chocolate covered bacon and the meaning of the wintertime

The dry season ended, all of a sudden, and the sky became dark and wet and the air turned cold and all the leaves fell. At first I was taken aback by all of this, because I hadn’t wanted it to happen. I was feeling like a victim of the seasons, like one of those people who lives in Portland but wishes they lived somewhere else but who won’t, for whatever reason, just move. But then I cranked up the space heater and pulled out the extra blankets and got a Netflix subscription, and now my trailer is a cozy little winter den with yellow lamps blazing and chicken stock bubbling on the stove and I never want to leave it, I only want to eat pears while I watch gossip girl and stroke Kinnikinnick, whose fur has been softened by the rain and who refuses to go outside and pee again until spring.

My life currently lacks direction. I purposefully set up my life this fall in such a way that I would have plenty of time to write. As summer was winding down I registered for just a few credits, knowing that between school and my two regular money gigs, I’d have lots of downtime left over. I’ll work on my book, I thought, and then in spring I’ll set off to hike the pacific crest trail. Isn’t life grand! Except now the rain is falling torrentially, sealing me indoors like a biblical flood, and I can’t write at all.

You know, I’ve read alot of books about the writing process. Books about writing by prolific authors I do not read, and books about writing by not-so-prolific authors who I adore. I’ve even read books on writing by authors who are neither prolific nor particularly admirable. Writers say lots of nice things about writing, and that’s nice, and it feels comforting. But they can’t ever answer the one question that I have, the question that never goes away. In fact, they never even try. The question seems pretty straight forward to me, but the fact that no writer-writing-about-writing has, as far as I know, addressed it, makes me wonder if I’m a fool for even asking it in the first place. My question-

What do you do when you are trying to write but you don’t feel like writing?

This question is not- What do you do when you want to write but you’re blocked?

The question is- What do you do when you don’t want to write? Like, at all? For a really really long time?

If there was a writing god, up on a mountaintop somewhere, I would climb to the top of that mountaintop and I would walk up to them and I would shout at them-

IS WRITING OR IS WRITING NOT MAGIC?

Because if writing is magic, then it’s probably not something that you should force yourself to do when you don’t want to do it. If writing is magic, then it’s probably not even possible to do it when you don’t feel like doing it. If writing is magic, and you don’t feel like writing for a whole year, even though you’re really, really tired of having nothing to show for yourself but a bunch of rambling personal essays on the internet, then there’s probably nothing you can do, but maybe wait. And do something else, like learn to be a dog musher. Or walk across the continent.

But if writing is not magic, then you’re a fool, and not only are you a fool but you’re a lazy fool, because if you had just one speck of discipline well then you could sit yourself right down at this here computer and write and write and edit and edit and ediiiiiiiiiiiiiit and then after a number of days had passed you would have a finished manuscript and then maybe you could find someone to buy it and then you would be a writer, a real writer, and you wouldn’t even have to move to the sub-arctic to learn to be a dog musher which is fine because you didn’t really want to do that in the first place, you just wanted to be a writer.

So there is the writing god, way up on the mountain top, and there is capitalism, way down in the hollows. Between the two I’m perched in a little alpine meadow, watching the clouds roll by, tearing the petals off daisies and trying to pretend that time is not passing.

So my life has no meaning right now, seeing as I’m neither writing, working towards anything in school, having adventures, or falling in or out of love with anybody. And so in an attempt to stuff the meaning back into my life, I’ve taken up Bikram yoga. Bikram yoga is like regular yoga except totally different, and that’s why the yelp reviews are so harsh. Because most people, I think, don’t like it. In regular yoga everyone is calm and the room is cool and if you need to pee you can just get up and pee. In Bikram yoga you’re not allowed to leave the room to pee but it doesn’t matter. You’re sweating so much fluid and you’re so dizzy and overheated that your bodily functions cease entirely. And the instructor stands on a mirrored podium and yells at you through a mic. LEAN back! Lean back! More back! More back! Farther back! Back! Back! BACK! Like they’re daring you to fall over. And it’s not only 105 degrees, there’s also no air circulation and it’s humid and close. It’s like if Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights was teaching you yoga in Florida in the summertime. And you weren’t allowed to open the windows.

Afterwards though I sit in the little courtyard in the rain and look at the faded prayer flags that have tangled in the trees and my sense of wellbeing shoots up to about five thousand percent. The melancholy of my stupid life actually starts to seem sort of beautiful, and as I walk the four blocks home in my sweat-drenched yoga clothes, clutching my crumpled mat, while the freezing rain falls around me, I notice how nice the rain can smell, like mushrooms and earth. And I remember when I first moved to Portland from the desert and how miraculous I thought it all was, the green and the wetness of November, the dripping conifers in the park and the steam rising off the ground. And the grey of the wet-season sky comes in so many different, subtle shades; smoke and soot and burnished steel and burning lead, each one invoking its own special flavor of melancholy. The emotional pallet of the Pacific Northwest wintertime.

