torrential rainfall and the disputed kingdom Protista

radiolaria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

I WANT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the sun and time

This week is our last week in Idaho. Corinne is at the cave cabin tonight, to think in the fire-warmed dark and have epiphanies about her path in life, while the stars wink on over the salmon river and the goats, once tamed for milk and now gone wild again, bed down in the clumps of trees that cap the dark hills. The cave cabin is a small room carved out of the stone mountain and framed inside with logs. The front wall is made of mud and old car windshields, everything is fitted together with clever bits of wood, and the window opens on leather hinges. There is a woodstove made from an old steel drum, set into the rock at the back of the cave. There are a few shelves, two oil lamps, and a teapot. There is a shitter at the end of a little path that runs along the hill, it is made of recycled planks. Last time we were there, there was a frozen tower of turds in the hole where you shat into. Turds stacked one on top of the other, all winter long. But the weather has been warm, and I imagine the tower is now melted and collapsed.

Inside the cabin there is a rough board that serves as a desk, fastened just below the windows that look out at the river and the sunset and the stars. There is a chair pulled up to the desk, and some paper and old national geographics. I imagine Corinne sitting there, mapping out her life, burning beeswax candles and playing with her tarot cards. I sent some mung-bean patties with her, for dinner, and some split pea soup and rice. She took a big glass jug of spring water, the good spring water that comes from the tap here, and has so many minerals the glasses are never clean. It gets cold at night, still, but she has plenty of wood and blankets and though the vent on the stove at the cave-cabin is busted open and the fire burns too fast, she’ll get up at night to feed it, and build it up again in the morning to heat water in the teapot for her tea.

Here at the house I’ve been having my own sort of ritual, the kind where I read in bed for six hours, oddly cold and then too hot, and wait for my period to come. While the sun was out today I sat next to the river and read there, the wind blowing my blanket and the dog, the ugly wiry-haired brown dog with the weird yellow eyes, came up and sat next to me, next to the rock labyrinth that has just as much horse-shit in it as stones. The yellow grass bent in the wind, and the horse chewed at the ground and moved around, and I wished I knew how to ride horses, and I was strangely content, and I wished I never had to leave. There is so much to do, besides sitting in the sun and reading, and working on writing projects that may never be finished but grow larger anyway, foolishly, and surprise me every day- there is walking in the hills and collecting crystals, which Corinne can see better than I can, because I need glasses, but there are still enough that I find plenty- and back at the house we break the big rocks open with hammers to find the geodes inside, the geodes that we think might be inside, and get glittering bits of crystal all over the cement deck and laugh, like children, and feel like children, and I watch Corinne grow younger, and her freckles come out, in the desert, like magic spots, the nicest color brown, and her eyes flash like gemstones, and her lips are the color of amethyst, and she is happy-

It makes a person trust in the future. And there is no reason to trust in the future, and so it makes a person try and figure out how the future will happen, so that it might seem reasonable to trust in it- but there is no reason in trust, and trust, in a sense, is the opposite of hope- it is acceptance instead- this trust- the belief that Everything will be ok is not a belief that everything will, indeed, be ok, but a declaration that Whatever happens, I accept it, and then of course you can let go of the fear, and you are just where you are, and your shirt is full of crystals that you have carried home from the desert, where you were almost lost in a ravine choked with brush, but you helped each other find the animal trail, for cows and deer and wise beasts, and you climbed down the rock and crumbling earth to home, and everything smelled of sage, and it was the new moon. And you were happy, and you trusted.

I don’t want to go back to the city. Can you tell? But Corinne has to, and if I was out here alone it would be like my oxygen had been taken away. I am going to try and come back, to this land where there are no dance parties or potlucks or readings or buildings full of books or unique ingredients for cooking or really any kale, but still, there is so much to do- we haven’t even ridden the four-wheeler to the secret lake, yet, where in spring the fish are so thick you can grab them up with your hands, nor have we ridden the horse, or had our photo shoot in the good sun at the abandoned log farmhouse in the tall golden grasses, wearing the ridiculous clothing we got from the thrift store in town, holding a BB gun or a length of rope or teacups. One of us was going to be the cowboy and one of us was going to be little house on the prairie in a bright neon Technicolor muumuu, with a wicker hat with a big length of ribbon, blowing in the wind. And the shirt for the cowboy is thick cotton with turquoise feathers on it and geometric designs. And Frannie wants a bit of the wallpaper.

