proteanme

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it . . . Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

Still life

Originally uploaded by proteanme

If you sat at my desk and turned your head to the left, this is what you’d see, unless you were wearing the headphones and then of course they’d be out of the picture.

I kinda like the way the camera phone shoots. The light gets blown out a little and there’s no getting a close up. Reminds me of the Kodak Instamatic I had as a kid.

I love this line from Prison Girls by Neko Case so much so that I listen the song, which I’m not a big fan of, just to hear her sing: I love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes.

Pre-pride rainbow 2010

Originally uploaded by proteanme

Stopped on my way home last night, riding over the Hawthorne bridge, to snap a shot of this rainbow. It was almost storybook in its color and brightness. And although I could see the full arc from my perch on the bridge, I could only capture pieces of it with my camera phone, which is kinda poetic, I think. The rainbow’s occurrence seemed especially fitting as Portland queers are getting ready to celebrate Pride 2010.

On Friday, the weather forecast promised something like 10 straight days of sun. Everyone was talking about it. Seriously, they were. So on Saturday I didn’t get up out of bed until I saw blue skies through my blinds, which was about 9am. And man it was beautiful. I loved the feel of my bare feet on our deck. I loved squinting into the sky. I loved the sweat behind my knees. It was sunny for 2 whole glorious days and then yesterday the rain came back. Today the showers have been relentless. It’s just too heartbreaking to keep longing for the sun. I don’t feel resigned or defeated, as much as I feel like I have to let go of this part of myself, this dreamy part that’s always been in love with summer.

Love Song (Lame)

This is a little like high school
he said, when I wouldn’t take off my clothes.
It was true, although in high school
I would’ve come over to torture him deliberately
and now the torture was an unfortunate side effect
of my sadness, and had nothing to do with him at all.
Sleeping with you would be like
a drowning woman grabbing an anvil,
I explained. A burning man guzzling gasoline.
Lame analogies, but I was trying to make a point.
When he got up for a drink, I missed him
but that feeling disappeared once he came back.
I sat there and tried to feel sad,
tracking my blue mute form
as it sank to a furrowed ocean floor.

-Courtney Queeny

New Ohio Review
Spring & Summer 2010

ReadingOriginally uploaded by proteanme

I haven’t written any butch stories in a long time, but all of the sudden I have a few from things that recently happened to me.

Story 1

Today RU and I were walking back from the store and thought we saw this cat that looked like her old cat Benjamin, who disappeared about 6 years ago. We were standing there petting the cat and this young boy across the street, who was perched in the upper branches of a small tree, started talking to us about how he knew the cat, that it was his neighbors and it was a girl cat. We chatted with him for a minute and then stood up to leave. As we walked off the kid asked me if he could ask me a question and I said, “Yeah”

He said “Are you a girl?”

I said “Uh, yeah.

“He said “It’s weird.”

And I said “I know it throws people off.”

Story 2

On Friday RU and I went this artist studio open house in North Coast Seed building. I didn’t see a whole lotta other queers at the event, at least none that were obvious (which sadly is often the case, as queers tend to self segregate for all sorts of reasons, like comfort, safety, etc) and was doing the things I mostly do, adapting to the overwhelmingly straight world. In that mindset I didn’t pick up on the old school lesbian vibe in one of the studios we visited, but as we left, this super friendly dyke said to me: “Excuse me, but we were just admiring your butchness.

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?

Wow – sunshine! It’s all promise and hope right now. All warm air on my skin and blue sky every where. It’s lyrical stuff. Speaking of which, I keep meaning to post William Matthews short summary of all the subjects of lyric poetry. I love reading this when I’m feeling too serious about being serious.

• I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious
• We’re not getting any younger.
• It sure is cold and lonely (a)  without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.
• Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent on we know not what.

Broken Promises by Paula Rego

Originally uploaded by proteanme

Just discovered Paula Rego this morning. Her work reminds me of Lucian Freud and John Currin.