So Bikram is helping me. And aside from taking up Bikram yoga, I’ve also adopted the Paleo diet, for no reason other than it’s extremely difficult to stick to, and so that takes up alot of my brain space that would otherwise be devoted to seething existential despair. Following the Paleo diet is satisfying in the way that having an eating disorder is satisfying, in that it makes you feel as though your life is under control. When I was a teenager I had an eating disorder- I’d memorized the caloric content in every food that I ate and I spent the day counting and recounting, adding things up in my head. My rules were simple- always be hungry, and eat as close to 1200 calories a day as possible, and never, ever eat more than 1800. I was super thin, and I fit perfectly into whatever I wanted to wear. My jawbone was alluringly angular, and nothing on my body folded when I moved. I was also super weak and always coming down with colds and things, constipated and riddled with allergies, not to mention always hungry. The worst part was that my boyfriend thought that this was my natural, healthy body type- he thought that this was how girls were supposed to look, and I never told him otherwise, and so I helped perpetuate his fucked up ideas of what women are supposed to be.

When I moved to Portland at nineteen and walked across the park at 22^nd and Powell, feeling the damp grass soak my shoes, my eating disorder magically went away. I was making my own choices about my own life and I no longer needed it to make me feel as though I was in control. I started exercising and eating regular meals and I immediately gained about thirty pounds.

Following the Paleo diet doesn’t hurt me the way that starving myself used to hurt me, and so I feel pretty good about it. And it’s a fun challenge- kind of like that radio show where a caller presents the host with three imaginary ingredients and the host has to come up with a dinner made exclusively from those ingredients and a few random spices. I know, no-one listens to the radio anymore but I do, and it’s a real radio show. If the Paleo diet was that radio show then the caller would say, “Ok, your ingredients are Meat, Vegetables, Bacon Grease, and if you’re feeling really wild, a little bit of sweet potato or maybe a ripe plantain. What will you make?” As an addendum to my own personal version of the Paleo diet, I’ve added on as much dark chocolate (80+ percent) as I want. And of course in order to balance out all the discipline that’s required to not break down and binge on a giant bag of juanitas tortilla chips or a pot of gluten-free rice pasta, I’m allowed to watch as much Gossip Girl as I like. And play online scrabble. As much as I want.

And all of this, of course, makes me feel as though my life is under control. Under MY control. As if I can control anything. Like, I may not have the discipline to work on my manuscript, but at least I haven’t eaten any grains in a while. I may have all this writing just sitting around that just needs a bit of editing and maybe I could get it published somewhere, and here I am unable to work on it, but at least I can stand on one leg and fly forward like a bird in a really hot room without falling over or throwing up. It may be cold and raining outside, and I may be lonely, bored and directionless, but at least I have Netflix, and chocolate covered bacon. And my dogs. Who are awesome.

s u n d a y

Overcast, warm unless the air is moving, reading Anne Carson,
I went running in the forest, in my old running shoes, that need replacing, on the narrow dirt path, squishy with mud. Finn and I, and the small dogs, like squirrels, out of place, which would wink out of existence, immediately, if western civilization were to collapse-
at least the Papillon, the chihuahua would survive, would dig a burrow in the dusty earth, eat mice, insects, grasshoppers, chicken bones, the dried stool of other animals, buts of hair, earthworms, clods of mud, grass, birdshit, discarded hamburger buns, would survive, would procreate, would carry on for all of us.
The forest was beautiful, cool and damp in all the right ways, like a breathing animal, without urgency, an animal who does not feel excited, anxious, who is infinitely calm, an animal like a grandmother, as old as a grandmother, the world’s grandmother. I’m finally bleeding, the storm clouds have broken, my heart is a wheatfield in the sunshine. I ran and ran through the forest, high on advil and the euphoria of baseless optimism, or rather clumsily jogged, although in my imagination I am an antelope, and nik nik is a squirrel, and our spirits are birds, and we will live forever.
For breakfast afterward I had happiness, contentment, bacon, greens, brown rice, eggs scrambled with fresh herbs, and a chocolate muffin that I had baked without sugar, at first had though was awful, had frozen, and now think is particularly delicious, like flourless chocolate cake, only with coconut milk in there, and mashed bananas.
I am going to try to blog more, unless I do not. I am going to the forest for a month, (I think), unless I do not. I do not particularly believe in things happening, in the future, (or continuing to happen), but I go through the motions, so as not to seem insane, and am constantly pleasantly surprised when the earth continues to turn, the sun continues to rise, I continue to find pleasure in affection, my dog does not leave me, only snuggles closer, while I sleep, spreading herself along my ribcage, resting her small snout on my armpit, breathing her small, good-smelling dog breaths on my face.
I have no hope, but I am grateful, and I will not curse this life by declaring that anything I love will continue to exist, and I will attempt, instead, to write its creation myth, so that we can somehow understand it, without looking directly at it, like the most distant stars, which exist, and do not exist, and show us the shape and depth of space-time, everything happening all at once, all piled up, there and not there.
Life is a feral dog, and by avoiding eye contact I hope to gain its trust.

