how to know what is important

Sometimes, not matter how tired I am, I cannot make myself go to bed. I will do any number of meaningless, unnecessary tasks to avoid it- stare at myself in the mirror, walk back and forth, straightening things in my obsessively tidy apartment, look at blogs on my phone that have not been updated in days. I have class in the morning, early, but I have already decided not to go- the week is spinning around me already, so full of objects like furniture in a hurricane, wizard of oz style. If I do not go to my chemistry lecture I may have time to write my paper for biology. If I do not go to biology lecture I will have time to walk my dog, run the errands I desperately need to run, and read my chemistry book. I am robbing peter to pay paul.

I know that this does not sound like such a terrible situation. School is something that thousands of people are doing all of the time, quietly and without complaint. I have been transient for years at a time, sleeping in guest rooms/camper vans/forgotten stands of trees next to the highway. I have lived for long periods on extremely small amounts of money. I have ridden a freight train through Montana in a snowstorm, with nothing but my terrible menstrual cramps for company. You would think that school would be easy for me, a relief. I’m smart enough, although it is extremely difficult for me to concentrate. I live close to my school. Student loans take off some of the pressure of surviving in the very difficult job market that is Portland.

But I want to tell you, that having no money and no place to live is much easier than going to school. Wanting nothing is so much easier than wanting something. Wanting nothing is like enlightenment, in a way, it is like freedom. And because of everything that has already happened, there is a part of me that believes in nothing more than anything. And when you believe in nothing, wanting something is like beating yourself in the head with a piece of wood every day. It’s stupid and it makes no sense.

There are other, compounding factors, that help to make me feel overwhelmed and, simultaneously, stupid/weak for feeling overwhelmed. Why do things feel hard? I ask myself. My life is not hard. I must be stupid/weak/lazy. I must be a waste of human space. A heaping cup up self hatred, flung like a pigeon into the tornado.

I am moving this month. I am moving and I have too many things, things that I never wanted to acquire, because responsibility, even for inanimate objects, fills me with panic, but I did acquire, because my apartment felt empty without them, and I did not want my apartment to feel empty, did not have the guts to live a monk’s existence, to face the blank walls every day until my money, inevitably, ran out, and I was forced to move. They are cheap things, things I got for free, but I have polished them, and they are heavy and beautiful. Now I am moving and they are like children, dragging at my ankles.

My relationship may or may not be ending, and, as my relationships go, that means that the other person is angry with me and most likely will not want to see me for a period of time, and, as my relationships go, I have isolated myself during the relationship, hanging out with mostly this one other person (which, of course, ultimately feels suffocating, hence the end to the relationship) and so when they no longer want to see me (for a period of time) I find myself alone, unmoored from the world around me like a dinghy torn loose from the shore (in a hurricane). This, combined with moving (I have too many objects), financial stress (student loans are not enough and I am terrible with money anyway), and school (I cannot focus/concentrate/I never learned how to be a student/I cannot accept the irreconcilable contradictions of learning institutions/I am taking too many credits this term/I become discouraged easily), makes a hurricane of emotional objects which tears up the small, ramshackle villages of my health (I cannot digest things/I cannot relax/I have no energy/I feel discouraged/I am constantly irritable). And all of this is compounded by the fact that I am deeply ashamed of having feelings/needing help/I tend to self isolate when I’m having a hard time. And of course, while I am being a little dinghy, drifting alone way out at sea, it is always good to remind myself that I have no safety net. I love that my friends have families, parents in the suburbs, strange, tenuous relationships with people with whom they do not agree on things. Ties that go way back, something that transcends their “chosen family”. I love that sometimes, in spite of everything, this is still the case. But I do not have this. I have a brother. I love him but we see each other maybe once every few years. He is in Afghanistan right now for six months, and neither of us is good at writing letters. It’s been fifteen years this month since I last saw my violent, abusive, schizophrenic mother. And I never knew my father.

