I’m back

It is so strange to be back in the city.

It is raining, I cannot ride my bicycle. The air is cold and grey- there is fruit out there, ripening, figs and blackberries, but I do not know how to find them. Last September it was not like this- last September there was long yellow light and the sidewalks were strewn with walnuts and moldering flower petals.

It is hard to leave the forest. They dry, breezy forest where I have slept these last five months. In the forest there are always good smells, pine pitch and green things, everything is fresh, there is dust, and small mammals with bright black eyes who make their lives in the dirt and the moss and in the food cabinet of the outdoor kitchen, in a crumpled plastic bag. They eat the bag of green tea that was left there. They eat fifteen grains of brown rice. They do not want the rice cakes. No-one wants the rice cakes, not even me. Rice cakes are famine food, although I did not used to feel this way. The mice build a nest of hair and cloth fibers behind the bottle of olive-oil. They have just gotten settled when I wake them, mid-day, and they stumble out on their hopping gerbil-feet and huddle, confused and disoriented. I can not bear to scold them because they eat green tea-leaves and harm no-one. Gentle beings with their tiny, beating hearts.

It is so strange to be back in the city. I woke too early this morning, all the world was present in the warm damp wind from the window- jet-planes were in attendance, and freight trains, and buses, and garbage trucks with their crashing sounds of glass like windows breaking. If only there were the sounds of water running underground, and the clatter of breakfast dishes, and stars exploding. But it is hard to be present to the whole world at once- my ignorance of some things keeps me sane. I do not think I could stand to hear the stars exploding.

Not in attendance were the animal sounds. “I think that the season of screaming birds is over,” I say to you, from my half of the bed. We are both bathed in light, much more light than I am used to. Your old bedroom, downstairs, got little light. And in the forest the light was blocked by leaves and wood. Now you have moved into an attic bedroom with windows at both ends, and the light and winds blow through, woo-woo, in one end and out the other, and shine off the hardwood floors and colorful walls. There is room for yoga and dancing and a dozen reading chairs. The view is of peaked rooftops and the tops of trees. And in the distance, a rainbow windsock. And the thick grey sky.

The rain has stopped, and there is so much to do. It is September, and there are so many things. I can write again, and soon I start school. Today though I will unpack the car, and get on my bicycle, and go to the grocery story for carrots and chicken broth. I will do laundry and go to the bank. I will make my bed and put the books on my bookshelf. I will search out more Fitzgerald. I will sleep early, in the dim musty light of my shack, with its walls banked in moldering leaves and its light filtered through raspberry canes. And tomorrow! And the next day! And all of September! And I am in the city now!

Today

I met T-brid at the co-op in southeast. I ate a chocolate-covered pecan from the bulk bins, an energy nug, and an anemic gluten-free cookie that had unpleasant, uncooked millet in it, and which attempted to fly on the strength of its dried cherries alone. We walked to T-brid’s shack. She carried a chainsaw in one hand, an umbrella in the other. She had to pause and tell everyone she met on the street why she was carrying the chainsaw. There were a lot of people about, wearing nappy wool and unkempt hair. Southeast has its own population of people, they are not the same ones you see in northeast. They are handy and environmentally minded, they go on hikes and build cob benches in their yards. The northeast is populated with fierce hipsters who fight each other for barista jobs. Burnside keeps the two demographics separated, like the waters of a strong river.

T-brid and I walked past the brooklyn trainyard and down into the swampy, frog-infested woods of oak’s bottom. We saw two great blue herons (my grandmother! Said t-brid, as one flew out over the Willamette), a white egret, two flocks of starlings and a flock of redwing blackbirds. T-brid is a birder, she can recognize the flocks by sound. The cacophony of springtime! Clustered on the electric wires. I know it is spring. The mosquitoes have returned, the frogs, the spiders. The spiders have come home to my shack! I woke up on Tuesday with a spider bite on my left cheek, the first of the year.