The next two days

I mostly ate the same sorts of things. My jaw hurt, the nerves like exposed rock on a mountaintop that is harried by the wind. I took the last of a bottle of vicodin leftover from when I got a tooth pulled in 2008, and then wouldn’t let myself have anymore. Without the vicodin the pain danced around in my skull like electricity, moving from one side of my jaw to the other, up into my skull where it pulsed like a flashlight. I worried about getting food stuck in the red empty socket. I checked the socket in the mirror after eating. I imagined a little piece of bread in there, a flax seed. Bumping against the raw nerves like a buoy in the sea.

I made juice to drink from beets and carrots and celery and a handful of kale from the garden. There was stuff on the top like cappuccino foam. It tasted sweet. I made a smoothie from frozen raspberries that C brought me. I made split pea soup, frying the carrots and onions in bacon grease before adding them to the pot. I made kale salad with lemon juice and olive oil. I bought gluten-free carrot flax muffins and ate them with C out in front of her school, on the sidewalk in the sunshine.

Today I was tired so I took the lightrail home instead of riding my bike up the big hill. I went to the grocery store. I talked to the man at the meat counter and he said that the “natural” bacon there comes from factory farm pigs. They just aren’t fed any antibiotics, he said. That’s what makes them different. I imagined the pigs in stalls so small they couldn’t turn around. I imagined the workers saying mean things to the pigs. I put the bacon in my cart and bought it but thought that maybe next time I wouldn’t. I got a package of raspberries and a cauliflower. The air outside was warm and bright. At home I sat in a kitchen chair in the sun and ate the raspberries. I could hear the freeway, and see the neighbor’s windows up close to the fence. Last night they had their porchlight on all night. It was so bright it was like a spotlight, throwing pale squares of light through the windows of my cottage, making my room grey and soft purple like a room in a movie where it is supposed to be night, but you can see everything. I had lain awake, wondering why they had such a bright light, if they were trying to signal something. If they had lost a ship in the harbor. If maybe no-one had told them that the harbor was gone, that a highway had been built there, a neighborhood, neighbors so close their pears fell on your roof and they could see in your windows. Today the apartment looked empty, the blinds were drawn back and the walls I could see were bare and white.

After eating in the sun I lay in bed with all my school reading on my chest and instead of reading it, I fell asleep. My jaw hurt and if my body couldn’t have opiates well then it wanted to sleep instead. It was dark when I woke and I went inside the house. Toby was there and I made some bacon to share with her. The bacon didn’t cook right and there were pieces of fat left, firm and rubbery. I packed kale salad and injera for my lunch tomorrow. C called from work and said that she had eaten three skittles, a square of fruit leather and a three by two inch rice krispy treat. She was walking her bike to the broadway bridge. It was a nice night, clear and not yet cold. It hardly feels like October the way I imagine October should feel. It feels like a clear warm in-between place, a last hurrah before the rains come.

And therein concludes a week’s record of the food I (mostly) ate.

Experiment

I am going to try and write what I eat every day

for a week

for an experiment

Today was sunny

and cold

Corinne was here for breakfast and we ate what we always do- love. We also had eggs with the yolks runny (cause corinne made them and she is good at not breaking them- I always break the yolks- after hundreds of pairs of eggs over many years I still break them- it is impatience, I think). With the eggs we had kale from the backyard (the backyard is a kale forest! a tangled jungle of kale!) that was cooked in browned onions in the cast iron and corn tortillas, three for me (softened on top of the greens) and two for corinne (made crispy in a little oil). This breakfast requires three cast iron pans. My new house has nine cast iron pans, so there are always plenty. We could melt them down and make a meteor, or a ship’s anchor.

While Corinne was making breakfast she was simultaneously making our lunch, because I was shuffling around in a fret, trying to finish my chemistry lab report that I wasn’t sure, exactly, how to do, before fifteen minutes was up and I had to get on my bike and ride to school, in the cold clear fall air, with the yellow leafs on the concrete and the wind that smells like sugar cookies. (There is a cookie ghost in our neighborhood, when the air is clear and cool it smells like sugar cookies.) For our lunch Corinne browned more onions in a pan with carrots and a little cabbage from the backyard brassica forest, and added ground beef and some risotto rice I’d made by cooking rice with some oregano and bay leaf and a square of bullion in a pot. She put this into my little lunch container for me, and sent me out the door to my bicycle and the Mississippi street hill and skool. I am in school now, my school has twenty-seven THOUSAND students and each one of them is a bright and shining individual, and they are all clamoring for education, or the bureaucratic shadow of it, and the institution is filled with alien-bright florescent light and stale blowing too hot/too cold air and everything is free/not free.

I ate my lunch in a big room with little tables and people hunched over computers and other lunches. The beef and rice tasted fantastically delicious, and I stared at the other people eating. I also ate a salad from the dining hall, young leafs in a brown to-go box with red wine vinegar and some sort of indiscriminate salad oil. I ate it mixing bites of leafs with bites of beefy rice, stabbing the leafs with my potato fork and kicking my legs happily under the table.

I met Corinne for a walk in the afternoon because she goes to school downtown too and the sun was out. We went to the expensive overpriced natural foodstore where the only thing I can afford is cooked brown rice, and Corinne got me a little container of raspberries. Berry season is waning, and I am already mourning. I love the berries. Soon I will have to break into my stash of frozen blackberries at Corinne’s house, and eat an entire pie to consol myself.