In moments like these, I am at a loss about what to do. My instinct, of course, is to run- to drop everything- I’ve fought-or-flown my way through life so far. But quitting is not longer an option. When I was younger, sure. When I could sleep outside and eat nothing but dumpstered bread and my eardrums could handle the deafening roar of the freight train. But my cerebral cortex, at twenty-nine, is exhausted, and if I expect to live at all, at this point, it has to be done on different terms. There has to be consistency, and consistency requires responsibility, and responsibility is something I never learned how to have. There has to be commitment, which is a concept that fills me with an awful, black and bottomless fear, and which has always felt like a trap that I must chew my own arm off to avoid. Because to commit to something, you have to trust it- you have to trust that it will not hurt you. Or that it will do its best not to hurt you. Or that it does not explicitly want to hurt you. And every cell in my body is built on the idea that success in life means never, ever letting myself be hurt again. And of course, if you are not willing to be hurt, ever, then there is absolutely no-one, anywhere, that you can trust.

I do not know what any of this means. I do not know what the answer to any of this is. I have my dog, thank god, who flings her little paws backward in the air when I get home and who licks my face with her small bologna tongue. At night she spoons me, pressing her tiny self against my back, making a little pocket of heat. I sleep badly but in the morning I sit in my reading chair and watch the sky lighten, a mug of green tea on my lap. My dog is still in bed, and the tick of the electric heater fills the room. I have a memoir I have been reading and it has been comforting me. I pick up the memoir and I remember how writing comforts me, how writing is the only thing, sometimes, that comforts me. I remember how writing can be the only thing that matters, how something intangible, that you cannot hold or see or rely on, can be the only thing that matters. I wonder if I am living my life or if I am being one of those people who pass years but do not live their lives. I think about the regrets of the dying. I remember that my credit card bill is overdue. I think about the rhythm of sentences, and how in the memoir I’ve been reading the sentences are perfectly balanced, as though the author weighed each one out on a scale, and how that calms me, seeing that kind of care, like watching the ocean beat against the shore. I think about the rhythm of tangible objects. I remember how, many years ago, I was in a samba marching band in North Carolina, how we practiced every sunday next to the railroad tracks. The unsung brilliance of my friends, they way they wrote new beats at night, in their dreams. They way it felt to play drums with people that I cared about. Like dancing. At the time, I thought that those moments would last forever. I wonder how everyone is doing now. I remind myself that I am a bad person because I do not keep in touch. For making close connections with people and then abandoning them. I remind myself that if I write a book about it someday, I will feel better about the whole thing. About not keeping in touch. About not letting the people that I have grown close to, and then drifted away from, know how much they mean to me. How important their presence in my life has been. How much I need them.

light bulbs, chihuahuas, and writing about myself

My new apartment is two square rooms, a yellow kitchen counter, and the hum of the fridge. It is the click-click of the baseboard heaters and the cold blue light of the stark-white walls. I have not hung artwork yet. I just moved yesterday from a one-room cottage with a woodstove to this land of carpet, neighbors, and window blinds. But I had to share a kitchen when I lived in the cottage and I don’t want to share a kitchen anymore. I have some money and I want to live alone. I have never lived alone in Portland. I have lived alone in plastic, drafty yurts, I have lived alone in dark cabins made of logs. I have slept alone beneath mosquito netting in a camper van, I have lived alone in a two-person tent that I pitched, surreptitiously, in a patch of woods next to the highway, while I waited for salmon season to start. I have lived alone on the freight train, and always I have lived alone in the copse of trees on the outskirts of town, lying on my back on my foam sleeping pad, watching the birch leaves flip like coins in the wind. But I have not lived alone in Portland and now here I am, in the City, in my very own Apartment. I must be grown up, or I must be anti-social. I am highly efficient, or I am a capitalist tool, unwilling to do the work it takes to share space with others, and so ultimately responsible for the current breakdown of human community, and all of our resulting cultural alienation and existential despair.

In my apartment, now, there are No Distractions To Keep Me From Writing, and it is raining heavily, so even my dog needs nothing. She is a chihuahua, from the desert, and she does not like the rain. If I try and walk her when there is water falling from the sky she will turn, face home, and plant her feet. Sometimes if I stand motionless, the leash taught, and wait a long moment, her peanut brain will reset and she’ll forget why she’s pulling so hard. She’ll trot merrily for another half-block, before she remembers, again, that she doesn’t like the rain.