We reached the eroded edge of the woods and stared at the flat water of the river, slow and steadily moving. The sky was dimming and the lights on the west hills blinked on, warm-looking homes, overly large. I told T-brid that I wished I had a wooden skiff, with oars, that I might paddle my way home. The walk had made me tired, and I didn’t want to bike. The skiff would have an oil lantern on a tall metal pole, and I would call out as I rowed, and there would be mist along the water. And in the stern of my ship would be a flag of such height that all six of the bridges would have to go up for me, on my way home, like they did for the barges. Ross Island, Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside, Broadway, Steel. T-brid offered to be the lighthouse on the bank, with a tea-light in a glass lantern.

I had no boat, I biked home, in the dark. It did not rain. The hills seemed extra long. At home my housemate and I talked about what junk foods we ate as kids- whether we drank whole or skim milk, and what sugar cereal was our favorite. I fixed myself a bowl of salad, and Brussels sprouts, and leftover curry, and rice casserole that my housemate made that had zucchini in it, and sausage, and almonds. I ate too much. There was a bag of milk chocolate sitting on the table, and I ate some of that too. “I miss ice-cream,” I said to my housemate. “Bacon tries to be my best friend, and it’s good that ice-cream and I aren’t together anymore, but I miss it.” There is nothing like ice-cream. Nothing in the whole world! It makes my bones ache from missing. Instead, my housemate offered me use of her kayak, sitting in the side yard among the blackberry brambles. “It doesn’t have a rudder, tho,” she said. “so it’s kind of hard to steer.” I imagined myself paddling down the Willamette in big circles, leaning left, leaning right, my lantern swinging crazily on its long pole, my tall flag swiping starlings from the sky. My dreams have been filled with water lately, my imagination with boats. If I am to stay in Portland for forever then I see no reason why I should not get a water craft of some kind, for free somewhere. An old skiff, a canoe. I can take it to Ross Island and build a treehouse there. Or perhaps I will only imagine my boat, and the things my boat and I would do, which is almost nearly just about as good.

(also, not to be discounted, is this- perhaps the most important piece of writing on the entire web.)

eight years and for what

The hard drive in my brain is working too hard today. Trying to process all of life’s possibilities now that all of these doors have opened and I’ve finally admitted to myself that I can actually go to college if I want to. Thinking if I start now, today, if I start this one step it will lead to another and another and in eight years I might actually be somewhere. Thirty-six! And the heavy rain of self hatred, too, muddying everything up- I’m a failure, I’m a failure, I’m a failure, eight years have already passed, and where did it get me? It got me to the present, which is here- Kristi is painting the front room tangerine orange, even though Eden was not finished mixing the paint. Eden couldn’t find happiness anywhere in that plastic bucket of color, and so spent three days brushing out squares of subtly different orange on pieces of cardstock, the tins from the basement lined up around her. Some of the orange squares were more brown, some more pink. Some of them were bright like a sunset that had been set on fire. Meanwhile the nubby pink and green couch and the record player are under plastic, huddled in the middle of the room, and the comfortable chairs have all been crowded into the dining room, and all the lamps. And Kristi got tired of waiting for Eden’s perfectionism to resolve itself so now she’s standing on the rickety wooden step-ladder, engulfing the walls in tangerine orange. Eden was nowhere near finished mixing the color.

“Do you think it’s too bright?” She asks Macon, holding her roller of electric taffy-orange at an angle.

“It’s ok,” says Macon. “Do YOU think it’s too bright?”

“I think it’s ok,” says Kristi. I like the color because it’s ridiculous, and that’s pretty exciting. One week ago the front-room walls were a dead, high-gloss dark brown, so anything is better than that. Now all we need to do is get a new chimney for the woodstove and a bunch of overstuffed couches instead of the one nappy one, and we’ll have the best front-room that anyone has ever had, ever.

I’m going to go running now. It’s frozen and dark outside but the skies are clear, and yesterday I went running in forest park and learned that if you just keep going, your toes stop being numb and then the rest of you is warm, and then you feel like an overheated cheetah that lives in a low-lit winter forest where all the ferns are frozen and stretched out, shimmery with frost, and the patches of ice on the trail are no match for your boundless enthusiasm. And what better way to feel is there but that?

Dispatches from the night-time

It’s so late, and yet here I am.

