proteanme

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.

RU indulged me tonight in some musical reminiscing. We listened to a handful of random FIP songs, a couple old and unfinished solo tracks, and the two most recent songs I’ve recorded. It made me really wish that Matt and I had recorded the second record because we hit this good streak on song writing and six years later it still sounds good to me. Ah well.

I was trying to explain to someone the other day, maybe it was PM, that lately when I reflect on my life, I feel like I’m looking at terrain from the 30,000 feet. I couldn’t really make out the patterns and shapes while I was so in the midst of them. I needed some distance that I suppose age has given me. Or maybe it’s age and grief. I dunno, but now I see things more clearly, like how I move from place to place. In fact, bet I’ve lived in at least 20 different apartments, houses, etc. in the last 30 years, but I’ve only had three real jobs since I was 22.  Work has been my stability, which is not to0 different from my dad, something I didn’t realize until tonight, when it occured to me my dad only had two real jobs. Worked for Kenny Meiring and then worked for Joe Breach. Of course it’s not unusual for anyone from his generation to have had lifetime jobs. So I don’t want to draw too much from the similarity.

Mostly, what’s interesting is the idea of terrain — that at some point you can see the shape of your life.

I’m more sad than I thought I would be. I was going to write more fucked up, but really I think it’s just more sad.  A lot of it is about my dad dying and facing all that means, including the current state of affairs with my family, which is on the brutal side. But there are other things too: the girl I like in western Mass is sicker than she’s ever been, the job situation is starting to feel pretty unstable and the layoffs were a big hit, and it’s not just me, RU got laid off, and then there’s this growing feeling that Portland isn’t the right fit. All of it scares the shit out of me, and at the same time it all touches on a big bunch of sadness. I’m often tempted to spin out on future tripping, but then I work at reminding myself it’s not real. The future is in my head. And I can move torward it, trying to shape my life in a way that I think will have more meaning to me, including and maybe most important the movement itself. I’ve lived so much of my life in response to external events. I swear I’ve hunkered down for years at a time, as though I was waiting for something bad to happen. And the few times I’ve made a choice and committed to it – quitting the Youth Shelter, going back to school – I was so scared, but I also felt so alive.

Sometimes I hate loving things too much. Or loving anything at all. And I go about the business of shutting down, turning off the music and putting down the pen, eating junk, doing nothing on the computer and buying stuff I don’t need, except with less and less excess and vigor as I get older. I swear it’s like I can’t even put my heart into being shut down. I just go through the motions. Which is what I’ve been doing since I came back from my trip out east. But then something happens like a friend sends an email to say she enjoyed finishing off the dish I brought to her pot luck and was feeling dubious about. And at the last minute RU came to dim sum with me this morning and we had a real nice time.  And later I talked to my sister, who I haven’t talked to in months and it made my day. Made my day even if I didn’t want it to because I’m not sure I want anything to make my day because made days are as impossible as unmade ones. I understand life is impossible. It really is. You don’t get to negotiate with it at all. Fariness is an illusion. Seriously. I’m trying to figure out how to be ok with that. Curious even. I’m not one for resolutions. But I’ve been working with how to be curious about impossibilities for about 6 years. Here’s to year number seven.

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.

It’s crazy here. Not a crazy amount of snow by most standards, but crazy for Portland Oregon.  There must be at least a foot in most places. Maybe more. This is my second day of being mostly home bound, although I just walked to get coffee and will probably trek my movies back to the video store. In the minute or two since I started my post, it started snowing again.

Since I came back from the east coast I’ve been dabbling with a state of “junk”. Spending more time shopping online, but not buying anything. Just filling up carts and abandoning them. Eating more crap food than usual – chips, soda, cookies, cereal, even the old stand by from my childhood — spaghetti-o’s.  I look at the weights in my room and maybe once or twice a week I don’t take my laziness seriously and I lift them. But mostly, I feel like a teenager rebelling against doing anything productive, even as I tackle some productive tasks, like taking stuff to Goodwill, clearing out the paper mill that accumulated from a couple years worth of personal records shoved in piles, deep cleaning parts of my apartment, recording some new music which I might post later this week. It’s just something inside feels off and askew, which I’m trying to be curious about.

It continues to snow. In fact, it’s snowing here like nobody’s business. And dark. Dark as all get out. I walked around for a good chunk of the afternoon out in the elements. Trudged is maybe a better word for certain stretches. But I had good company, so it didn’t seem like trudgery. On the way home the flakes were big and thick and about half way here, the sun set on me. Walking in the in the middle of the road in twilight, with snow piled up everywhere I turned, it felt like it really meant something to just get home. May be it always does; it’s just today I noticed.

One of the things I love about Portland is that it is possible to have a walking life and a walking life opens up the door to reflection and contemplation, to negotiation with the elements, to the possibility of more human contact, and the chance to notice the details of landscape. A walking life opens up the door on isolation, even if it’s only making eye contact with the guy coming the other way across the street. A walking life has really saved me these last two years.

I love twilight. In a nearly clear sky.

I’m lucky in that one side of my cube is almost all windows, extending from side to side and then up three feet. This way I get to notice the sky. Today I sat for a few minutes and looked at dusk and thought to myself, wow, this is what liminal looks like. This is liminality done up nuanced and stunning at the same time.

The interior landscape. Now that’s a tricky one. I wish I could keep it from getting over run with nay sayers. It’s funny how much I’ve externalized nay saying. Unconsciously, I think. It’s like a sixth sense the way I gravitate to the “no can do” in a crowd. Not that there aren’t some really wonderful and supportive exceptions. Lucky for me, there have always been; say for instance, the terrific friends who read my blog. But I swear to god sometimes I feel safer with the cynics and critics; I have a lot more experience negotiating with dismissiveness and disdain. For those of you who feel comfortable doing so, feel free to give me a gentle nduge away from the rut of familiarity.

I’ve been watching myself these last couple days, riding a baby roller coaster of small successes and defeats. Good practice I think — to observe it all.  And the stakes are pretty low, but details count. I keep thinking of Churchill saying “life is one damn thing after another” and how that doesn’t have to be condemnation or an echo of defeat. It could be an invitation to embrace the damn things. What else are you gonna do, work against it all?!

Landscape. It’s impossible not to have a relationship with it. Impossible to escape its imprint, even if its only in the imagination. When I was in Paris I wondered what it would be like to grow up and inhabit a space so immersed in history. Here in the U.S. history is an event or a place one goes to visit. It’s not an every day occurrence. But in France 200,000 families live in houses dating back to Henry IV (1589-1610); 500,000 families live in houses of the Louis XIII period (1610-43); and 1,250,000 families live in houses of the Louis XV period (1715-74). Home is a historical landscape. And in walking through one’s neighborhood, there is the possibility to mark one’s steps along a time line connecting the now to the the past. The times that came before are right there. And they’ll be right there for the next generation too.