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.

Sheez, it’s raining cats and dogs this morning and I’m missing summer thunderstorms. So I read some poetry.

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

 -Tony Hoagland

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.”

This time last year I really wanted to get a BB gun so I could set up tin cans on the wall in my bike yard and shoot them. RU vetoed the idea for fear I’d shoot a cat or a bird or a squirrel or neighbor a kid; plus it’s illegal, she argued. At the time, I was sure she just didn’t understand that sitting on the deck and shooting shit was a perfectly reasonable way to express grief. But she’d been so accommodating on almost all the other ways I was dealing with grief that I didn’t begrudge her that veto.

A year later I myself don’t exactly understand the sentiment to shoot shit except as expression of the futility one feels about life in the face dealing with such a crappy death. In fact, I’d forgotten how strong that sentiment was until last night when I was watching an episode form The Wire and they showed a guy in the morgue in a white, plastic body bag with a zipper, which reminded me that we had to keep my dad’s body at the county morgue for at least a week while we were trying to figure out funeral arrangements. I imagine he was in a body bag too. As I was falling asleep I thought to myself “of course” I wanted to shoot crap with a BB gun.

These days I try to talk more casually about my dad dying, the way I talk about going to Paris or moving out here or a breakup, to convey it’s significant, but “hey I’m ok.” Or at least I feel like that’s how I’ve been trying to talk about it recently. Who knows? Maybe I’m not successful. I guess the only thing I can truly identify is that for the most part I don’t feel compelled to talk about his death, at least not at length, which seems about right for right now.

Front door

Originally uploaded by proteanme

On Friday I got obsessed with trying to capture how the sunlight was filling up certain spaces in the factory where I work. I locked up that day so it was just me, the sun, the shadows, and the creaks of warehouse. I only got two good pics (camera phone), but I think this one maybe gets at the experience a little.

Yesterday witnessed the pleasure of unexpected company and more sun and blue skies. I wore flip flops, which almost seemed decadent. Today I think I might drink some lemonade.

Three days in a row with blue skies. It feels kind of fragile but I’m in love with it anyway, not jumping for joy in love, because that’s not me. But more a quiet “I just want to experience that you mean the world to me” kinda thing.  It reminds me of something a critic said about abstract expressionism about how you have to open yourself, let in the energy and spirit of the painting, and allow it to dance with your psyche.

Tonight I flashed on the name of the first butch I met, Sherry, which is funny because I’ve been forgetting names a lot lately, but also I’ve not thought of her in years and years and years. At first Sherry thought I had a crush on her. I’d been kind of following her around, like a little, baby, butch puppy, whenever she was working as the line manager during my shift at cafeteria in the dorm. I can imagine that I must have seemed  kind of doe-eyed and uncomfortably eager. So she was stand offish toward me. It sucked because I was trying to figure out how to come out and all I wanted was to be out like her. Sherry seemed so fucking fine with being butch. I wanted to say “How did you do that? I want to do that too?” I remember being so envious of how easily she joked around with these older dykes who worked full time in the kitchen. They tried to joke with me too which i was too receptive to at first, but eventually I joined in. And over time I think Sherry and me must have worked something out. I must have told her “look, I’m into cheerleaders and prom queens and other such femmes.” We never got to be close friends, but we got to be friendly enough. One time I sat in her door room and played my guitar while she and her girlfriend made out in their loft. It was like I was serenading them getting all hot and heavy, which seems very adolescent, but I was barely at the end of my teen years anyway.

“If you look at a national temperature map, it’s almost like we have become a separate continent,” said Hill, “because literally everybody else in the lower United States is in a different season than we are. I mean, it really is just absolutely nuts!”

I’ve updated the listen up page with mp3’s of stuff I’ve worked on. Feel free to download any of the tracks. And lemme know if you liked something in particular.

The sun.

I’m dumbstruck.