Today it is raining and dark, I am tired, and I do not know what I need. I am tired today of my small dinners, my cabbage-and-onion browned in a cast iron skillet, my half-a-lemon, my leftover-chicken. I am tired of reading periodicals and watching the rain in the courtyard. I am weary of the way I overthink my relationship with my dog, the way I look at her and try to puzzle out her emotions, the way I project my own negative feelings onto her (Kinnikinnick doesn’t love me, Kinnikinnick thinks that I am a failure) in a way that I do not do with any human relationship.

I am Tired, I have Fatigue, I cannot Concentrate, and so instead of working on my novel here I am, writing about myself, which is what I specialize in anyway, since it is what I have done the most.

Yesterday I was at Fred Meyer buying a can opener and I found myself lingering in the light bulb aisle, picking up the long fluorescent tubes that said things like “sunshine!” and “full spectrum”. I’ve thought, before, about buying a full-spectrum light box, in front of which I could sit, in the mornings, until I became energized. But full-spectrum light boxes are expensive, and what with my solo apartment in the city and all the money I’m spending on healthcare each month and how much Corinne and I like to eat at Chaba Thai, I wasn’t sure that I could afford it. Then, in Fred Meyer, I saw that you could buy the “full spectrum” tubes individually, and that they were the same price as any other florescent bulb. So theoretically I could just get a fixture and put one of these bulbs in it, and then I’d be all set to get jacked each morning on pseudo-sunlight and slowly turn my sad face upside down.

But then, I didn’t know if the ones at the hardware store were really the same as the ones in the light boxes, and I just looked on the internet and the light boxes were on sale, so I bought one.

We shall see, when it gets here, how it makes me feel. We shall see if it can replace the forest, if it can replace the drip of rain in the fir boughs, if it can replace the infinite peace that nature brings. If it can prop up my chi enough for me to write.

In the meantime, dear steadfast reader, I have a question for you- have you ever used a full-spectrum light box, and how did it make you feel. Was it as nice as cross-country skiing? Did it make you feel generous towards your chihuahua? Were you less prone to eat snack chips instead of meals? Did you feel like running in the rain?

 

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.

.

.

.

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

rain

Last night, in my van, after work, the rain wouldn’t stop falling. Flooding! Endless! Dark and dampening rain! And the rear doors on my van don’t seal properly, it was in an accident, the water drips down on my collection of books- What We Leave Behind, Mrs. Dalloway, Shadows on the Koyukuk. I sat watching the rain, not rain like I’ve known it here, in the last three weeks- not thunderstorms, the sun fighting with the wind, clouds like wadded clothing thrown across the sky. This is the proverbial rock’s underside- a wetness that saturates every happy soul- thorough- like how they do it in Portland. Portland! I am nearly two weeks past the three-month mark away and my homesickness has reached its fever pitch. How I miss my friends! How I miss them! Kindred spirits! I’ve stopped caring about minutes on my overpriced prepaid cellphone (orphans don’t have family plans) and I call them up whenever I fell like it, except always it’s too late, there, or someone is working, or the connection is bad, and I end up feeling like the last living person on Earth. Last night I got through to Toby on the second ring, dear close Toby, and as always she was having the very same thoughts and feelings that I seem to have, only she tempers hers with coffee and notcaring and I try to temper mine with nature.

“We’re going to die!” She said. “I don’t give a fuck!” And then I laughed nearly hysterically because it’s true, true, true, and I had just been thinking (writing in an email) that very same thing in the morning, that I am, in theory, unafraid to be myself and not tempted in the least by conformity and moderation and self hatred because I am, truth be told, along with every other thing, going to die, and for this very reason I should listen to my soul and my heart and my intuition and no-one else, not ever, ever, ever. I have to keep reminding myself that, these days, here in the land of self-doubting, where everything seems for naught, and I don’t remember who I am, or why I care, or where I came from, and I don’t have any friends.

I am going to die. I am going to die. I am going to die.

What is there to be afraid of! What is there to lose! Nothing! Nothing nothing! Tell me what you are afraid of. Tell me one single thing. And then imagine you are dead. You are dead right now! You are dead forever! You never get to be alive again! That’s it! It’s over! You never get to put together another outfit, or eat another pinto bean. You never get to have one single more crush on a living human being. You never get to tell someone to fuckoff! Never again! What a shame!

