Doc Essays

Portland wrestling

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 09:39:11 -0400

Ahhhh… Saturday. In my entrenched middle age, Saturday means taking Griffin to a Little League game, maybe renting a movie, washing the car… general old-dad messing around. I like Saturday.

But, you know… I used to LOVE Saturday. I used to live for Saturday. Not because of the lack of school; I liked school all right. Not because of the ability to sleep in. Not even because Saturday was allowance day and I could go feed my sugar jones with a furtive run to the Meister’s Buy-Rite candy department (another story in and of itself).

Nope. I loved Saturday because it was WRESTLING DAY.

The late 60s and early 70s had a lot of things going for them, including the Amazin’ Mets, naked hippie chicks, and the Meister’s Buy-Rite candy department. But that paled in comparison to the luminescent glory that was Portland Wrestling. Living in Ashland, we beheld the magnificence via cable TV. Channel 12, I think but that hardly mattered. What mattered were the 90 soul-consuming, mind-inflaming minutes of epic grappling.

Sure, we knew it was fake. We knew that Lonnie “Moondog” Mayne didn’t really eat that turnbuckle. We knew that the matches were rigged. We didn’t give a fuck. We just wanted to see some action. We were in early adolescence, with hormones raging and a taste for the old ultra-violence. We wanted fake blood!

If you worked it right, you could build your Saturday around Portland Wrestling. Jeff Miles, my next door neighbor, had a perfect yard for whiffle ball. We’d play a half hour or so of Whiffle Ball, just to satisfy our moms that we had not spent the entire day inside watching TV. Then, we’d go inside and spend the entire day watching TV. Japanese monster movies were first — Godzilla, Rodan (not Rodin… that would have been a leeetle too much culture for us) and Mothra. Tiny Japanese twins, caged and singing to a nuclear mutant to provoke him to emerge from his slumber and fight another nuclear mutant… is there any wonder my generation grew up so WEIRD?

And, is there any wonder my generation can actually pronounce the word “nuclear?”

Be that as it may, we’d soak up some monster movie action. Then, kung fu movies. Always, always, ALWAYS an old guy with a pointed hat and a long beard, flying, disappearing, kicking the ass of some other guy. This is how I learned about world culture, from kung fu movies and Godzilla flicks.

By then, we hadn’t moved for several hours. It was wrestling time. Tom Peterson’s grim visage filled the screen, telling us to wake up and buy a lot of crap merchandise from his store. “Free is a very good price!” Frank Bonema came on, looking like an unhealthy version of the Cigarette Man from the X-Files. Chaos ensued. Chairs were bashed over heads. Ringside ropes were leapt from. Commercials were run. Ice cream was consumed. Dreams were filled with the screams of overweight, hairy men in tights.

They didn’t have steroids back then. They had beer, and bad road food. Instead of lifting weights, they lifted each other in death spins. They climbed ropes to jump on necks. The Portland Wrestling workout.

Diversity was the theme. Peter Maivia; Samoan. The Soul Man Rocky Johnson; Black. Haru Sasaki; Indeterminate Oriental Descent. Lonnie Mayne; Cracker.

So we sat, we watched, we learned. The lessons are with me to this day. Never turn your back on the ref. Move away at the last second if someone is trying to jump on you. If things get really bad, grab a steel chair and beat the living shit out of someone. And, whatever else you do, always stay within tagging reach of your partner.

Sure, wrestling is still around. But, all the good stuff happened 30 years ago. Just ask Frank Bonema.

Customer service at the bottle return.

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 23:55:38 -0400

Way back in the halcyon days of 1971, when I was an erstwhile 8th grader discovering the joys of onanism and the hideous perils of acne, the reign of famous maverick Oregon governor Tom McCall was in full swing. McCall, famous for imploring people to “visit Oregon, but please don’t stay,” influenced many progressive acts of legislation including land use planning and a bill to keep our beaches forever open to the public — all 300+ glorious miles of them.