Corinne and I also shared a strange chocolate health-food bar that had sprouted buckwheat in it. We sat on the sidewalk in the sun against a building and held hands. Corinne’s eyes looked nice and faded in the sun and she has freckles in her ears.

I biked home in the good air of evening and made a manchego quesadilla before leaving to get my hair cut by Naomi. I had risotto rice and leftover pinto beans on my quesadilla. The pinto beans needed salt. Naomi cut my hair in her living room, and then showed me some shoes she’d bought on the internet. They looked like if an architect and a stripper designed doll shoes for a museum, only better. They looked like salmon could use them to get up waterfalls, if they had enough money.

After my haircut I went to the store and wandered, dazed, among all the overpriced packaged health food goods, wondering what I liked to get for groceries. I got another small package of raspberries and the staples, carrots and onions and corn tortillas and such. I also got a hanging plant called string-of-pearls at the last minute for my new cottage (which has a woodstove! and good light!) and put it in my bike pannier to carry home. At home I ate the raspberries and wrote emails and felt pleasure. I think I will go build a fire in my woodstove and read Xeroxed articles for class and feel happiness. And then sleep.

I WANT

I want to bust you out of the city. I want to steal a car and drive up I-5 as fast as I can go. A nice car, a solid box, a bubble-pod, a car that smells like vinyl, nothing of the forest, a euphoric comfort machine. Stolen. What better thing to steal, than a car?

A stolen car and a suitcase full of money, to pay for all the gas. I’ll find the suitcase under some tumbled rocks on the mountain-top, underneath a giant Alaskan yellow-cedar of record diameter. A suitcase full of money and a car. The seas are filling with oil, the world is ending, who cares. This is no time to be pretending to know how to bake bread. This is no time for routine. This is no time for patience, for tolerance. This is no time to love the land of here below.

I’ll pick you up in my new car and then we can go anywhere. First, we’ll chase the sun. For moral. We’ll bust out of the rain cloud that clings to the cascade mountains and drive east into the summertime. It’s so bright out there that we’ll get suntans on our feet in the shape of flip-flops, even while driving. No more getting cheated out of summertime. No more pretending to know how to bake bread.

I never want to learn how to really bake bread. How to give an egg wash, sprinkle the loaves with seeds, mist the ovens with water to make a nice crust. I want to burn all bread loaves. Next, I want to burn all gluten-free bread loaves. I want to burn all pizzas. I want to burn the word PIZZA. As soon as I’m out of the rain cloud this feeling will pass. I’ll have my feet up on the dash, in flip-flops. Bread loaves can live. Bread loaves make a pleasing smell, sandwiches are sometimes interesting to assemble. Anything can go in them. Absolutely anything.

I’ve got you in the car with me and we’re busting out. Routine does not need us. School in the fall can Eat a Dick. Being far apart from each other is unnecessary. Missing your freckles come out, one by one, in the springtime, and seeing them only in bunches now and then, for a night or two, tears my heart apart. Now I’ve got you till the money runs out or we get sick of each other, whichever comes first. You’re wary of my plan, my stolen car, my mercurial wanderlust, but then I tell you that I’ll pay for your art school so you don’t have to spend your savings, and you feel better.

We go to North Dakota, because it is far from everything and not overdone. There’s an abandoned ranch, the grass waist-high. The wind blows ferociously, and sucks the moisture from our lips. The old house tips into the earth, but there is no mold anywhere. All the rooms are filled with light. The paint is peeling, and paint chips get in everything. I have a small gas generator for electricity. You’ve brought a good table and enough coffee to fuel a mild obsession.

All we do is fuck and work. We wake at dawn and run, without time pieces, down the pitted dirt road that goes through the grass. We can see the horizon in front of us, and I think of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her bareback ponies.

We run until we are exhausted, farther every day. There’s a stream to jump into, clear, with wildflowers. We bathe in the stream and then make breakfast out of things from our garden. We’ve cleared an overgrown patch of yard for our garden. It has volunteer watermelons and chicken bones in the dry soil. An old compost pile. We’ve got chickens. We eat and then I push you over into the grass and take off your clothes. We lay in the sun and bake. Then we crawl into the shade to fuck, because I am intolerant of the heat.

After fucking, we do not know what time it is. It doesn’t matter. We stumble, barefoot, into the house, leaving our breakfast dishes in the grass, and begin to work, you at your table and me at my computer. When we get hungry we eat from the big pot of food on the stove. Simple things, mung beans and brassicas and bone broth. Wild potherbs. Bacon.

When the sun sets we stop working, for we have no electric lights, and if we tried to work by oil-lamp we would go blind. The oil lamps hiss and we lay on the warm boards of the deck and watch the stars come out. I’ve got a banjo, and you’ve learned to play the thumb piano. Our hair is wild. We have no mirrors. It doesn’t matter, because we know how beautiful we are. We fuck again. All day, when we are taking breaks, moments of staring out the window at the tall grass, and the wind, we are thinking of new ways to fuck. Ways to fuck that no-one has ever done before. Fucking as improv, as spirituality, as ritual. Fucking that pushes our limits, our pain tolerance, our love for one another. Fucking that doesn’t try to be anything at all. Sometimes I read outloud to you from Little House on the Prairie while you masturbate. Sometimes I try and make myself come just by breathing and watching the clouds.

