proteanme

Sunny and almost 70. Luxury weather for out here.  I spent most of the day working outside in my yard, which was not what I’d planned to do, but I got a lot of stuff done without having set out to do any of it. It was a kind of zen and very satisfying endeavor. Up until this year I’ve generally hated doing yard work, which was something I did not know about myself until RU and I bought this house. It’s funny how you find things out about yourself. This year, I don’t mind working in the yard. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either. The warm and dry weather help. A ton. But I also think there’s a real shift too. I’m definitely more interested in the vegetables we are trying to grow. The slugs ate all the leaves off my turnip plants, which weren’t doing very well anyway because overall the temperature has been so cool this spring. And I’m sad because now I can’t find turnips anywhere. I encased my vegetables boxes with copper slug tape and I’m hoping that will work to protect what’s left of the cabbage and collards, which are also taking a beating from the slugs. I bought tomato cages when I got the slug tape today. I’m excited about tomatoes, although it needs to get quite a bit warmer for them and basil and green beans too. I’m trying to convince RU to let me experiment with growing some cantaloupe.

I did not plan on writing about vegetables or the weather but sometimes it’s just that simple. And simple is maybe not the right word. It is really about being alive and doing things that are about the business of living, like taking care of the yard and grocery shopping and cooking food and doing laundry. Things that are easy to take for granted or to see as a chore, until you think about tornadoes and earth quakes and air raids.

Passing on NYRB review of some current memoirs, which also includes some advice for all those aspiring memoirists out there. It’s good advice. Maybe hard to hear, but well worth taking the time to read.

April is half over. I don’t know why, but that seems strange. The way time has passed this whole year has felt weird. Everything seems to march on and then something happens and a little window opens up and time feels kind of suspended. It’s like how on a Monday or Tuesday I feel like I’m just getting through it with, but on a Friday or Saturday I feel like there’s something to savor.

I heard some good music tonight and it was exciting. It always is the first time I hear something I really like that I’ve never heard before. Plus, it seems like it’s been a year since I really listened to anything new. Or really listened to much music at all.  I think I’ve been listening more to NPR shows than I have to music, which makes me feel kind of old in a cliched way and cut off from myself.

I’ve been getting things done lately, which feels good. Nothing big, just lots of small things I’ve put off, like cleaning the furnace filter and weeding and clearing off the top of my dresser. I cleaned out the raised beds in the backyard today, which was very satisfying, and planted kale, collards, leeks and turnips. I’m hoping all this doing stuff will lead to me doing bigger things,like submitting for publication some poetry and the story from my chapbook and trying to sell some songs. I think that’s the first I’ve said that in public.

I stopped reading Anna Karenina, at least for the time being. Maybe I’ll try again this summer. I’m struggling to stay on top of my New Yorkers, but I’m hoping to get around to something more meaty soon. I feel kind of self conscious about not being a more prolific reader.

The days are noticeably longer. It’s nice. It feels better than short days.

I’m back from the shortest trip home I’ve ever taken. It was kind of intense and much sadder than I had expected, although I’m not really sure what I was thinking would happen. The sadness stems from lots of things, but mostly I think it’s about getting older and time passing and living a couple thousand miles away from my family and being part of how some people cope with some things and being totally apart from how other people cope with other things. And of course there’s just plain old grief over someone I loved so much dying.

The funeral was sincere and straightforward and heartfelt. The songs were perfect. Heartbreaking but perfect. I could barely sing for crying. And the eulogies were so personal and moving. My uncles and my mom did an amazing job of planning a service that was about all of us and my grandmother, which is really hard to do and I’m incredibly grateful they did it. They made  rituals matter in a personal way. For instance, I was one of the pall bearers and it meant a lot to me that my family was willing to break with tradition to include me in that. I can’t articulate why, but I really wanted to help carry my grandmother’s casket to her burial plot.

Other things happened too while I was home. Even when someone dies there’s not just death. There was the sound of thunder and seeing lightening from the plane and the sunny skies the next day, with the temperature rising to almost 80 degrees. My mom and I got to spend a big chunk of time alone together and it’s been a while since we’ve done that. We ate at Steak and Shake and did errands and we laughed at ourselves a lot. I also got to go to my Aunt and Uncles 50th wedding anniversary and see all my cousins on my mom’s side and hang out with Ty and have lunch with my dad’s oldest cousin, Pattie and her son John and his wife Becky. Pattie called everyone deary, which seemed very sweet. We talked about family history and they told some stories I’d not heard before.

About 3 weeks ago my grandmother died. I’m coming home for a very short trip to see my family and attend the funeral and burial.

My grandmother, who we called Mammaw, turned 100 this past December. There was a big family party. My sister and I sent flowers. Mammaw lived for a couple months after that and then passed away on the eve of my mom’s 79th birthday.