And there is so much else! I haven’t learned the constellations yet, for example. And I haven’t done my howling-wolves cross stitch and I haven’t built a miniature log cabin out of twigs that I fell with a tiny, imaginary chainsaw as imaginary winter comes quickly and notch and fit together just in the nick of time. And I haven’t found any roadkill, and I haven’t made a potroast. And I haven’t had a garden. The days pass so fast, and I thought they would go so slow. But when do the days ever go slow? It seems that time is speeding up, that life is a spiral into nothingness, faster and faster, and only youth have the slow smooth arch of the outside circle, where for a moment there is immortality and unspeakable wealth, as if there will always be enough of everything, and the minutes run through you and make you larger, and so little happens that you see it all and take it all in and there is still some of you left over at the end of eac day. I am not old yet but already, time is going too fast, and there is not enough of me.

And what of you, dear reader? No doubt you live in a building surrounded by other buildings, in a great glowing stretch of lit-up buildings, where weather doesn’t matter and all the crystals have long ago been picked from the earth or paved over. It’s where humans live, these days, nearly completely all of them, some crazy percent of the world’s population, now residing is cities. More than every before in the history of anything. We are living right this ten minutes in a way that has never been lived before. Everything looks different, if you are a tree or someone who has lived long enough to be able to notice it, than it did for most all of time, and no-one knows why, or where this train is headed. But it doesn’t matter because the train is headed nowhere, it is just the feeling of moving, this vibration, the earth through space. And I wonder- if time passes because we are on the earth and the earth is moving around the sun, and that is a day and night, then what is time on the sun? I imagine that there is no time on the sun. There is only one moment, and that moment is the moment of burning. And we are small burnings, children of the sun, small heat factories, tiny combustion engines, making energy. So is there time for us, or just this one moment, the moment of burning? And what gives it shape and color? And why are there feelings?

Who knows the answer to my questions? The trees know, but they are not telling. They are made of sun and water, they are indifferent to both time and space. They do not mind me asking, though, foolish mortal that I am, vibrating like a hummingbird, no roots to prove that I exist. They humor my need to see shape and color and space and time, my need to feel their curled white bark and think bark, to lean my forehead against their furrowed trunks, to ask the simplest, and largest questions, to get pine pitch stuck in my hair and think pine pitch. They cannot make existence small enough for me to understand, but if I turn off my brain, they can help me to almost feel it- and it is like a wind, a warm wind, the sort of wind that comes from sun, from water, from movement. And that is all it is.

A Fate Worse Than Death

(this is the piece I read at my reading on tuesday. the theme was “what we are afraid of”, so I wrote about my schizophrenic mother.)

(also- I use the word “crazy” alot in this piece, and I realized, last night after reading it aloud to the entire city, that my  usage could be pretty hurtful to people dealing with mental health issues- indeed, mental health is a broad spectrum and it’s a universal truth of human existence that we all struggle with mental health issues, be it depression, anxiety, bi-polar or schizophrenia, at some time in our lives- and so you should know that the “crazy” I talk about in this piece is my mother’s brand of crazy- full-blown, catatonic, “can’t talk or hear or think” schizophrenia, of the chronic variety, that lasts a lifetime and does not respond to treatment- and this is why I equate it with death, indeed worse than death. But know that I do not believe that mental health issues in general are cause for suicidal thoughts, nor am I encouraging it, this is only a story of my unreasonable fears around my mother’s particular brand of the disease. Also, did you know that 20% of the population has experienced auditory hallucinations at one time or another? True fact.)

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A lot of us are afraid of one day becoming our parents. We’re afraid that those behavioral patterns that we hate so much might one day manifest in us.

My mother is crazy. She’s schizophrenic. She hallucinates, she hears voices, she’s enormously paranoid. God and the devil are real to her in the physical, tangible sense- and all of the people and events around her are part of her elaborate religious delusions. In these delusions she is the reincarnate of the virgin mary, put back on earth to transcribe god’s message onto scrap pieces of paper and the backs of old Christmas cards, so that the people might somehow receive it.