Frequently your coffee consumption keeps you from sleeping. These nights you sit up in bed and blind-contour draw my chin as seen in the moonlight. During the day you nap, and I write you love letters because I miss you, and feel my infinite smallness, all alone on the plain. I am like Ma in the dugout, when Pa has gone away to find work back east, and the blizzards will not stop coming. Only Ma was infinitely more patient than I am, because she never had the internet. Eventually you wake up, and find that I’ve taken off your clothes and tied you to the bed with some rope I’ve found in a broken-down stable. I’ve rubbed you all over with oil and placed warm stones along your spine. I’ve made constellations of your freckles with one of your shoplifted drawing pens. I’ve made you come seventeen times, in your sleep. You’ve had the strangest dreams, and you’re flushed.

Summer gets old and dried-up, and we run out of salve for our lips. We’ve eaten the twenty-pound sack of mung beans and are down to the bottom of our barrel of salt-pork. The wild pot-herbs have gone to seed and we’ve eaten all the watermelons. One day I wake up and want to read the news. You’ve been reading it on the sly for many months, and tell it to me in one long narrative there in bed, propped on your pillows, talking with your hands. I work in some magical realism to put the world back together, like an emulsifier. The seas are still filling with oil, there is still nothing I can do. The sun from the window is resting on your perfect tits, which have exploded in freckles. I pull the suitcase of money from under the bed. It’s empty. We haven’t grown sick of each other.

What to do next? Get married? There is nowhere else to run. North Dakota was the last place. You furrow your brow. You are both worried and excited by my mercurial wanderlust. Your hands are neat and square, the blue of your eyes has faded from the sun. I do not know what to do with you. Maybe I was exposed to too much lead as a child. All those peeling low-income apartment complexes. The lead weights in window dressings. Lead affects the part of the brain that determines impulsiveness, and one’s ability to learn from one’s mistakes. I flop back down on the sheets, and whine like a puppy. The sheets are thin and soft, like my grandmother’s sheets. They have small simple flowers on them. The sheets make me want to have sex, and sleep. They fill me with infinite peace, like my grandmother’s house, with its hardwood floors and chiming grandfather clock.

We don’t have money for gas, so we leave the car at the house, at the end of the long pitted dirt road. We use some of your savings to mail your art and art supplies and my computer back home, to the raincloud. Then we walk. It’s fall, and the wind blows drier than ever. I have a mason jar of water and a cucumber, and my banjo. We’re barefoot. Our jean-shorts are torn. My tye-dye shirt is faded and thin. Around my neck are rainbow freedom rings, and they glint painfully in the sun.

When we get to the small paved highway we’re so hot we almost pass out. A woman with air conditioning picks us up. She’s unhappy, so I give her my banjo. She rambles when she talks, and offers us diet sodas. You’re allergic to diet soda so to protect you I dump yours out the window when she isn’t looking. In this way you know that I love you, and that I Pay Attention. The woman is so excited by our energy that she calls her husband and breaks up with him, and then drives us to Oregon. She throws her shoes out the window, and after dropping us off in the raincloud she moves to a small beach town, and opens up a shop selling bath oils and gluten-free cinnamon rolls. She’s reached the end of her personal evolution and lives there, happily, until her death.

My problem is that I fear that I will never reach the end of my personal evolution. Back home, we both get jobs somehow, even though the world is ending and capitalism is becoming irrelevant. It feels good, to have routine. It’s much easier to pretend to know how to bake bread than to think. The wild part of me goes to sleep and I lose my suntan. The rains come back and we both have allergies. We don’t worry about what the next part will be because we both know that one day, the day will come when we won’t have to figure out the next part, that the next part will come for us, over the mountains in a tidal wave, and we’ll never have to think again.

doritos, tater tots, and the anatomical vagina of the sea

Yesterday, C and I made a list of things to take to Idaho. It was a food list- grains and legumes, oils and spices, animals. Plants. This evening AM came over to practice reading aloud and read a piece about the food she has eaten- all the food she has eaten in her entire life. Her mother’s shopping cart, memorized. Jars of ragu, flats of chicken top ramen. And I thought, What do I eat, what did I eat? What did I eat today?

