometimes I feel anxiety about it- like I’ll never be able to travel again, because I won’t have the money, and my body can’t handle the way I used to travel, for free. Waking up on the freight train, sided somewhere in Minnesota, watching the dawn bleed into the sky. Shoplifting grapefruit and sardines. Spending days in a bramble thicket, reading Steinbeck. Walking for miles in the dead of night, looking for water. So many moments of feeling so alive- stacking up on top of each other, making the universe hum like an electrical current. Like it was just me and the universe. The universe moving through me, like I wasn’t even there. Have you ever felt that way? Like you can actually forget yourself enough for the universe to go about its business right in front of you. Like in any Farley Mowat book, when he’s been in his canvas tent in the snow for long enough and the wolves decide he’s just a bunch of lichen, and they start playing with each other and acting out all their wolfy dramas in front of him. Like he’s found the secret place at the edge of everything, where there’s something else that no-one knew was there.

I haven’t been working on my book for a while. I took too many credits this term, and I moved, so I haven’t had time to write. And I hate being really busy. It gives me big fluffy piles of anxiety. Too much of my brain is devoted to thinking about stuff like colors and shapes and patterns of light and very little is devoted to time management and schedule planning. So I sort of freeze up if my life gets too complicated and then I can’t do anything. I need large blocks of time to stare out the window and think about sea creatures. I need to be able to accidentally fall asleep while studying. I need to be able to be ten minutes late for everything. I may not actually be ten minutes late for everything, but I need that to be ok.

I wish I had another three month stretch to work on my book. It’s my ladder to the moon- I need it to climb out of here. But you need a really strong ladder to climb out of one way of life and into another one, and it takes a long time to build a ladder that strong. Right now I’m doing undergrad to prepare to go to school for my master’s in Chinese medicine, because that’s my other dream, besides writing. But when I look down that road I see full-time school for the next five years and then after that, working full time to pay off my student loans, and then working forever until I die. And there’s no time for writing in that anywhere.

How do you do it? How do you be an adult. How do you want things hard enough to make them real. It’s like I woke up one day and all the rules had changed. Or I woke up one day and realized where I was- in this body, on this ground, with this rain coming down everywhere. There’s no place at the edge of everything, and yet there is. And I can want both worlds, but so far, I haven’t figured out how to have them both at once. And that’s painful, but pain can be good. A motivator. Soothing, even. I feel pain, therefore I exist. This sucks and I want something else, therefore I exist. This sucks this sucks this sucks, I exist I exist I exist.

dream

dystopia, dark skies, lightning and chemical clouds, always dark, I’m staying with SG in a sprawling metropolis- I go to visit Mykhiel, who lives in the bottom half of a tiny, peaked house with dark, papered-over windows- the bottom half and basement, on the inside, are a chaotic, teeming labyrinth of strange, industrial apartments winding concrete staircases and cold, damp show spaces. People are everywhere. I wander the house looking for Mykhiel, becoming lost in the art and production studios of nerdy boys with wild, tangled hair. I finally find Mykhiel. They live in a series of concrete rooms lit with Christmas lights and mostly bare. Mykhiel’s kids Z and M are there, as well as three dogs, two cats, and a giant lizard I do not recognize. Mykhiel is a visual artist, works all night at a light table in a dark, empty room. Ten year-old Z makes me cupcakes. They are the ugliest cupcakes I have ever seen, but they taste amazing. Z and I eat cupcakes and have philosophical conversations. The night gets late. SG is texting me, she doesn’t know where I am, but I can’t find my phone. I can’t get out of the building, I’m lost. I end up on the rooftop with Mykhiel, looking at the clouded chemical sky. We try to have sex, but we can’t decide who’s the top and who’s the bottom, and we can’t stop laughing, so we give up. SG shows up and we all sleep together in one tiny, rumpled bed.