proteanme

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.

More poetry from Tony Hoagland.

Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight exaggeration,

an immoderate description of the person
who at the moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.

What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what I meant behind that
was that my father was split
into two people, one of them

living deep inside of me
like a bad king or an incurable disease—
blighting my crops,
striking down my herds,
poisoning my wells—the other
standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming
with bad knees and white hair spouting from his ears.

I don’t want to scream forever,
I don’t want to live without proportion
Like some kind of infection from the past,

so I have to remember the second father,
the one whose TV dinner is getting cold
while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window

where just now the sun is going down
and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills
they once touched like a child.

~ from What Narcissism Means To Me (Greywolf Press, 2003)

This from Tony Hoagland, a poet I discovered this year and became quite taken with.

FORTUNE

Like in the Chinese restaurant, it is
the perfect forethought and timing with which
the slices of orange arrive
on a small plate with the bill.

So, while you are paying what is owed,
The sweet juice fills your mouth for free.

And the fortune cookie too
which offers you the pleasure of Breakage
and then the other pleasure of Discovery,

extracting and reading the little slip of paper
with a happiness that you maybe conceal,
the way the child you once were
is even now concealed inside you.

Maybe you will marry a red-haired woman.
Maybe you are going to take a long journey.
Maybe a red-haired woman will steal your car and take a long journey.
Maybe you will be buried next to your mother.

And when the people you are dining with
smile and read their fortunes out loud,
and ask you to tell them your own,
you smile and tell them a lie,

and they laugh and think you are weird and funny and sad
and you know that you
are all of those things,

but you don’t tell them the truth
because you don’t trust anyone,
and you never have:
that is your fortune.

I love the Academy Awards. It’s a cheesy kind of love, I know, but I’m not embarrassed by it. There’s something about the mix of scripted and unscripted that works. I gotta say that I’m really pleased about some of this year’s awards, especially all the accolades for The Hurt Locker, which I saw when it opened here. It got under my skin, in part because it’s an edge-of-your seat, intense kinda movie, and in part because it gave me a visceral look at the drug of war, which is the drug my dad was addicted to. I didn’t want to be attached to the film winning so much, but inside I was, especially given that it was up against another war movie that glorified vengeance. In my mind, revenge is about suffering, but I don’t want to write a long post here on wrath. Not right now. Because I have been nurturing a crush on Katherine Bigelow since I read a profile of her in the Times. She’s a bad ass director and on top of that she was a painter, can talk about art and appeared in Born in Flames. And she’s tall. And she’s fucking hot. Of course I have a crush. And I’m way, way psyched she won best director, not just for breaking the barrier, which needed to be broken because this fucking gender shit is so remarkably old, but because she really rocked the screen. If you haven’t seen the movie. Go see it.

Plus, I’m always happy to see Helen Mirren. She’s hot. She’s British. And she makes everybody who gets on the screen with her seem about a thousand times better.

Great coffee in Palm  Springs. I’d never have guessed it, but every morning RU and I have walked to Koffi for lattes and americanos that rival Portland’s own. Seriously. That’s one thing about traveling and being kind of addicted to coffee. It’s hard to find great stuff on the road. So Koffi’s a terrific find. Way, way better than the Blue Bottle in SF. And makes the beans in NYC not even worth mentioning.

At first we couldn’t find the place. The guys that run the little hotel where we’re staying had called it coffee with a “k” and that’s literally what RU and I looked for as we drove down Palm Canyon, craning our necks at the signage on either side of the road. We shared a collective “doh” when we finally spotted it. Prices run about the same as in Portland, which tells you something about the Rose City’s cost of living. Anyway, it’s just been this nice, unexpected pleasure to have such good coffee every morning.

I’ve been swimming twice since I’ve been here, which seems almost unbelievable to me. It makes a big difference that the pool is heated, for sure, still, I can’t think of the last time I went swimming outside. I don’t go swimming in Portland in the summer. And any time I’ve been to any of the Oregon beaches the water is too cold for me, even in warm weather. I’ve only swum in the Pacific twice. Once when I was visiting Martha and she took me to this semi isolated beach in Malibu and another time in the Bahia de Banderas when RU and I went to Puerto Vallarta.

The last time I was in a pool though was this time last year, when Kath and I went home to bury Dad. We stayed in the suburbs at a hotel with a pool and I brought my swim suit just in case. I swam on the one night that we didn’t have other things to do. I don’t know why. I wanted to do something normal I think. But it was like trying to take respite in my junior high gym after everyone had gone home for the day — if it had had a pool. It was empty and out of place and I wasn’t sure what I was doing there.