Mammaw helped raise me and my sister, along with a whole group of people, most of whom are dead now. Growing up I would say that Mammaw had backbone. That’s the best way I can explain it. She gave us structure and order and consistency. That’s the big umbrella under which everything else with her existed — all the summer trips, all the holidays, all the dinners and the desserts — everything she did for us and she did a lot.

“C’mere kiddo.”  I just remembered how Mammaw used to say that to me or my sister or one of my cousins.  Even when we were grown. She’d say it and pat the arm of her chair or the spot beside her on the couch.

With her gone I feel a little more untethered, a little more ungrounded, and less like myself. Which may explain why last night as I was trying to fall asleep, I thought about dying. Usually, when I think about dying I think about who gets left behind and how really fucking hard that can be. But last night I just got so scared of dying myself, that I shot up out of bed. I slept horribly after that and all day at work I couldn’t quite shake the sadness or fear. Riding the tram up to OHSU this morning I thought this is the weirdest fucking thing, riding this tram up a hill to go to a job.

I know that alot of my fear of dying comes from not knowing what’s going to happen and not trusting that it will turn out to be anything good. For the last ten years or so I’ve been working on trying not to take that line of thinking so seriously.

On the way home I made myself look at the river and the grass and the trees, especially all the ones that are blossoming right now. I remember going for a hike once with Ty when I was feeling really sad and he kept saying things like look there’s the sky and look there the trees or there’s a bird or there’s a flower.

When I’m feeling optimistic or a little enlightened I like to think that nature is telling us something about living and dying. We talk to mystics and repent and pray and do tarot and augury and gather data and do science experiments and conduct research, but maybe it’s really as obvious as the cycle of life and death, as hard as that is to say without wincing because of how the term got commodified by Disney and Elton John. But it is always happening in the natural world around us. Maybe we are all just like leaves. Leaves that can kill and torture each other, but still leaves. Or maybe we are more like volcanoes. Or big gay rainbows. I don’t know. It’s a pretty simple view, but I’ve been wondering for a while now if we just make things too complicated with our big and under-used human brains.

We have a guest at our house this week, a Buddhist nun, which is different story, but I’m bringing it up here because when I got home from work I was surprised to discover our guest had set out a treat for me — a small tart with a note telling me to “enjoy,”  accentuated by a little hand drawn smiley face. It was such a really nice surprise that I forgot my angst long enough to think of something else besides dying and being sad and wishing I didn’t waste so much time.

I thought about the last time I went home and how it was warm and sunny and Becky and Jeremy were getting married and I met PJ and Nash and ran into Ty in Indy and how I got to spend time with so many people who are so dear to me. And I thought about about how the time before that, I’d come home for Ned and Kristy’s wedding and how I loved being with everyone there and seeing fall again in Indiana and how sweet it was that Rachel and Pat let me tag along with them flying home and getting around Indy and down to Bloomington and back to the airport.

I’ve not posted for a while because I’ve not known what to say about anything. There has been so much destruction and upheaval and so much suffering these last several months. And there seems to be a mean spirited climate taking over US culture, at least when it comes to looking out for each other. And I want to say something meaningful about all of it, about how life is precious and how there is so much pain in the world and how if you can do something for someone that will make things better, then do it.

Rain in all it’s glorious self. Today has been a quintessential end of the winter rainy day – kind of cold, kind of windy and really wet. It doesn’t pour here. Or at least it doesn’t pour very often or for very long, but the way it streams down is relentless. I’m hoping my gear dries out enough overnight, so I can brave it all and get soaked again tomorrow.

I had a conversation with some friends not too long ago about rainy Junes out here in Portland, which are the bane of my existence. There was some disagreement in how wet the last 3 Junes were; we all remembered it a little differently. And I realized later when I was thinking about the conversation that some of us were talking about the factual aspect of rain – how many days and how many inches of rain we got and some of us, mostly me, were talking about the experiential aspect of the rain – what it feels like when it rains more than a couple days in a row in June. But at the time we all thought we were talking about the same thing.

James Franco sucked at hosting the Academy Awards last night. It was like it was beneath him to actually preform. I didn’t see hardly any of the movies that were nominated in most of the categories, but I still can’t help myself from watching the spectacle of the celebrity. It’s like a special televised addition of People Magazine.

I’m trying to read Anna Karenina. RU said it take about 60 pages to get into it. I’m at about page 50 or so and am having trouble tracking the characters, in large past, because I’ve read a little here and a little there. I think I need a 50 or 100 page day to successfully become immersed. Also, I’m finding I need to adjust something in my brain to better take in and enjoy Tolstoy’s writing, which seems so dense. And it seems to take it’s time.