And then guess what? You are alive. You are not dead yet. You have been beamed down from space, mysteriously, after you were sure that you were dead. You are like a spy! No-one knows that you have died and now you are alive again. You can do anything you want! You have this strong and functioning body, fifteen fat leather suitcases stuffed with privilege, like a season’s pass to all the world’s theme parks. You can, in essence, do whateverthefuck you want. No more lingering in the clouds, watching, being nostalgic, having regrets for all the times you were dishonest or indirect or cowardly. A L I V E ! What are you going to do with your million living dollars? Your twelve thousand days? Your five hundred waxing moons? How often has a waxing moon passed and you haven’t even seen it? How big a number is five hundred? How long do you think you will live? What if you were already dead?

It’s a cheap trick, I know. But it works, like beads on a rosary. There is the part of me that believes it, and there is the part of me that is tempted by immortality, laziness, and cowardice.

“Does it ever get any easier?” asked Toby, the Toby that lives in my soul but also in the telephone- “Why can’t people like us have someplace to live that’s not in the city, with good air and water and stuff?”

“I think that life is just hard,” I said, laughing. “like a hundred years ago people were like, ‘I wish I didn’t have to haul water in this bucket, and I wish I had a comfortable chair and stuff’, but it didn’t make anything easier, life is just hard now in different ways.” We are both laughing, and when I hang up the phone I am crying. Sob, sob, and then I swallow it and reach for Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To a Young Poet, which I have just acquired and which, of course, has been written just for me.

“You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. – And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to inte4rest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.”

And

“In your opinion of “Roses should have been here . . . ” (that work of such incomparable delicacy and form) you are of course quite, quite incontestably right, as against the man who wrote the introduction. But let me make this request right away: Read as little as possible of literary criticism – such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. – Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!”

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Anchorage

In Anchorage, it’s really spring. All the snow is gone, and the air smells like dirt. And the sea, too, although I cannot see it, beyond these dead potted plants and ratty driveway, ground down by winter’s ice-age of weather. I can smell the sea, though, and hear the seagulls. I know it’s close to me, the sucking mud beach, the flat shallow water, the reluctant whales. The white volcano in the distance, just across the water. I forgot about the volcano! I suppose this town should be covered in ash, buried. Well it’s not. I was here when Redoubt blew the first time, in like 1989 or something. I was approximately seven. The skies turned black and for days ash fell like fine dirty snow. I went to buy groceries with my mother’s food stamps, and a man on a bicycle handed me his paper dust mask. I collected the ash in a pickle jar, labeled it, put it up in a closet, and forgot it when we moved.

Earlier today I was sitting out here, on a friend’s peeling front stoop, breathing the good sea-air, and some kids were playing on the cracked pavement of the road, riding a little pink bicycle in the gutter and rowing the ground with their feet. I used to be those kids, I thought, not far from here. I lived, at one time, just down the road, in a neighborhood just like this, sort of sinking and neglected, with lots of children. When I lived here, and was a kid, the whole city, it seemed, was like that. Sinking and neglected, cracked and peeling. There were rich people, sure, and everything still cost a lot. But the rich people lived off somewhere, and you didn’t see them. And I’d walk along the silty sidewalks, head into the car-wind, with my paper bag of cheeseburgers, or whatever. And at the traffic light I’d hit the metal button, pong, pong, and the loneliness of all the poverty of the world would pour down around me in the form of rain, and hit the dirty snowbanks, whose gravelly crusts sported sad sprinkles of straw wrappers, crushed drink cups, and cheeto bags. I’d plod, it seemed, for miles on those sidewalks. And when I left Alaska in high school, that was always what I remembered of this place- the plodding. Lonely, hungry, empty-pocketed plodding. I’d had no magic tickets for anywhere, no street-smarts other than the ability to dumpster chalky old candy bars from behind the drug store.