I didn’t plan this trip to coincide with last year’s but it’s ok it turned out that way. It doesn’t make Dad’s dying the way he did any worse or any better, but the sun feels good and I got a slight recharge. Which is a lucky thing because I still need to write a letter to the VA appealing their denial of our application for his death benefits. Fucking bureaucratic bullshit. Something I’ve had little energy to deal with for the last year, but time is running out.

I hadn’t planned on writing about Dad. I had no idea how much his death would become part of my life. I’m not surprised that it has, it just wasn’t something I predicted. For so long he wasn’t really part of my life.

Yesterday, after spending the better part of the day by our hotel pool, Rachel and I went on a self-guided MCM architecture tour that took us from one end of Palm Springs to the other. It was late in the afternoon and we were driving on these wide streets that reminded me more of the midwest than of Portland. Something about the traffic and way the sun was shining made me flashback to a teenage summer evening in Indy, riding in the car with my mom over to my cousin’s, window rolled down, pushing my hand against the air, skin a little sun burnt, chlorine rainbows jumping off everything that was shiny, and there was the faintest smell of coconut oil hanging around me. The impossibly sexy smell.

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.

This time last year Katherine and I were getting ourselves ready to come home and bury Dad. I’ve been thinking about him more on the anniversary of this trip than I did on the anniversary of his death, which was just a couple weeks ago. It’s not surprising that it took coming home and being immersed in his after-life, to make his death real to me in a way it hadn’t been up to that point. Sadly, I was never as close to Dad as I was that week last year, which probably doesn’t sound that weird to anyone else who’s lost a parent.

As a rule, I’ve not speculated a lot on what exactly happened to Dad. It was a fire. He was found kneeling by his bed with his arms folded over the top of the mattress and his head laying face down in them. His cell phone was on the floor. His dog on the rug beside him. The coroner had Kath identify the tattoos on Dad’s arm via a photo and you can see the redness of burnt skin on the side of his chest. Nothing good in any of that to speculate on.

But this morning, when I was just half awake and the sun wasn’t up yet, I got filled with a kind of palpable imagining of him waking up to a dark room so full of smoke that he couldn’t see and reaching out for the phone, but knocking it off the table. I could feel the fear and confusion, and the disbelief he must have felt, even if only for a split second, when he realized that he wasn’t going to make it.

Until I write my own ode to the midwest this weill have to do for. Just because your state is flat doesn’t mean you’re in the Midwest.

Fifty years ago today, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College walked into a Woolworth five-and-dime with asked to order lunch. They stayed until the end of the day, when counter closed. The next day, they came back with 15 other students. By the third day, 300 joined in; later, 1,000. The sit-ins spread to lunch counters across the country — and changed history.

On MLK day in the midst of all the “I Have A Dream” clips, a couple local reporters drew some very loose analogies between a couple local campaigns and civil rights. A guy from the Mercury talked about MLK in the context of the campaign to pass a two ballot measures that would nominally raise taxes on high income earners and businesses, and the bikeportland.org guy talked about civil rights in reference to bike rider’s rights to use the road. Both columns bummed me out and reminded me of Oregon’s overwhelming whiteness. The campaigns being discussed were legit and they have an impact on real people’s lives, but they’re not landmark movements. It’s as though those reporters failed to understand the suffering, torture and killing that were part of slavery and part of the Jim Crow south. Whether or no they intended it, I read it as this casual white wash of MLK, where not only was he was separated from his blackness, but there was no recognition of why the civil rights movement was so necessary – why people were willing to risk their lives.

When people ask me about living in Portland, I try to explain it’s overwhelming sense of whiteness. It’s uncomfortable and strange. It’s so just so white.

I read Howard Zinn‘s The People’s History of the United States the year I quit the Youth Shelter, when everything in my life was all topsy-turvy and I was dealing with it by recording music down in the basement at Chateau Drink More and reading books I borrowed from Ned and Jim. After I finished the The History, I thought, wow, this Zinn guy is brilliant. How come I haven’t heard of him before? And I felt an urgent need to recommend him and his book to anyone who would listen.

When I’m feeling cynical, like I just was tonight, I like to remind myself that even in my relatively short life I have seen things change on an epic scale – the passage of the civil rights and the dismantling of apartheid – and Howard Zinn played a part in that. And when I think about that I am reminded that I won’t get the chance to play even the tiniest of parts in working for change now, if I give into the lure of cynicism.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. – Howard Zinn