proteanme

The shine is off Portland for me. Yep, almost ten years out here and I’m realizing this may not be my kinda town. Now I’m not sure what that means in practical terms, cause it’s not like I have plans for moving or anything. At least, nothing more than some fantasies. It’s just one more thing that I’m willing to put in play as I think about how to make being alive special.

It will sound funny to some folks, but I actually miss the subtle landscape of Indiana, even if I can’t imagine living there again. Nothing against my home state or all you wonderful folks living there that I hold so dear. Indiana has all the nice guyness I could ever want, but the queer factor could be better.

I was entertaining a fantasy last week about getting a job that would allow me to work from anywhere and being a bit of nomad for a while, spend some time here in Oreogn, some time in Indiana, some on the east coast, maybe some in Europe.

But really as much as I wanna grab hold of something to give my life meaning, I’m pretty my sure the focus has gotta be on the internal, at least for the next little bit. Not that there aren’t some things I wouldn’t mind wrapping my hands around, like the waist of this girl I know who lives in the wilds of western Mass. But things being what they are, I need to let them simmer, not just with this particular girl, but everything in general. Simmering is not particularly glamorous, as much as I may try and make it out to be what with playing music, working on art and writing. Mostly, there’s just this boat load of nothing and in thinking about looking inward, I relate a lot to Silvia’s nourishment post. I started a list in my head the other day of what makes being alive feel special to me and here’s what I got so far:

• Writing
• Riding my bike
• Intellectually challenging work
• Meaningful work
• Music
• Good food – eating it, making it, sharing it
• Good friends
• Freaks

I am amazed, when I really pay attention, at how many moments there are in any given day to have some empathy and compassion for another person’s experience. I swear they are happening all the time.

It’s funny, for such a long stretch, nothing much was happening in my personal life and then all the sudden a bunch of stuff happened in a flurry and then it settled back into a new version of nothing much, where the revelations that were uncovered in the flurry changed things, some in a kinda big way. One change is that a girl I really like told me she really likes me too, which made my day. For all its complications, it is as straight forward as that.

Silvia you were so spot on with the Rilke recommendation. Thank you. I’ve never felt an author speak to me so directly and its not typically what I expect or look for from what I read. I had to put the book down a couple times because some sentences hit so close to home. Very powerful. I’m now reading the Duino Elegies. If anyone wants to join me, lemme know.

I was listening to John Wayne Gacy by Sufjan Stevens with a friend and she was saying something to the effect of how the lyrics were just too depressing, especially in juxtaposition to that really beautiful and haunting melody. I was thinking about how that was the whole point, how that melody brought some humanity to the darkness, and how we’ll never figure out the dark in us as long as its confined to the realm of what’s inhuman.

A warning that this not been real well thought through, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’ve been searching for so long for some place or someone that feels like home, and lately I’ve been getting the message that maybe I need to re-group the search party and start trying to find that sense of home inside myself. I think some people and some places are gonna be more right than others, but I think what I’m looking for ain’t out there. I’ve been feeling sad about this for a while, until right now, and right now I can see a little freedom in that endeavor.

A couple months ago I kinda stopped watching TV. It’d become like a drug, really. And life’s been interesting since I gave up on the regular dose. (Interesting is not really the best word, but I don’t wanna loose my train of thought by tripping up on vocabulary right now.) Something inside me feels hollowed out and at times big and at other times uncomfortably exposed. I find myself struggling with the urge to fill it up quick, then shut the lid. Usually the first thing I’d do is reach for something to eat, but I’ve been bringing a lot more attention to eating (food and hunger and habits) and while not super rigorous, I’ve become a more mindful eater. Food as a filler is not a workable option. Actually, I’m trying not to derive filling from anything, and not just the usual suspects, like window shopping or doodling, but also reading, going to the movies, and hanging out with friends just cause I’m lonely. Emptying things out has sure has helped me connect things that I’d never seen as having bearing on each other and that’s been been pretty revealing. But there’s a starkness to some of my days and I’ve not slept well for a number of weeks. Something in me feels restless and like it needs soothing. Even typing that is getting to a tender place I didn’t even know I had.