It’s not a simple mission. My mother is up against insurmountable odds. The devil has sent demons, to try and derail her progress. These demons have access to her subconscious, and so they know her history, and her very deepest fears, and the spots in which she is most vulnerable, and they use this knowledge to psychologically torture her more effectively than even the most talented torturer at Guantanamo would be able to do. They force her to relive, again and again and again, all of the terrible memories and painful moments of her life, and they make her go through elaborate rituals in order to carry out the simplest tasks, like leaving the house or answering the phone. They yell at her to keep her from sleeping, they yell at her to keep her from eating. Sometimes they even enter the bodies of those closest to her- my brother and I, when we were young- and are brought to life to conspire against her in the third dimension. But mostly they insult her, endlessly and forever, all through the night and all through the day. The insults are simple, almost laughable- you’re stupid, you’re fat, you’re lazy- but I imagine that over time, they have their effect. And daily, into the din of the demon’s voices, comes the clear voice of God- and my mother transcribes his message onto paper grocery bags, or whatever she can find, in her beautiful looping penmanship, and all of it is complete and total word salad.

This is what I grew up with, this was my only adult mentor. To a child, she was a monster- violent, unpredictable, irrational, psychotic, and more often than not, catatonic- kneeling in child’s pose on the floor in front of her gently glowing radio, incapable of speaking, or hearing, or understanding anything you might say. She subsisted off of fear, cigarettes, and mountain dew from the corner store. The government paid our rent. My brother and I raised each other.

There were moments of lucidity. My mother would walk out of her room in a cloud of cigarette smoke and see me sitting there on the couch watching TV, a bowl of top ramen in my lap. She’d look straight at me and really see me, not just the fantastical demons that lived in her head. Our eyes would lock, and recognition would wash over her. Tilting her chin back on her long, thin neck, she’d look over the room- our apartment was a mess. The floor was covered in fast-food bags and crusted pizza boxes. Paper cups filled with her cigarette ashes sat on all the surfaces. The counters were oily, the sink smelled like rotten hamburger. A lone potato moldered in the cupboard. My mother was alarmed. She quickly pulled on her long, puffy quilted coat, in pepto pink and with holes in all the pockets, and fumbled closed the toggle buttons with her thin yellow fingers. The front door slammed. She was gone. A bit of cigarette smoke traded places with a puff of cold winter air. She would return a few hours later, with heavy grocery bags dangling from the ends of her fingers. Cleanser, dish soap, windex, bleach. And food- milk, potatoes, margarine, cottage cheese, fritos, cans of corn. And a big-gulp of mountain dew, frosty and green and sweating. We’d eat the fritos and cottage cheese together, me slurping up whey-soaked chips and stealing drinks of her soda. Then she’d begin to clean, and to talk- manically, and with more and more urgency- everything was going to change. Everything, was going, to change.

Mostly, though, she was catatonic. Mostly she stayed in her room. My brother and I fished coins and bad checks and lost foodstamp bills from the ripped folds of her purse and walked to the grocery store. We weren’t very good at choosing what food to eat. Mostly we ate little Debbie snacks and cans of soup. Often there was no money in her purse, no blank checks, no matter how hard we looked. I remember the smell of that purse, old crumpled leather and tobacco that had fallen from her loose cigarettes. My mother couldn’t read, or talk, or understand anything you said, so there was no way for her to keep up with our welfare paperwork, and we were always losing our benefits. Mostly we ate the free school lunches, corn dogs and soft apple crumble. The weekends and the summers were the hardest. I started shoplifting when I was twelve, stealing tacos from the taco bar at the grocery store, crispy fried tortillas with great piles of salty refried beans, and iceberg lettuce. And lots of cheese. And olives. I would walk out without paying and eat them on the grassy hill that overlooked the parkinglot, the wind in my face.

When I was fourteen my grandparents adopted my brother and me, and we left Alaska to live with them in Colorado, in a little meth town in the desert near the Utah border. By the time I was nineteen I wanted out of that town. My grandparents were close-hearted, spiteful catholics, who had me pegged as an insufferable slut and drug addict, and my brother and I had grown apart while in highschool, which was tragic- having lived through the war of our childhood together, I felt as though his heart and mine were permanently fused, and I loved him fiercely, and he had been enormously protective of me, and he was my only close family- but now he’d taken up with the wrong crowd and made a living manufacturing meth. He also collected illegal firearms, committed armed robbery in his spare time, and had developed a hostile, drug-fueled paranoia to rival our mother’s.

I had an older cousin, Nathan, living in Portland, so I decided to move to Portland. Nathan’s brother Jason was also moving west so we drove together, in my little Honda prelude, amped up on adderal, and bonded. In Portland the three of us lived in Nathan’s moldy apartment off 22nd and Powell, and Nathan got me a job bussing at the restaurant where he worked. Nathan and Jason were a beautiful set of brothers, Jason tall and dark like his mother, Nathan stocky and blonde like his father. Nathan liked to paint and go for long runs late at night. Jason liked to read textbooks and write open-source software. We would all drink pabst together, and make endless pots of black beans.