Anchorage is different now. The first summer I was back here, twenty years old and hitch-hiked up the Alcan to meet my dad for the first time, I rode a borrowed bicycle to the low-income apartment complex where I’d lived as a child- Tyee Apartments, it was called, on Northern Lights Boulevard- slate-colored buildings that smelled of ramen noodles and echoed with the cries of playing children. Four years- it was the longest we had ever stayed in one apartment. A happy place. That first summer back I pressed my hands against the wrought iron gate that encircled the place, that had never been there before. The TYEE sign was gone, the one that had always blown over in the mid-winter Chinook winds. In front of each apartment, now, was a sleek SUV. A gated community? Really? The shopping mall next door, where we had dumpstered the candy bars and dragged them to the woods to devour among the spruce branches, was closed. Its sign had been gutted, windows black. The carpeted halls held no-one. There had been a library inside, once, where I poured over Seventeen magazine in my stained pink winter coat. Now it was all gone, just like my childhood. Like a movie set, that rolled over. Now it was someone else’s story- the people with the SUVs. But what were their stories, exactly? I Moved To Anchorage Because I Got A Really Awesome Job Offer And I Like To Wear Gore-Tex And Go Hiking? What kind of a story was that? An un-story.

Yesterday I was sitting in River’s van in front of the bookstore on Northern Lights, waiting for her to come out. We’d driven down from Little House the night before, stopped to sleep in a pullout next to a frozen lake a few hours outside of town, but her bed was too small and our blankets were too few and finally we gave up, me reading an Augusten Bourroughs library book in the four a.m. dawn as we drove the rest of the way to Anchorage, giant jagged-edge mountains that showed flakes of dull grey beneath their white winter coats circling the horizon, and then the stoplights, overpasses, and newly-built strip-malls of the edge of town. Wasilla. This is where Sarah Palin lives. We started our errands early, as soon as the shops opened their doors. We breakfasted on sausage and hash browns from the Fred Meyer deli and one organic cucumber, delicious cellulose tube. And then I waited while River was in the bookstore, watching all the yuppies in their five-hundred dollar arcteryx jackets pour from the coffee shop next door. I was feeling delirious and sleep-deprived and prone to mild epiphanies that flashed like the last flare of a dying headlamp in the cabin at night.

These yuppies weren’t here when I was a kid, was what I managed to come up with. And then the reality of it hit me- really, they weren’t. They really, really weren’t. There were no eco-friendly parents pushing babies in jogger strollers, no tattooed hipsters here for summer jobs on the Kenai Peninsula. Way back then, back when, it was just me, and the city. Wasn’t it?

It’s strange how our memories of a place from the past and the realities of a place in the present can fail to reconcile. The don’t overlap or blend, one does not cancel the other out as the More True Reality. Nothing, really, is resolved. They both just are, stacked one on top of the other, a fine, thick wall between them that’s just as real as the passage of time and just as strong.

And yet, it’s amazing, sitting here on my friend’s flaking front stoop, watching the pale eight pm sky begin to darken, how being here makes me feel the same sort of hope I used to feel, when all the world was opening up, the daylight running into the evenings, the sun warm on the boggy ground. I had a fierce belief, even then, in the god-like power of springtime, of summer, of fall, of winter. The seasons were a god, I was sure, the passage of time, a god, the seagulls were gods, the trampoline of moss in the forest was a god, and I was in awe of it, it would make me drunk, and I would fall down into it, and it was, in the end, the only real thing at all. And then, of course, I would be free. Because if Nature was the only real thing, then what were cities? What was flaking paint, second hand smoke? What was hunger? That was nothing. That was nothing in the face of forests, of sucking mud-tide, of glittering white snowbanks in the dark of winter.

I guess, what I’m saying, is that Alaska gives me Hope. Even if it feels like another world and Sarah Palin might as well be president of the whole goddam thing, even if the forests are just an illusion, the last scrap of wood pulp waiting for the world to trash its last ream of Xerox paper. The bears are just props, the wolves, disposable, hunted down from bush planes when the moose fail to walk into the sights of trophy hunters. The musk-oxen, hunted to death by the first people with spears who came across the land bridge ten thousand years ago, are re-introduced from Greenland. The weather makes no promises anymore, just like everywhere else. The ocean currents carry PCBs from all the corners of the world and deposit them in the breast milk of the coastal Inupiat. There are over four thousand LUST (Leaky Underground Storage Tank) sites in this great green state, and they hold enough persistent organic pollutants to single-handedly birth a thousand generations of autistic children. And on and on and on.