It  snowed this morning. Maybe an inch total. By 2pm it almost all melted and then it snowed again. There were flurries, big fat flakes, and I thought, now here comes the real snow storm. But that only lasted for about a half hour, forty-five minutes tops, and now it’s mostly gone, save for piecemeal blankets covering some front yards and patches that sit on top of whatever cars have been parked in the same spot all day. Not much of a storm, although I hear it’s supposed to get icy and cold later tonight. Poor daffodils, trilliums, and fairy bells. Things have already started blooming here and this late snow might be a killer to those first hints of spring.

A day of Pandora tuned to the Radiohead mix. Pretty good stuff, although predictably melancholy. Don’t know why it took me forever to figure out how to hook up the laptop to the stereo, but no use beating myself up for missing the obvious.

I’ve been reading a bunch about queercore. Did queercore happen in Indiana? Or did I just miss it? Maybe I was a boring homo. Gosh, that would suck. I did know some Sally’s Dream people, though, and in retrospect they seemed kind of like a queercore-ish kinda band?

A week ago or so, I had the worst dream about my dad. He was alive. He hadn’t actually died in the fire two years ago, but he’d let us believe that he had. And all this time he’d been hiding from us. On purpose.

Somehow my mom  found out – maybe he finally called her or maybe she just caught wind of it. I don’t know. In my dream, it wasn’t important how she knew, just that somehow she did and she was going with me to see him because she knew where he lived. He’d moved into an apartment complex that looked pretty similar to the complex where Mom lives now.

When we pulled up Dad was getting out of this 90’s sedan, something like a Cutlass supreme from the 1990’s. This detail struck me as significant, because for so, so long my dad drove a truck. He was a carpenter, so it made sense. Anyway, in the dream, he gets out of this car, goes around to the back, opens the trunk and starts rummaging through a couple trash bags he’s using to carry around his stuff. He pulls out some clothes and puts them aside and then he holds up a couple books. And all the time I’m saying something to him like, “How could you do this to us?”  “Do you know what you put us through?” “Do you care what it was like?” But he doesn’t say anything; he just keeps pulling things out of the trash bags that he wants to take in the apartment.

Then all of the sudden Mom and I are standing inside the door of Dad’s apartment. It’s pretty bare inside, like it would be after losing so much of his stuff in the fire. There’s a couple folding chairs, some TV trays for side tables, and an open hide-a bed couch, which he immediately goes over and sits on. I look around and see there’s a few stacks of books on the floor and a couple more trash bags of  his stuff.  He starts thumbing through some books he had left sitting out on the sofa bed and I’m still talking about how I don’t get it – how he could have left us to clean up his mess. He looks up at me and shrugs his shoulders. I notice a couple bathrobes hanging from some hooks on the bedroom door and I ask him if he’s living with these two women from his church. (In real life, these are the women this insensitive priest told me were just like daughter’s to my dad.). And Dad tells me no, but they know he’s alive and they come over and check on him every few days or so.

And  then I wake up.

Ever since my dad died, I’ve wanted to dream about him. As much as I hate to admit it, deep down I’ve wanted to get some kind of sign from him that though it never seemed like it, he thought about me and my sister all the time and that he really loved us – with all his heart he loved us. He knew our birthdays and color of our eyes.

But that’s not the dream I got and the one I did dream says volumes about all this shit that is unresolved in my heart. I thought because I was able to put the shitty dad thing aside 12 years ago, so I could get to know him as a person, and because we’d had a relationship in the last 12 years, that I was over the shitty dad thing. And I’m a little shocked to find out that I’m not over it.

One of the most bittersweet things I learned about my dad after he died is that he was a really good and loyal friend and that he was cherished by people, including a step daughter. In so many ways, he gave up on ever being that to me or my sister. We never go to cherish him or be cherished by him. At last not in a pragmatic way that made any real difference in every day life. In my brain I know better than to take it personally, but it appears that my heart is not a reasonable partner to my head.

So when I talk about my dad’s death, which I do a fair amount here on my blog (a feed of which I pull into Facebook) it’s as much about trying to work through how it’s kind of fucked up to be his child, as it is about his dying. And for some reason it works for me to do it in this format.

I finally finished the last couple chapters of Matterhorn. Semper Fi to the Old Breed. Next on my list is either Anna Karenina or Billy Budd or Slaughterhouse Five. Or some other title, like The Magnificent Ambersons.

All the good fiction I’ve been reading  makes me want to give the finger to David Shields (I don’t want to link to him because I don’t want to give him the publicity.) What a stupid fucking idea he had pitting fiction against non-fiction and what a hack he was for not giving credit to anyone who he quoted. I could go on here, but I’ll stop myself. Done ranting.

I keep putting too much sugar in my tea this morning. I am my own enemy.