My grandparents have six children. Two of them, my mother and a childless aunt, are schizophrenic. My grandfather’s mother and brother were also schizophrenic. Modern science knows very little about schizophrenia, and there are lots of conflicting theories about its origins, but the theory that schizophrenia runs in families has been very popular in the last fifty years. My grandparents have fifteen grandchildren, ages two to thirty two.

Since I’d grown up in Alaska, far away from the extended family, moving to Portland with my cousins was the first chance I’d had to get close to any relatives other than my mother, brother, and grandparents, none of whom I could be close to.

So it was nice to hang out with my cousins, in Portland. One night when we were drinking and walking in the rain, over the Hawthorne bridge, I told them that every new place I lived, I planned how I could quickly and easily kill myself, if I woke up one day and was crazy.

“Here in Portland,” I said, “I’d jump off a bridge.”

“I do that too,” said Jason.

“You think of how you’d kill yourself, if you went crazy?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Jason. “Everywhere I go, I think how I would do it.”

“Me too,” said Nathan. “I would totally kill myself if I started hearing voices.”

The cars crossing the Hawthorne bridge made unearthly humming noises, strangely melodic. Everything glistened, wet.

“Do you ever think about our other cousins?” I asked. “Do you ever wonder who’ll go crazy next?”

“Oh yeah,” said Nathan.

“Yeah,” said Jason.

“No-one’s gone crazy yet,” I said.

“No.”

A few years went by. I traveled compulsively. I’d never had a home, and didn’t really know how to have one now. I dated people, and our courtship would always follow a certain pattern. It would be around the third or forth date, and we’d be at that point in the getting-to-know-you game where we discussed our relationships with our parents. Like, yeah, my parents and I didn’t talk for a while, but now we get along ok, although I wish they wouldn’t try and send me money all the time.

And then I would say, because it is the truth-

“My mom is schizophrenic. I haven’t seen her in thirteen years. She’s in a halfway house in Alaska. We don’t talk at all, because she thinks I’m satan.”

And then there would be a silence.

And I could almost see the gears working inside this person’s head, that churning engine of history, and book learning, and socialization.

And then they would almost invariably say-

“Since your mom is schizophrenic, do you ever think that you, one day, might be schizophrenic too?”

And I would bite my tongue and try not to laugh, or scream, and then maybe I would tell my date that not only had I thought about the fact that I might go crazy one day but that I had thought about it every minute of every day of my entire life, and also that asking the child of a schizophrenic if they had ever thought about going crazy was like if someone told you that their mother had died of breast cancer and you, after a moment of silence, and in total earnest, asked them if they had ever thought that they might, you know, die of breast cancer one day too.

As the child of a schizophrenic person, how do you go through life without making yourself nearly sick with worry that you, one day, might be schizophrenic too? The answer is you don’t. You think about it all the time, and this worry becomes its own obsessive condition. It’s intrusive, it colors everything. It takes up a good chunk of your hard drive, like an eating disorder. It hangs over you, and invisible weight. The blank canvas of the future. The unknown. Calamity, death. The end.

But I kept being alive. I kept not being crazy. I got older. I wondered if maybe I had missed the window to go crazy. But then I knew that I could still go crazy- people went crazy in their late twenties all the time, their thirties, their forties. And anyway, mental illness is a broad spectrum. How did I know that I wasn’t crazy ALREADY? I mean, maybe I wasn’t crazy like my mom was crazy, like if you looked up the word CRAZY in the dictionary, there’d be a picture of her. But I might already be crazy nonetheless, in my own way. I mean, seriously- I hadn’t lived in one place for more than eight months since I was nineteen. That’s kind of crazy. I had this intense wanderlust, and I couldn’t focus on anything. I always wanted to be in the place I wasn’t. I was impulsive. I had potential, but lacked follow-through. And not only that, but I didn’t believe in the future. There was no such thing as linear time! And I thought that there was magic everywhere- I thought that the sunset was infinity, and our imagination was more important than anything, and that every day was the morning of the world.

So was crazy just around the corner?

One afternoon a few years ago, I had a revelation. I was laying in my bed, and the sun was coming in my window. And I thought- What if one day I was old, just about to die. What if it was the last ten seconds of the last minute before I died, and I still hadn’t gone crazy. Would I feel relieved, like I had won some sort of contest? Or would I feel crushed and destroyed, when I realized that I had spent my whole life in fear of something that had never even come to pass.