In my ears and getting under skin this week: Wilco’s Hate It here, Hercules and Love Affair’s Time Will Tell and Sera Cahoone’s Only as the Day is Long.

Gosh it feels like the last 3 months have been so intense and it feels kinda odd not to have much in the way of big external markers for what’s happening on the inside. I have lost about 20 pounds, but hardly anyone notices. It’s mostly been about music, art, writing, reflection and opening up to new connections, specifically with these three women who are themselves very loosely connected to each other. While the connections differ in intensity, from casual to what has the potential for pretty dang intense, they have these commonalities – imagination, creativity, brains, illness and sex. And lots of words. Sometimes, really, really great words. (Just to clear things up I’m not having sex with all three of them.) I don’t believe the universe is trying to tell me something here, but I still find the coincidences interesting, something to reflect on a little.

All I do is ride my bike back and forth to wherever I’m going, no more than 6 miles at a stretch, but sometimes something in all this feels kinda epic.

Gosh, I’m feeling kinda melancholy today. It’s not something dramatic. It’s not something I’m trying to ward off either. It just is what it is. Lots of little things and nothing big really, although I feel I’ve had some big revelations lately. The funny thing is big revelations don’t always lead to big changes or big action, especially when it’s about mostly understanding who I am in the world. If I had to try and say it better, I’d say things change your life, but that doesn’t mean your life changes. I guess I’ve also had some big longings lately that are just longings, at least for the time being . The “just” in there is not meant to minimize their intensity, but to say I can’t make anything solid come of them, anything more solid than lots and lots of words. Frankly, I’m amazed at the amount of words I got inside me. Sometimes when people say what’s going on, I wanna say nothing much except everything, but that sounds kinda corny.

I’m at SXSW interactive, which I’m not all that interested in blogging about except to say it’s not really all that cool, or actually it’s not as cool as I thought it would be. Although I am convinced that it would be much cooler if Amos still lived in Austin.

I do have a SXSW hook to make a tangential jump to another kinda fragmented rumination post. I’m staying with my friend Christopher, who I’m happy to reconnect with after on and off contact over the last 10 years. He lives about 6 miles away from all the action, so this morning I took the bus downtown but did not really nail down the directions to walk to the stop and from the stop to the convention center. Predictably, I got turned around. I got turned around twice to be exact and arrived about a half hour later than I’d hoped. Once I finally sat down in the small hall where I attended my first session this idea lodged in my brain -“how long can I to go in the wrong direction before I turn around.”

I think I’ve learned or am learning that I can’t think hard enough or close my eyes tight enough to turn north into south. Right as I typed that I thought to myself, god, north to south feels so loaded, in contrast to east to west which just feels so big. Almost too big. But I feel like these days I’m trying to figure out the degrees of things. And degrees matter. Certainly one can get lost, maybe waylaid, just by starting out a few degrees off and then marching on anyway. And the offness multiplies. And thinking about all that offness I’m so tempted to segue into these life and death scenarios played out in the northwest wilderness when a hiker miscalculates sunset or a backpacker loses the trail. But I’d like to turn down the volume on that kind of tragedy, which my mind seems almost tweaked to track.

Things don’t always have be tragic and maybe lost is not the right word. Maybe it’s just you don’t end up where you thought you would. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Christopher took a wrong turn last night on our way to the Salt Lick, and we had a beautiful 20 mile drive out to where the sun was setting in the start of hill country. I had forgotten what it is like to see for that many miles.

All this may be my attempt at a round about way of saying lately I’ve been thinking there are places, or really just one place, where I’d like to end up but I’m not sure how to get there. I mean I think that’s what I’m trying to say here, although it feels less straight forward, so I don’t wanna say it without adding some poetry to it. I keep thinking about life being short, not in a fatalistic way, but just that life is short and like M Ward says and, “my heart is always on the line, I’ve traveled all kinds of places.“