C and I ate breakfast in the backyard today. It was late morning and sun washed over the wooden deck. I’d gone running in spite of my amoebic dysentery (the test results came back, this is what I have, now I am taking the harsh antibiotics) and I was so ready for food, so open to it, the way I am after running, like I have never eaten before, like I have never smelled bacon before, not even once in my life. C had made breakfast while I was running so it was all there before me, like magic. Brussels sprouts and broccoli sautéed with onion and garlic, flat tortillas fried crispy in the bacon grease, peppered bacon and fried eggs broken by my impatience. Some rice. C had come over for dinner the night before- valentines day but neither of us are into that sort of thing, adamantly, maybe a little TOO adamantly, and then C leaves me a bunch of flowers on the rain-wet cement outside my shack door, so maybe the dinner is a coincidence, maybe not. I made steamed mussels, I found a recipe on the internet and sautéed leeks and garlic in a stockpot. The recipe called for one single shallot but I don’t know what a shallot is so I used a leek instead, assuming it was an oniony thing that was called for, and that the universe would forgive me. The universe did. The recipe also called for white wine but there was only red, a bottle on the counter leftover from Kristi’s birthday party, so I used that, a much greater offense, I am told, than the leek/shallot substitution, but the universe forgave me again. The mussels were delicious. They were steamed in chicken broth as well, and had parsley wilted on top. We ate them with asparagus because it is asparagus season for the next five minutes, and Brussels sprouts cooked in coconut oil with lemon juice, and tater tots. Mussels and French fries is the thing that tastes best, but French fries cannot be replicated at home so tater tots did the trick. I do not know how they make tater tots so delicious, I think it is the magic of the cylinder. It is quite pleasurable to bite the crispy browned cylinder. Corinne also brought beet salad, made with boiled cubed beets and homemade pickled cucumbers and red onion. All in all there was quite a lot of vegetables. I waited too long to eat and got irritable and then ate too much, too many small anatomical vaginas, because everyone knows that’s what mussels are. Go look at one. You will see.

Then when AM came over this evening I was making some dinner- leftover fish that my housemate’s friend had caught sautéed with some brown rice, more beet salad, and kimchi that just finished culturing in the big glass jar on the counter. It’s the best kimchi I think I’ve made yet, all spicy and tasting like ginger.

What did I eat ten years ago? Tuna salad and pickles on roman meal wheat bread that I made at home. I remember cutting the pickles on a plate with a dull paring knife, the way they made the plate green. Vlasic. The way the juice smelled when you opened the jar. Taco bell bean burritos, liquid and hot and running all over the paper wrapper, with lots of salty mild sauce. I worked graveyard shifts at Denny’s, so lots of “moons over my hammy” and sick, gummy pancakes. Ice cream, scooped from the cooler with a metal scoop that stuck to your fingers. A single cheeseburger from the McDonald’s drive through, with the salty meat-cheese and smattering of pickles and smear of ketchup and dusty white air-pocket on the bottom of the bun that every McDonald’s hamburger has. Doritos, nacho cheesier kind, burning my mouth with MSG. They indescribable mouth-feel of a single, unbroken dorito. I liked cool ranch too. Food had different names back then- instead of Brussel Sprout and Beet and Fish it was Dorito and Vlasic Pickle and Taco Bell Bean Burrito.

What do you eat for breakfast, dear reader? And what did you eat for breakfast ten years ago? This is what I want to know. I am curious! Leave comments!

And also! I need new music. Slow, barely audible instrumental music, with sparse lyrics and little rhythm. Music to write to! Do you have any suggestions?

Argiope aurantia vs. the giant who made civilization

I slept well last night. You are not going to believe this, but the weather has been warming and yellow garden spiders the size of my thumbnail have been making the trek through the wall between my shack and the garage and catapulting themselves, at one a.m., onto my bed near the wall. It’s happened twice. The first time it was a dull THUD, just after I had turned out the lights, as if a small rock had hit my pillow. Reaching out in the dark, I felt the big spider scurry over the back of my hand. Thinking it was a mouse, I yanked on the lamp-cord. It was a yellow garden spider, gentle and horrible, frozen in the light, terrified. I smashed it against the wall with my stiff dayplanner. I had unpleasant thoughts. I fell back asleep. A fluke! I told myself in the morning, over bacon. Never to happen again.

Then, the night before last, it happened again. Lights out, and THOCK! as a small object hit the wooden frame of my bed. NO, NO, NO, I thought to myself, and almost did not turn on the lamp. Almost rolled over and went back to sleep. almost. I sat up and turned on the light. There was another one, massive, trembling, immobilized in the bright lamplight. Gentle spider, I thought. Spinner of elaborate garden webs, catcher of dewdrops. Steadfast. What was she even doing in here? It was the female, large and decorated. The male is a ghost, existing only for mating, then dying. Their lives are in the garden- what were they doing in my shack? As I reached for my planner, a part of me remembered that I was the giant in the situation. I had created civilization, the combustion engine, synthetic fertilizer, iphones. She was only, maybe, looking for a warm place to lay her eggs. On a sort of expedition. Being brave. I smashed her with my planner. I turned the light back off, had horrible thoughts of yellow garden spiders jumping like lemmings from the upper part of the wall, falling in a cascade onto my face. What I deserved.

Last night I crawled into bed at midnight, somewhat anxious, with a borrowed copy of Chelsea Starr’s hurriedly photocopied zine, Long walks on the beach with Chelsea Starr. Chelsea Starr does not know it, but she is my favorite queer Portland writer. Maybe she reads this blog. Chelsea, you are my favorite queer Portland writer. Chelsea writes genuinely hilarious stories about her childhood of incredible poverty and neglect. Reading her stories is like reading about my own childhood, only somehow I have magically been given the ability to laugh at it. I do not know how she pulls this off, but it seems enormously important that she continues to do so.

