proteanme

Oh goodness, it’s come to my attention that I’ve been indulging a little too much in some of my less than favorable character traits – cynicism, pretentiousness, criticism – stuff like that. And it’s not particularly endearing. Duh, right?! It’s easy to poke holes in things other folks believe, but it’s cheap too. So I thought the stand up thing to do would be to come up with a list of things I actually do believe in, like self awareness, personal accountability and intellectual curiosity, poetic license and artistic expression, and that everything changes, we all need each other, gratitude and compassion should be super powers, it’s good to share a meal, most things people say are crises aren’t, and everyone should let themselves really feel their heart break at least once. Hmm. I think I can stand by this, at least for a little while.

A couple nights ago,  during dusk, I was riding home from the other side of town and I passed through my old neighborhood. My favorite neighborhood. Kerns. It’s always such a bittersweet thing to re-visit the this little Northeastern enclave and even more so on a summer night, it being both my favorite season and my favorite time of the year and time of the day to be riding my bike around Portland. I really, really love Kerns. Sometimes I think if we moved to that neighborhood, I’d stop bitching so much about living in Portland.

It made me think about how easy it is for me to fall in love with a place, like Kerns, or this stretch of road near lake Lemon, or my grandmother’s basement. Not easy in the sense that I’m in love with a lot of places. But easy in the sense of not holding back my heart. To be unabashed. To wax on and on and on about it, which has not been my approach with people. Humans are so much trickier to dive into, but you kind of have to dive in if you’re really wanting to be in something with someone. I wonder if my friend Val would call this “being a pickle.”

I was never much of a carpe diem kinda guy before, but over the last six months the idea  of seizing the day has taken on unexpected poignancy. Maybe it was my dad dying last year or maybe it’s how I’m getting closer to turning 50. Either way there’s something going on inside that feels, not urgent, but essential, like I’ve never wondered so profoundly as I have been wondering since the start of the year, on the question of “what the fuck am I doing?”

Sometimes I feel like I’ve awoken from a long dream. A while back I was sitting at work looking out the big window beside my desk and it was like I could see myself from the outside. For a minute of two I had this sensation of finding myself in the cross hairs of a satellite snapshot, imperceptible really, and then zooming in, Hollywood style to an aerial shot of the parking lot across the street from my building – where the camera view switches to assume some private eye, telephoto lensed, close up of me sitting at my cube. The point of view went from less that a speck to my hand resting on my keyboard.

Maybe it was the all the sunshine that day and the fact that it was 6:30pm and I was at work, which seems like a a sucker’s game, but I remember I thought what the hell am I doing here. Life is fleeting. It’s been raining for days and I’m sitting inside on a rare sunny evening writing code to sell light fixtures. It felt not right and it felt symbolic of almost everything else in my life.

Well, I just deleted this whole paragraph of me lamenting about wanting to find meaningful connection. Better to just take in a long pined for blue sky and write some poetry or weed the garden or maybe go get a shake. Life’s got no promises. I’m not owed anything by being alive. Death took that particular intellectual understanding and madeit  a cellular experience.

I realize I don’t have a lot of practice with wanting to want things, beyond items of immediate gratification, and I’m going from a year of suffocating numbness, which shut me right the fuck down, to feeling open and vulnerable and having desire. And I mean desire in the broad sense of wanting to fall in love with the world, that whole joy thing Joseph Campbell was talking about, which is I think probably a heart breaking endeavor. But what else is there. I think it’s all about connection, joy, sorrow and heartbreak.

My version of upbeat – how’s that a sunny disposition?

A while back I was dating this femme, who I’ll call C, and around the time of one of our first dates she happened to be dog sitting for a friend. C told me that she was convinced that this dog was her spirit animal. I asked C some questions about how she knew that and then told her I didn’t think I had a spirit animal and really I wasn’t sure if I even believed in spirit animals for myself. C told me that maybe my spirit animal was something that was separated from me by such a great distance, like a manatee out in the Caribbean, that I just couldn’t feel the connection. I loved that answer. It was funny and smart and creative and she wasn’t buying into my cynical front.

