proteanme

I wrote this several years ago and I keep thinking I can user some of it for a poem. It’s about summer when I was a kid.

We spent the rest of the summer in my backyard or Tim’s and when we weren’t there, we were riding our bikes up and down the street with one of the George’s (pet snake) wrapped around our handle bars. We passed rainy days jumping up and down on my bed, singing to Jesus Christ Superstar and the Jackson Five. We found the Playboy magazines our parents had hidden under their mattresses and we swung on the trapeze my father hung in the garage. We wrote a play about saving a tree and staged it on my front porch and charged every kid in the neighborhood a nickel to come see it. We ate Oreo cookies and Space Sticks and cut the crusts off the ham sandwiches we made. We drank Koolaid sitting on the wall of my porch, legs dangling over the side, dropping half melted ice cubes down into the patches of dirt beneath our feet. On muggy evenings my mother took us to Lindners Ice Cream shop. She stayed in the car while we waited in line, waiting our turn to order milkshakes and sundaes with lids on them so we could take back home. On days it was so hot that the pavement burnt our feet, we’d ride over to Butler college a couple blocks away from where we lived. We’d throw our bikes in the grass and chase each other under the rows of sprinklers that rained down on the big lawn in front of the library. The water arced in the sun and cast off halos wherever we looked.

Cardboard. That’s how it feels sometimes. Like I am cardboard. Mostly flat. Or maybe burlap is a better fit as is can take on some rudimentary shapes depending on how you fill it. But it’s the middle of the marathon here. Nothing sexy. Just more miles.

Solstice has come and gone and summer hasn’t even really started yet out here in this part of Oregon. I hate that fact more than I hate the rain. I don’t even really hate the rain so I guess that’s not an apt comparison. I just hate that summer starts when the days are getting shorter. I miss summers that start in May, summers that have seen the first sun burn come and go by this date.

This weekend I took a train to Eugene to see my sister and niece.The ride was a little dreamy and a little sad. I got to thinking about my father. Something about the clumps of trees so close to the tracks reminded me of home and I remembered that I am never going to see him again. Never.

I had a dream about my father the weekend before last. My sister and I were visiting him in a nursing home. He was telling us a story, looking from my face to her’s, checking our expressions for something. As he was ending, I kinda rushed him along, telling him “we have to go”; we had to go see see so and so. He looked up. Looked  right at me and said, “But I don’t want you to go.” Said it twice. And then my sister and I laid our heads down on his arm.

It’s 10pm on a Saturday night and I’m making latkes and reading posts about “best records of the year”. After more than a week of snow, warmer temps have came back to town, along with the rain. And now Portland is awash in a sea of slush. My feet are still wet from an epic walk around the sotuheast side. Trying to quiet the blues that seem to be weighing heavy on me as 2008 winds down. iTunes is playing random songs and  “Band on the Run” just came on and suddenly I’m at the pool waiting my turn at the diving board and every where the smell of coconut oil mixes with the smell of chlorine. The lifegaurd  cranked her little radio, but I can’t tell if she’s looking at me through her mirrored sunglasses.

That’s how it is so often with music and for some reason these last couple months I’ve been listening to it less and less. I think because I wanted to shut down to myself.  Music opens me up. And I couldn’t bare it these las couple months.

Earlier today I was at the grocery store and the Smashing Pumpkins “1979″ came on. I cannot hear that song without remembering a certain girl. I hear that drum fill in the beginning, sticks on the rim, and I’m in her car at Taco Bell late at night and at that moment I didn’t want to be any where else. Sometimes I wonder what we would have done without each other that winter.

The latkes were good. The applesauce and sour cream helped. But that’s what they’re supposed to do.

There’s not one person that I’ve been close to over these last ten years here in Portland that I’m close to now. A lot of things happened. It’s beautiful and sad and true. Still I feel lucky. Got moved. Got changed. Ain’t never gonna be the same, man.

It’s been raining buckets here. On and off, but all day. For a minute or two this morning the sun came out while it was raining and I was reminded of how sometimes thunder storm at home will roll away and reveal a blue sky. It seems like it’s been years since I’ve seen the sun shine on rain. So I sat and looked out my window for a little bit, looked out at the shadows and rain drops ripple across the tops of puddles and I missed home.

1973. Summer. All the kids at the apartment complex spend their days at the the swimming pool.  Everyone’s back from lunch and we’re lined up at the diving board in an endless loop to see who can make the biggest splash. Bennie and the Jets is on the radio when my turn comes up.  I run down the length of the board and jump on end.  Popping up into the air it feels like I have all the time in the world to lay my body out into a baddest ass can opener any kid in the complex has ever executed. It’s gonna be a big fucking splash.  I just know it.  It’ll even get the lifeguard wet and I’ve been trying to get her attention all day.

Some of my interest in the language we use to talk about the darker parts of ourselves and the darker parts of our world stems from being raised by parents who had intimate relationships with darkness. My dad is a WW2 combat veteran, a Marine who fought in the South Pacific, and he suffers from post traumatic stress. My mom has her own dark story to tell; the details are not mine to reveal, but suffice it to say she saw some of the worst in someone she loved dearly. So as you can imagine, lots and lots went unsaid in my household, and to be fair I don’t know how either of my parents could have described the seminal events in their lives to me and my sister.

I’ve tried to imagine my dad killing people and tried to imagine what he did to survive people trying to kill him. And I’d guess that the darkness he experienced in himself and in other people was not something he wanted us to see in him or the in the world. But at the same time he felt the most alive there in the midst of all that. I know this because he told me as much. And it breaks my heart because that made him kinda fucked. It wasn’t like he could say “Hey kids, guess what? The world can be a terrible place and I have a terrible secret. I’m really fucking good at killing people and even better at not getting killed, and lemme tell you, that right there, that gave me a reason for living. I sure wish it was you kids and your mom, but what can I tell ya. Now pack up your shit cause Daddy’s taking you to the state fair.”

Posted some old photos of me, mostly young butch, even with the long hair I think. It was 1972 and all the cool guys I knew had long hair. I wanted to be a cool guy.

Except for personal projects, self-expression has no place in design, but constraint is vital to design. No component fuels creativity more than constraint.

I went to a fundraiser/show last night called a Naughty Little Cabaret. It was a spectacle, but likely not the kind they were hoping for. There was a youngish drag queen, very energetic and kinda hot. At one point she was down on all fours, doing this sexy do me from behind thing. Looked promising. But when she got up she somehow (and I missed the transition) she ended up kicking her legs around alot in what looked like a river dance gone awry. After that I had about 5 minutes of missing all the great drag queens I saw at Bullwinkles as a young butch in the 80’s . There was this one in particular, Vicky Lane, that we got to watch start from scratch and then become the “it” queen. She was so hot; everybody had a crush on her. She did a number once with this 6 foot boa constrictor. Yeah, it was MTV, and it sounds trite now, but MTV was new then.

I have this dreamy play list in constant rotation. It’s a little sad and a lot of longing and I can’t stop listening to it. I don’t even wanna stop. It feels like I’m poking around at all the corners I’ve kept covered up so tightly, prying loose old memories, shaking the dust off things I forgot I ever wanted in the first place.  A bit of re-remembering.  It’s funny I could have forgotten what it is to imagine.

The song that’s breaking my heart right now, is Cat Power’s cover of Joan Baez’es Song for Bobby.