I read Chelsea’s zine, and no spiders fell on my face. Life is good. I fell asleep.

Now, this morning, it is brightly sunny, like spring. I eat my breakfast on the back deck, sitting cross-legged on the wood. Eggs fried in bacon grease, Brussels sprouts fried in bacon grease, corn tortillas fried in bacon grease and bacon- friend in bacon grease. It is the same thing every day, with mustard greens or kale in the weeks that there is a frightful hike in the price of Brussels sprouts. I wonder if it is bad for me to eat so much bacon. I like to roll the egg and bacon up in the tortillas, and make a little taco. I like to eat the Brussels sprouts with my fingers. I have been having violent dreams. Is it because of all the bacon? Last night I dreamt that friends were trying to kill me, that my housemate shot me with an antique revolver. We were all wearing long slinky dresses with splits up to the knee. I woke up feeling as if I had missed something important, neglected something, forgotten something so crucial, like a child or a whole life. It felt as though, in the night, a part of me had left. Was it my old self, my old way of living, my old way of thinking about the world- was it this part of me, saying goodbye? Slipping out in the night? Did it happen when I half-woke to the sound of freight trains, the highline to Chicago, the 4am mail train? Was that the old me, leaving quietly, so as not to wake me? Scrawling a note on a piece of paper bag, leaving it on the nightstand while I slept? I love you, I miss you, I’m leaving, goodbye. Is that why I woke with such a sense of loss? Is this what happens when you decide, for the first time in your life, to go to college? After eight years of never being in one town for more than eight months at a stretch?

I do not know, but it fills me with melancholy, this bright morning. What happens to that other self? Where will she go? Will she be lonely? She will always be out there, in the fields, sleeping, alone. There is always someone, lonely. Running from nameless things. Looking. Attempting to transcend gravity.

And what about this new self? What am I, now? Boring? Uninspired? No! I will be prolific, I will grow all the things that one can grow will moving in time, but not in space- I will no longer spread myself so thin that I cease to exist entirely. Days and hours will stack up into something of worth, and every minute will add onto the one before it. This is what I want.

National Bacon Day in the Republic of Zanahoria

I ate bacon twice today. My body is a beast, and demands the pork fat. C made me breakfast- I was groggy, woke up in a black mood, the morning wind balmy, the clouded sky more bright than usual. The knock of windchimes heralded spring. C had breakfast nearly ready before I even got out of bed- a pan of roasted roots in the oven, steamed greens, corn tortillas, eggs fried in bacon grease and bacon, perfect crispy strips of lovely, salted, rust-colored bacon. We sat on the front stoop and ate, egg yolk dripping across our plates. We watched the houses across the street, all condemned, where the new sports field for the college will go. The bus went by, grumblingly. C wiped a hand on her sweatpant shorts. Her eyes twinkled like little lights inside her freckled face. Folks passed in front of us on the sidewalk, pushing strollers, going here or there for MLK day. After dishes I walked home under the weather beating the tree limbs, bringing a rounded soft wind with it and the smell of warming soil. My shack was cold- my space heater had broken. We’d spilled water all over my comforter while playing cards in bed and I’d draped it over the space heater to dry. It’d gotten too hot in there and the plastic dial had nearly melted off the thing. Now it seemed stale in my shack, and there was a strange smell, like decomposing leaves. My laundry was everywhere. My books needed reading. There was writing to do.

I couldn’t write. A nameless malaise sat on my head like a wet hat. I set out on bicycle to get a new space heater, carting it home on my rack, strapped down with an old innertube. Now there was warmth again, and the chemical smell of the space heater’s “rust preventative coating” burning off as I turned it on for the first time. I tried to read, but all I could think about was how irritating and unbelievable Oscar Wao’s sister is in the book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, not that I could write it any better, which of course makes me feel terrible. I turned the book over and wondered how it was that books even got written at all.

There was nothing to do but eat bacon. I was hungry, and there didn’t seem to be any other food in the world that I wanted to eat. I even went to the grocery store, wandered the aisles, looked at delicious foods, both those I was allowed to consume and those I was not. What I really wanted was an entire pint of ice cream, maybe a cheese pizza. But when you are allergic to both gluten and dairy, what do you do? You eat bacon. So I ate my second round crumbled on a kale salad with kimchi and grated beets and carrots. And then after the bacon was gone I suddenly felt weary of everything, again, this black mood like an acrid smoke that clings to my clothing. This day feels old. Tomorrow will be better.

everything

I sleep with the windows open and it’s cold now, as wintry as Portland will get. In the mornings I come up as if from the bottom of a deep hot pit and the cold air bites the tip of my nose where it sticks out from my ten hundred blankets and my sleeping bag, underneath all of it. I open the blankets and eject my little knitted bear, which has been wrapped up in my arms like a cat. I turn on my cellphone to see what time it is. Usually I’ve got a text from you, because you wake up before I do. Sometimes you’ve left me some soup on the front steps. Sometimes it’s still warm. This morning I wake up right when you’re walking up the driveway so I pull you into my shack, try and drag you down into the watery depths of my bed like an octopus. But you keep your shoes on so you won’t be late for work.