The other thing that was implied in that exchange is that it was ok for us to have different experiences and we didn’t have to validate them for each other in order for the experience to be real to us. It’s like I don’t believe in ghosts but my mom swears she’s been visited by the spirit of her grandmother, and who am I to say she wasn’t? It’s not like I can claim to have knowledge of the whole crazy range of human experience to say that it’s not true. I know I could extrapolate out from this position in an unhelpful way, but what I’m trying to get out is how we open up our experience of the world to include another person’s experience, especially when it doesn’t fit in with how we see things or do things. I’m pretty sure that’s where connection happens, that’s where you get this great opportunity to develop compassion and empathy. But if you’re like me you need some help. You need someone who doesn’t buy into your knee jerk contrariness or someone who doesn’t take your cynicism too seriously, which is a tall order for anyone and I can get en-fucking-trenched for sure. But I’m trying harder and harder to have better sense of humor about my own prickly nature and to stop myself, when I can, from putting my foot in my mouth and more quickly make a repair when I do.

I don’t know what exactly has got me fired up on this topic. As I re-read what I’ve written I’m not sure I’ve even really gotten around to whatever point I wanted to make. I’ve been thinking a lot about where I fit it and where I don’t and how hard it can be to really connect with someone. I meet someone new and I start telling them my stories and they start telling me theirs and sometimes that seems like all it is – an exchange of stories. But sometimes something different happens and I realize we’re not just swapping stories, we’re trying to figure out if we can cultivate some shared experience, which can be super challenging when confined to just a conversation.

Hmm. . . I’m posting this more to practice being a little exposed. I don’t I think I’m on to anything profound, but maybe in a couple days I’ll come back and figure out if there’s something else I’m trying to say.

It’s the day after my birthday and the sun has come out for a little bit. It’s like a belated wish, which I like because it extends the celebration a touch longer. Plus every bit of sun feels so dreamy right now and I’ve missed that dreamy feeling. I wondered sometimes last year, especially when I was feeling the weight of my grief, if I would ever get that dreamy feeling back. Or more accurately, if I’d ever want to get that dreamy feeling back. I’ve been struggling so much with wanting to want anything. Even now that hardest part of grief seems to have lifted, something about putting myself out there and wanting something – it feels a bit like climbing Mount Everest. But the sun pushes the dreaminess on me before I can figure out how to resist it. It’s a great a trick. Must be the warmth and the light and the color of the sky – how it’s not some cerebral experience – especially from the saddle of my bike. I think that’s part of why I’ve been struggling so much to deal with this record breaking rain. I need the sunshine to open up the things I can’t open on my own.

Two weeks of rain in late May. Oh Portland, you’re breaking my heart. I should be used to this by now, a spring that runs from February through June, but every year it bums me out more and more. And this year I seem to be adding salt to the wound by looking at Facebook photos of friends in t-shirts and shorts and reading about how it’s hot and sticky and time to get out the kiddie pool. Today, I feel almost desperate for warm weather and sunshine. Fucking desperate. The prospect of having to wear a coat or a rain jacket on my birthday is bringing me down and pissing me off. I swear that I’ve got to reclaim my birthright for a summer commemoration.

May marks the end of my writing program. It’s been a terrific experience. I’ve met some really wonderful people, written my ass off and learned how to layout, print and bind a book.  I was so ambivalent about writing when I applied for the program. Grief had knocked so much out of me; it’s amazing now to feel that I want to write. Hmm. The end result of this endeavor is a self published book. I’m already getting ready to print  my 2nd edition seeing as how I found a number of typos in my first. And I cut it crooked too. There’s always a learning curve. But my plan is to have a pdf version available for download here for free and then sell the book version which has some extras, like photos, appendices, nice paper and a cool cover. Stay tuned on that note.

I’d be forever grateful if you sent me some wishes for sunshine.