Is it stupid, to have hope, in the face of it all? Is it stupid to sit on the peeling stoop and smell the sea-air and have hope? I’m alive, after all, I might as well act like it. And if Nature is a god then she is a strong one. And by Nature I mean Life. Life is strong, I think. Sometimes I don’t feel it, sometimes I forget. Sometimes just being alive feels like driving a broken car until the engine blows, not caring when or where. Just driving this stupid fucking car, for no reason I can understand, and all I know for sure is that the car is going to break. And even if I’m alive, I’m still stuck in a car, which isn’t like being alive at all. And I don’t know how to feel alive, I don’t know what to do. And there aren’t any instructions telling me what to do, no books I can get from the library. There never have been, really, and it doesn’t seem like there ever will be. All the books already written just sort of skirt the subject, never looking it dead in the eye, because if you look it dead in the eye it’s just gone, and there you are, and you have more questions than ever, and no answers.

River was telling me, once, about how when she was a kid the Athabaskan elders in the village would tell stories, they’d sit in a wooden chair and tell stories that just went on and on and on, and the stories wouldn’t have plots the way our western stories have plots, now, and the stories wouldn’t have story arcs, and hooks, and soft rounded edges that tie the world up all neat like yarn in the corners of a woolen scarf. They’d just go on and on, and then they’d end, without any resolution at all.

I’m eating two thousand bowls of ice-cream

And bingeing on electricity. It’s hard, it’s so hard, hard, hard, in the land of TVinterernetIceCreamChocolate, to be a good person, in those hours when I get home from work, and read about making birch-baskets, and work on my dance moves, and write stories about important, dry and unglamorous things that move at the speed of life, which is not very fast, nor very bright, at least when you’ve had two thousand bowls of thin-mint ice-cream and nothing is fast enough, or bright enough, and you just want to beat your fists against the wall and scream at the parrot who won’t stop screaming, who screams like a human screams, againandagain and again, and so you do, and then you feel a little bit better. And the parrot cocks his one eye at you, astounded, his emerald colored head-feathers like a wonderful cap from a far-away land, and you open the metal door of his cage with its flaking white paint and fill his bowl with weightless green and red “fruit” pellets, which are, it turns out, made from soybean meal and no fruit at all.

How do you manage it, bird? How do you make feathers from soybean meal?

And you, how do you manage it? How do you make stories from ice-cream?

At the end of this month I will have a paycheck, at the end of next month, another. And then my job will be over, until I find a new one. And I will take my monies and I will go out into the world and I will buy-

-insulation for the sauna, some mats of it, bright yellow stuff, because I have neither vehicle nor motivation to go out and find someone who has sheep, from which I might collect raw wool to pack the walls, nor do I have the patience to gather moss from the forest floor, for the same purpose. Someday, someday. Sheep, chickens, goats, a potbellied pig dragging its belly in the snow, maybe, all of it, none of it. A homestead in Alaska! For now, bright yellow fiberglass from the home depot.

-Then! And Then! A chair, a table, a counter-top. A mat for my bed, which I will build. A small window for the smoke, the insufferable wood-smoke!

-a cutting board of decent size. A grater, too, for grating beets. For salad.

-a blood-sugar test at the doctor. For diabetes. To explain constant thirst, irritability, etc.

-one small tub spirulina/wheat grass powder. For moral.

-one tired head of kale, limp with homesickness. Dear brassica, you’ve come far!

-one tank of gas, owed.

-an amalgam fillings removal-procedure, from a dentist who knows what he’s doing.

-a plane ticket back to Portland, in the fall, to get my things, also to see said dentist, who knows what he’s doing.

-gold caps for all my molars.

-a plane ticket to Mexico, the land of Reasonably Priced Dentistry, where I can get said Gold Caps.

-I’m getting ahead of myself here. It’s just two paychecks.

Oh, capitalism!

Going private

Friends! Strangers! Passers-by! Now and then I choose to password-protect a post of mine, for whatever reason. If you would like the password to these posts, please leave a comment on this post- it will ask you for your email, and then I will have it, and I will email you the password. And I do thank you for your continued readership!