After you leave I get up and shut the window and turn on the space heater. I could keep the window shut at night, but then there’s something I’m allergic to and I stay up all night coughing. Mold! The concrete floor of my shack floods when it rains hard, the whole thing threatens to float away like a ship. I can only imagine what’s happening in the walls. But as long as there’s air circulating at night it’s not too bad, and I’m only mildly expectorant during the day. But still it wears me down a little, at the edges, and I fantasize my way out of here, plan my Great Escape. Only there’s nowhere to go. I can only move horizontally, I cannot transcend gravity. I am the master of my own heart rate.

So I stare at the computer, and think about my audience. Am I writing for you, who I don’t even know? With the shining hair and the glamorous costumes? What is your life even like? I have come to suspect these last few days that life, for nearly everyone, follows the same subtle patterns, and there is no way to transcend it at all. I can only move horizontally. Still I wonder where you sleep, and if you drink out of mason jars like me. Are there people who don’t stare at computers? Are we all jealous, imagining each other living? Last night Peter Fran came over for dinner, and while the shepherd’s pie and zucchini bread were baking we talked about all the horrors of the world, and also all the beauty when things come easily, and the contradictory nature of those ideas, and how try as we might, it was impossible to reconcile the two. It was, and still is, seemingly impossible that we exist in a world that harbors both. It makes a spectrum so wide it won’t fit into my field of vision, and I cannot make heads of tails of any of it. I am, we are, will be, stumbling along, in the middle. I guess that’s why it’s called mystery.

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(and this has nothing to do with anything, but it’s really, really funny.)

land of the midnite ice-cream binge

The sun at ten p.m. Can you believe it? Not setting. Just hanging out.

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Debbie and I are making pemmican, which first requires making caribou jerky. So today I thawed some meat from a roadkill caribou I found in the road a while ago and cut it into thin slices and put it in this awesome dehydrator that Debbie found at a yardsale that someone made themselves, because it’s Alaska. The sides are plywood or something and the trays are windowscreen and the door is piece of glass with cabinet hinges on it. In back is a red-hot element that looks like a curling iron with a fan behind it. The whole thing whirrs loudly and fills the house with gamey damp meat smell as it dries the caribou. The dried caribou, according to Debbie, will be real fragile and crumbly, because caribous are so lean. This one was extra lean because it’s sprintime. To make pemmican you need caribou fat, too, but there wasn’t any so we’re going to use coconut oil instead, and tiny dried cranberries that Debbie picked out of the bog last fall. (All of Interior Alaska is just a giant squishy bog of miniature cranberries.) I can’t wait to have real pemmican. Then I can go off into the wildz with just my bow & arrows and a rawhide bag of flint blades and walk until I discover a new continent. But I’ll get frozen in a snowstorm instead and future-humans with giant heads and squishy, formless bodies will find me and first they’ll think I’m a boy, and then they’ll decide I’m a girl and name me “Brittany”, or something. And they’ll look in my (now shriveled) rawhide bag and find the pemmican and they’ll say- “ah hah! But who did she trade with to get these coconuts?” It feels so cool to have all this frozen caribou meat. I think I just realized today how cool it was. Like, wait a minute! I can make fucking pemmican! It’s been my fantasy to make pemmican for a couple years now. I always wanted to make it and take it on the freight train, along with these little loaves of sprouted essene bread I used to make in the dehydrator before I stopped eating wheat. I would have the best train food in the world, and then the future and the past would become one, and I would transcend everything and turn into a ball of pure white light. I’m also interested to try the straight dried meat, before we crumble it to make pemmican. In Nunavut (that’s a part of Canada, I just learned today!) people eat plain dried caribou with butter on it. People after my own heart. I love butter!

Here’s the drying meat:

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In other food news, in spite of the frequency of hot-fudge sundaes in this house, I am now able to go three days at a time without eating any sugar, which makes me feel like a strong and living human, all alive with electricity and magical ideas, aka inspiration. It is but a small glimpse of how I might feel this summer, when I leave this village and set out on my own, returning to my traditional diet of raw vegetables, brown rice, injera, and beans with too much cumin. It makes me so excited to be alive. And that almost feels wrong. Like, happiness? Isn’t that a symptom of something? Could it really be so simple? Not like, overstimulated happy, but really, simply, child-like sustainably happy? No! Who am I to deserve such a thing, when all the world is writhing in pain and torment?! How will I ever muster the innocence, the reservoirs of wonder? I turn my face to the sky and clasp my hands and ask Annie Dillard’s god, a sort of spiritual death-centered natural selection with an eye for the individual, for three good months- just three good, endless, cloudless months- in which I might finish my manuscript. Whole civilizations have been created and perished in less. Colonies of insect eggs have hatched and died in a single second.

Debbie’s parrot, on the other hand, will live to be seventy-five years old. In a cage. Can you believe it? Sometimes I think I am a miracle.