And right then and there I stopped fearing the crazy so much, because I was TIRED of being afraid of it. And now, instead of thinking about going crazy once every minute, I was thinking about it once an hour. And then, only a few times a day. And at last, only if something jogged it, like a memory of my mother, or if I was feeling especially anxious. It’s like I was going backwards- growing up with a crazy person had made me, for a time, crazy, and now it was finally wearing off, like an old coat of paint being rubbed away.

And then, too, as I got older, there were other things to worry about. Real things that really happened to people I knew and loved. I could get hit by a car while biking in the rain. I could get breast cancer before I was forty.

And then I had another realization- I realized that all of it- the crazy, the bike accidents, the cancer- all of it was just manifestations of my fear of my own mortality. All of it- illness, accidents, the accumulation of passing time- it was fear of the fact that one day, this all has to end.

Because eventually, we all go crazy. Eventually, we all disappear.

One day, no matter how I live my life, no matter what I am or am not afraid of, I will disappear. One day, we will all disappear. One day the people that we love will disappear. Our journals will yellow and fall to pieces. Our photographs will crumble and be lost. Every letter we’ve ever written, every clever text-message we’ve ever sent, will cease to exist. Parents? Gone! Cats? Gone! Our hopes and fears? Gone! All of our memories will be forgotten, and everything we’ve ever anticipated will be over and done. Something else will be here in our stead- and after a good amount of time has passed, it will be as if we never existed at all. The wind will blow the leaves, the sun will come through the windows, and no-one, anywhere, will remember us

But

not

yet.

None of that has happened yet.

We’re here, sitting in this coffeeshop. It’s a Tuesday. It’s dark outside. You’re listening to me. You’re alive.

You have no idea, yet, what will happen.

It turns out that I was right when I thought that the world was made of magic. It turns out that I was right to be young, and earnest, and impatient. It turns out that I was right, when I didn’t believe in linear time. Because it turns out that there is only one moment, and that moment is

right

now.

And it turns out that this moment, is the greatest, and most perfect, moment that there is.

The fastest six days that ever did pass

I looked at this thing and saw that I hadn’t posted in six days. That never used to happen. I don’t know how fast time passes right now, I don’t have any way to measure these things, but I know that it passes swiftly and cleanly, like a little bird diving through the air, and there isn’t any friction at all, and then it’s just gone, like the way money can just be gone when you spend it without paying any attention. Last night in your bed I was trying to think of the way I used to describe that phenomenon, the phenomenon of time changing speeds in different contexts, but I couldn’t remember the word. I only know that some things are fast like a hummingbird is fast, and some things are slow like a tree is slow, and other things are somewhere in the middle. And you are fast like a hummingbird, and I am slow like a tree. And you told me that the latin root of your name means hummingbird. And we were both so tired but in a funny, laughing way and not in a weary, sad way, and you were leaving at four a.m., and I was driving you to the airport in your cluttered station wagon with the headlight out so I have to drive with the brights on, but it’s an old car so the brights just seem like regular headlights. And I lay on your bed as you packed, watching you stuff ten hundred t-shirts into your bag, and feeling a sort of endless curiosity towards you, like I wanted to turn you over and inspect you, figure you out like a little mechanical toy. And your fastness and my slowness, like two separate currents in a stream- yours high and rippling and filled with fractured light, and twigs and leaves, and movement, and little water striders and the broken reflection of the plants along the streambank. And mine is down deeper, slower, like cold honey pouring from a mason jar, or the otherworldly flowing of glaciers down a mountain’s face, or window-glass rippling downward, being liquid. Or like a tree, which speaks only one kind of truth over hundreds of years, and doesn’t bother with the intricacy of seconds. And you! You are a metronome of seconds, the intricacy of all the forest’s creatures, the static and drama of life. Dear lover! If we were shapes over time I would be the grand canyon, and you would be the infinite minutia of the night sky. I would be the pounding of niagara falls and you would be a sunset full of mayflies, blinking into being every second, and living furiously, and dying, and then doing it all again.

But that is not what I set out to describe! I only wanted to tell about you, in your sweatpants, arms swathed in freckles, hands square, fingernails neat, folding t-shirts, packing. And me on your bed, surrounded by unread books, so firmly stuck in the present I may have just been born. And each time I see your face, I am surprised. You exist! You exist!

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?