I wanted to write about how I don’t believe in silver linings, but once I started writing I realized I couldn’t explain it very well. And it’s not what’s on my mind right now anyway. The sun is shining. That’s what’s on my mind. There’s a bunch of blue sky right outside my window, along with a stretch of hills that would be called mountains in Indiana. And yeah, it’s stunning and everything, but I don’t want to be here right now. Not here as in sitting at my computer, but here as in the great northwest.  I want to be New York or Paris or both. I want to see the Lucian Freud at the Pompidu and check out the Whitney Biennial. I want to ride a subway. I want to look out a window and not see mountains, but an endless city view. I want to hear horns and traffic and people talking. I want to walk down the street and turn my head because some guy or gal is dressed to the fucking nines. I want to wave down a cab. I want to be stunned by humanity. Not overwhelmed by nature. Or the unending whiteness of inner Portland.

On the other hand, it was pretty cool playing blocks with Finley at her first birthday party. And I’m gonna grow vegetables this summer.

I’ve got a cold or some allergy thing and it’s exacerbating the funk I’ve been feeling for the last several weeks.  Nothing is wrong that wasn’t wrong last year. My dad is still dead. Things didn’t work out with this girl I liked. Work is still taking a hit from the recession. I’ve kinda eaten my way through the hardest part of it all, or at least the hardest part thus far, and am having a hard time forgiving myself for the weight gain. For some reason my malaise feels particularly American. I guess it’s the narcissistic part.

Mostly, I’ve been trying not to take it all too seriously – the narcissism and the melancholy. It will come and go. That’s the promise of life, right? Nothing stays the same for long. Except death.  People die and are dead forever, which probably sounds much darker than I feel; I’m not morbid. It’s just knowing now I’ll never know some things about my dad has softened me up, opened me up to the people around me, to whatever’s happening, like noticing spring, which would make RU happy. I’m just not quite ready to advertise it – the opened up part. Lord knows I have worked my ass off at not caring about things. Maybe not worked my ass off, as much as nurtured the traits I’ve inherited. Indifference and detachment appear to have been my legacy. Good stuff got handed down too, but it’s not like things even out, not like exercising to burn off calories.  I’m not sure what my point is here.

The last year has also brought folks into or back into my life, some of whom I figured I just wasn’t gonna find again, like my best friend Tim, who I grew up with. He was like family to me and I feel I’ve got some part of myself back now that we found each other. On Facebook of course. And there’s my dad’s best friend, Joe and his wife, Toy, who knew my dad for 30 years and who Kath and I met for the first time last year. There’s Val and Deborah. There’s Heather and her man Martin, and friends of her’s who I haven’t seen in years, like Lauren, Chris and Judith. And there’s a bunch of folks from Bloomington who I came out with or came out around and who were my fist circle of friends there, most notably Deanne, who I’ve looked for on an off over the last several years and then there she was this winter on FB. Of course. And there’s RU and my sister, both of whom I can’t imagine not having in my life and really don’t want to imagine a life without them.

All of this stuff happened in the last 15 months. It’s hard to get my brain around it. All that got undone and uncovered and torn open. I dunno.

Sunshine is an amazing thing. Especially when it seems to spill out from some endless supply, which maybe there is down here in southern California. I’ve never been to Palm Springs before. I feel like I’ve walked into an issue of Dwell Magazine, the sunny edition. RU just said it is so nice out and it truly is. We can see the mountains; a pool is about ten feet away; we just got back from a bike ride admiring the palm trees and the architecture.

I need some renewal. I didn’t realize it until we got here last night. I could use the vitamin D too, which is no joke. But the last year, has been a really tough one. Took something out of me I think.

I feel incredibly lucky to be here.

I bought a bunch of shoes in 2009, which was one of the many ways I’ve coped with my dad dying. I did other things to cope besides that, but I was just looking at my closet last night and thinking, Jesus, where did all these shoes come from? An unplanned legacy of footwear I guess.

This morning when I got to work, a colleague was taking snapshots of the sunrise. It was beautiful this morning and he sent me some of the shots later. They turned out pretty good.

I’ve taken so many photos of the sky this year. Sunsets from my apartment and RU’s house. Storm clouds in the spring.  Contrails cutting across the clear blue of summer.  Cloud banks from a plane window. The crisscross of phone wires. Night reflected back through a window. Rain and snow as it falls. All this time spent trying to capture a monent of something that is always changing.