It’s cold in Portland, cold, cold, cold. Not Alaska cold, but cold for here, and clear, and all the stars are stuck frozen like glass slivers in the dim lid of the sky, the night sky that’s all milky and faded from light pollution and the particulates of furious living, so many humans all in space together, like the flaking layers of a croissant. And the humans live so furiously their lights burn all through the night, and fade the sky, until there is no dark anywhere, just burning, burning, the hot burning of the human race, like a lit cigarette dropped into a forest wracked by drought.

Toby came over for dinner tonight and we made Pho, or a distant approximation of Pho, a soup almost transcendentally brothy. Once upon a time wheat and dairy marched out of my life, just up and left. They were blinked away in an instant- whole lives have been built on wheat and dairy, whole cultures, civilizations! And to think they could just be gone- gone! And their absence left a hole in my palette the size of Rhode Island, and tonight the meaty meatiness of the pho broth almost, almost came close to filling it, like a bit of spackle in a nail-hole. While eating Toby and Eden and I talked about the difference between Memory and Focus, and how none of us had either, and why that was, and was it getting worse as we got older, to which Eden, who is the eldest, replied Yes, definitely. And then I played the game in my head called Trying To Imagine Twenty Years From Now, to see if I had, in the night, grown a special muscle in my brain that suddenly allowed me to inhabit or imagine a time other than the present, and found that I had not. After dinner I walked Toby the three miles home in the starry night, down Alberta with its steamed-up shop windows and strange boutiques that sold hand-made versions of common, un-interesting things, and through the neighborhoods where all the humans were shut up inside, keeping warm, watching TV on the Internet in bed and petting their dusty, arthritic cats. As we walked Toby and I talked about how she’d decided to go to PSU next year, and how I had decided, vaguely, to do something or other similar, although, as we both agreed, I Had Better Get On It. We talked about the practice of making elaborate plans and how, over the years, Life Happens Anyway, in spite of plans, and how suddenly we might find ourselves living someplace, not only because there is no other place to go but also, maybe, because the place where we are just happens to be the place where we live. We paused our walk at the co-op so Toby could buy a peanut butter cookie and the checkout clerk commented on the psychedelic fleur-de-lis print of Toby’s brass-buttoned shirt. “Did you know,” asked the clerk, her flat blonde hair come undone from its clip and falling half over her face, “that a fleur-de-lis is really a stylized iris?”

“An iris?” I asked, astounded. “Really?” The clerk nodded, watching as Toby stuffed her EBT card back into her battered fanny pack and took her cookie.

Back out in the street we plodded west, and Toby told me about the library books she has been reading, which have been almost exclusively about Mexico, including one massive text that has been passing back and forth between her and two other people at the library, each of them putting it on hold, getting it, and then not being able to finish it by the time the next person’s turn comes up. As we neared her house Toby complained about her car, which is just barely broken, but is not, according to her mechanic friend, broken enough to be fixed, and which is also uninsured, but which cannot be insured, because then it must be registered in Oregon, which it is not, and for that to happen Toby must get an Oregon ID, which she does not have, and anyway who needs a car when in Portland it is so easy not to have one? And we mused about the nearly insurmountable mound of Unimportant Things that can tangle, if one is not careful, like blades of grass in the chainrings of day-to-day life, and I thought of how the mechanical parts of my life are like my bike- undermaintained, badly adjusted, and always in need of grease- and yet sturdy, somehow, like simple machines always are, as long as you keep them simple, and don’t get any crazy ideas.

Now I’m home, and it’s late, and I’ve turned the heater on, and eaten a last little bowl of soup. I’m going to crawl into my bed and pile up the blankets like a debris shelter, and when I wake up the earth will have made another revolution around the sun, and I’ll finish painting the front room orange with my housemates, and continue this game of Accidental Living, where one always imagines oneself in search of a home, without realizing that home has been following doggedly along this whole time, just waiting to be noticed, and that one has been alive for quite some time, and will most likely continue to be so, in the future.

Seen on a bumper sticker on Emerson- Home is where your food is.

t-bird’s shack

If there’s one thing I like to take pictures of, it’s the gently-lit shacks that some of my friends get to live in. Here is t-bird’s. We met today in the afternoon. T-bird bought me a tamale and a tiny persimmon in the bustle of the farmer’s market and then we went to her shack for tea, where we talked about romance, space heaters, and pleasure trips to Greece.

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where the mice like to rock

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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

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!

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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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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