And everyone who comments will be added! I want as many readers as possible!

Hurrah!

counting

I took the insulation out of the sauna, ripped it out in big yellow strips, fiberglass sodden with squirrel pee. A rain of stuff came tumbling down around me like wood shavings from the chainsaws, but it was only all the world’s pinecone sepals. There were shelf fungus too, squirrel size, pulled from the birches and stacked up, maybe, for times of famine, or for insulation. And two butterfly wings, one in each wall panel. Other than that there were no edibles, the larders had been cached out, the squirrels returned to the woods, I supposed, or simply tired of this filthy toilet of a nest, where nothing ever decomposed and the turds ran centimeters deep. I wondered if they had respiratory illnesses, now, from the fiberglass. I’d made a fire in the woodstove to warm the place while I worked, and it smoked a little and failed to draw. Snow in the stove-pipe hole thawed and dripped onto the bent and dented stovetop. The green-painted door was cracked open, brass doorknob pinched useless from the teeth of a blackbear.

Blackbears and raccoons. Aren’t they like, the same family?

No I don’t think so. I think blackbears are like their own thing. Bears. I think bears are their own thing.

No I think blackbears and raccoons are in the same family. And squirrels. I think squirrels too.

No I don’t think so.

But you looked it up, and of course you were right. Bear, Opossum, Raccoon. And then it made total sense- I’d always compared bears to raccoons, when I tried to describe problem black bears to friends in the lower 48. They’re like giant raccoons that eat your trash! And raccoon, secretly, was my sort of spirit animal. But there aren’t any raccoons in the woods- so what was I in the woods- a blackbear?

We’ve been building fantasies in this little house, stacking up the unwritten hours like cords of wood. We’ll walk to the next town in the snow. We’ll make sockmonkeys with rabbit-fur hats and sell them. We’ll teach joint workshops on local plants and the dangers of hydrogenated oil. We’ll have Kaz and Danny over for Ethiopian food. We’ll get a bear, we’ll have a whole bucket of bearfat. We’ll eat nothing but bearfat. We’ll put in a new well. At first I was a little apprehensive about River’s liberal use of the realm of unhatched eggs- throwing out hopes and dreams and spontaneous, elaborate plans as if all of it might come true just by saying she wanted it to happen, as if she had a magic wand that kept the egg-crushing gods of time and space at bay, the gods who punched holes in the bottom of your basket and left you in an aching sort of inspiration dept. The weird thing is, is that I think some of it might actually come true. I’m realizing that life in the woods is different, that eggs just hatch better here, the air is more conducive of it. There are more hours in the day, less stimulation, more space for thought, a surer sort of feeling. It’s almost safe to call them as you see them as if it was only the sun that you were promising-

So it feels like I have my life back. I’ve got a job, a sense of peace, a warm smoky house. River tells me I’m “weirdly healthy”. I tell her that this is me at my best, that she hasn’t seen me in the city, when it seems like all the universe has been sucked of its marrow, painted in leftover paint and left in the rain. I blame the city for making me hate the rain. I used to love the rain, but now I love nothing more than the fact I’m someplace dry, a boggy sort of permafrost desert, where a mere two feet of snow coat the ground and summer is sunny, parched, and hot- even by lower 48 standards. People build cabins and don’t even bother to side them- there’s just no mold anywhere.

What I haven’t been doing, is writing. But I still count it as if I have, because it’s inside me so I know that every morning when I wake, it’ll be there. It’s already happened, as far as I’m concerned. I’m free to watch the sunlight on the newly softened snow, walk across the still-frozen river, read books by headlamp in my smoky bunk. Poke around the old abandoned cabin in the woods, look through the windows at the lined-up tins of cigarette tobacco, the rusted bedstead with the yellow foam pad, the sheet-metal stove. The muskrat snares. I’m free to steal an old-fashioned alarm clock from a nail on the porch, with cracked yellow face, twin bells, and one leg. I set off down the path with the clock, boots sinking in the snow, and decide that I’ll put it on the shelf above my bed. I decide that it represents linear time, so old and cracked and broken. Halfway to the river I change my mind, don’t want the story that the old clock holds. I set it carefully on a fallen spruce tree and carry on.