I’ve been looking for a copy of an old Burl Ives’ record of sea shanties. My mom and my dad used to sing this one called Wrap me up in Tarpaulin Jacket. it’s out of print, though, so it’s gonna be a quest.

I’ve been a slump, or more accurately I am in a slump. It’s all very blah. Nothing big. Just the accumulation of  everyday quandaries and ordinary disappointments. I’m trying to be ok with it. I feel all slumps are a chance to practice working with future slumps, which are bound to come along, as they a part of being human.

After coming back from L.A., RU and I have been on a quest to find good Korean in the Portland metro area. We’ve got a list of about 10 places to try, which I think are pretty close to each other, off Hwy 10 out in the burbs. We’ve only been to 2 places so far. They were decent but forgettable; still the quest is fun and maybe we’ll strike gold.

I can tell spring is starting to happen here. There are birds chirping, trees are are budding, the back yard needs weeding and the days are long enough that I don’t need my bright headlight for my rides to and from work. It’s gotten up into the 50’s on more than quite a few days in the last couple weeks and I’ve walked to the store without a hat on. All this is luxury when thinking about the endless winter that seems to be griping parts of the country.

I’ve been trying to imagine Egypt. Trying to imagine being Egyptian.

A week ago I couldn’t stop humming hymns. I don’t know how it started, but it was like someone pushed a button in my brain and out came all these old, wonderful songs that I grew up listening to and singing. I never thought about it at the time, but looking back I’d say that there were some very sweet and catchy tunes in the old hymnal. If any of you have been to an Episcopal church you know what I mean. This week I’m quite taken with a Sharon Van Etten song, One Day. It almost makes me want to cry a little bit.

I just finished watching he HBO mini-series, The Pacific, hoping to understand my dad better. And in some strange way hoping to be closer to him. I’ve cried a lot while watching it and wished desperately that I knew if my dad had kept his dress blues or his Marines dog tags, I would have spent more time in that horror show of his burnt out and trashed house searching for them if I’d known they were there.

Last night RU and I went to the Portland Art Museum to hear Catherine Opie give a lecture about, well, really her whole body of work. It was interesting and we were joined by an interesting mix of queers, museum patrons, folks looking for some intellectual stimulation, and maybe some folks feeling kinda nostalgic for the 90’s. Not that those are mutually exclusive groups.

I hate to admit it but I only heard of Cathy 3 or 4 years ago; for a big chunk of the 1990’s I wasn’t really paying attention to art. But I did see her retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2008. I think Cathy’s early series of portraits, which pretty much made her as an artist, are powerful, and I’m glad i saw them in person. Because the slides don’t convey the power of them. You have to be confronted by them in person. The photos in those series are big and aggressive and put into technicolor something that Mapplethorpe started. Those photos are like “boom,  mother fucker. We’re are here and we are fucking queer.”

I don’t think she’s done anything as powerful or as moving since those portraits. For for more intimate portraiture, I’d pick Nan Goldin. For social commentary, I’d pick Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander. Off the top of my head, I can’t say who I really like for  landscape, but I don’t find Cathy’s landscapes particularly compelling, except for the ice house series.  But I was still fascinated with listening to her talk about her work. In part because she’s funny and she’s smart enough to know how to work the crowd. Also, I have a certain personal affection and admiration for her because she’s unabashedly butch and talks about it like it’s absolutely no big deal.

But the landscapes aren’t really that interesting and overall are pretty forgettable. It’s her narrative about them that gives them meaning – what she was thinking or doing when she took the photos, the camera she used, the stories about her travels and sometimes what she was trying to accomplish by framing them the way she did. There was a lot of cliche in what she said, which I didn’t care so much about except that she tried to present it as a unique perspective, like taking a photo of the back of sunflowers and how that goes against expectation. The other thing that was interesting was just listening to the language of talking about art – pieces in conversation with other artist’s work, and football fields and strip malls as social landscapes, witnessing personal experience through portraiture. it was kind of like the performance of intellectualism.

I’m still an Opie fan though.

What happened to DJs being able to mix? You know the ability to overlay 2 tracks and maintain a constant beat? I’ve been to more than a handful of queer dance nights in the last year where the DJ’s got a super cool name, but can’t mix his or her way out a paper sack. And it sucks. When I go out I want to hear something I can’t play at home with my ipod hooked up to my stereo. So here’s my open plea to all those stylish guys and gals behind the console. Aspire to be something more, man. Practice. Put in the time, sporting some headphones behind a mixer. Seriously, learn mow to match a beat. You might even come up with your own original style of mixing that packs a club and makes all the boys and girls swoon over your flat billed trucker hat or your cool asymmetrical hair cut. You look hot. Now, play hot.  C’mon and aspire to be the shit; you’ll drink for free.