He also had a hand in another landmark act, one that impacts all us Oregonians every day. He was the impetus behind Oregon’s first-of-it’s-kind “bottle bill.” Oregon was the first state in the nation with a mandatory deposit on beverage containers. Our streets are cleaner because of this. We recycle millions of tons of glass and aluminum every year, thanks to governor McCall’s foresight.

And, my fucking basement is usually full of old empty six packs thanks to that son of a bitch.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a hardcore recycler. I’m happy to do my part. But bottle recycling has changed over the years. I can clearly remember taking a shopping cart full of bottles and cans to the back of the grocery store. Friendly, helpful store employees counted the bottles and handed out a little slip of paper for you to go cash in. It was a dignified transaction. And, back in 1971, a can of pop didn’t cost much more than a quarter, so that deposit was worth something. Especially to an eighth grader in desperate need of more mass-marketed candy.

If the bottle deposit of five cents had kept up with inflation, we’d be paying about 85 cents per bottle these days. THAT would encourage recycling. You’d see executives wandering the freeways in suits and ties, rifling the bushes for cans. Stockbrokers would be going through garbage containers at TriMet stops downtown.

Times have changed. No longer are you met by Jimmy the Helpful Assistant Store Clerk when you bring your bottles back. Now you are faced with the twin hounds of Hades: the Can-Do machine, and the All In One machine. Designed by former Nazi engineers as a cruel psychological experiment, these machines are supposed to do what Jimmy used to do — count your containers and give you a little slip with a dollar amount on it. The advantage to the machines, as far as the store owners are concerned, is the advantage of all people-replacing work machines. They won’t ask for a raise, they’ll work stupid hours out in the rainy parking lot without bitching, and you won’t catch them reading the latest purloined issue of Juggs Magazine back in the sorting room.

I ventured to the Hollywood Fred Meyer last weekend to take the bottles back. There’s a whole subculture built around those machines out in the parking lot… several down-on-their-luck guys lurk hopefully, waiting to see who will get frustrated and leave a whole cart full of bottles just waiting to be scavenged. I usually give these fellows a buck or two while I’m there, so my trip usually nets about 45 cents when all is said and done. Then there are the anxious housewives, kids running around reveling in the old beer and broken glass, wandering out into the parking lot. There’s usually one old man, confused by the machines, thinking back to the days when everyone just drank out of the same earthenware jug and “pop” was something you did to the guy that tried to court your girlfriend. And, of course, one comically disdainful store employee, his Saturday ruined by having to unclog the infernal machines all day.

Because, as any bottle-returner will tell you, those motherfuckers DO clog. They clog early, and they clog often. They clog in rain, sleet, snow, or sun. They clog arbitrarily, and almost mandatorily. They CLOG.

Mine clogged a lot last Saturday. I almost abandoned the bottles. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a ghostly figure, perched on the hood of a 1993 Toyota Corolla, and smoking a cigar. It was the specter of Tom McCall. I knew it was him, because he looks just like the guy who plays Frazier’s dad on TV. He nodded, pointed to the machines, and said, “it’s your duty, son. Keep Oregon green.”

I flipped him off and gave all my bottles to the nearest homeless guy. As I drove off, the homeless guy was yelling something about a clogged machine. I didn’t stick around to hear what he was saying. McCall looked pissed.

Sated

Mon, 07 May 2012 11:05:00 -0400

Guinea pig graves are, by default, shallow. My shovel easily pierces the soil of the back garden plot, and I start to dig. I have yet to share the news of Max’s passing with Riley. Still in bereavement for her bunny, who died a scant two weeks earlier, she might not take this news so easily.

In the morning, I arrive at my first day back from my gloriously extended wedding-break. I’m greeted with the shocking news that a former graduate-school classmate has taken his life. Like me, he had taken his degree from our school, and returned to our school to work - in his case, as a well-loved professor. In an instant, my wedding stories are shelved, and we begin to plan for the inevitable tsunami of grief that is heading our way. I decline an assignment that would send me to the graduate school campus to confront his death through the faces of his students. I want time to untangle my own feelings before helping others with theirs. I know it will be a matter of one day before I am scheduled with my own clients who will want to process the loss of their favorite teacher. I can’t tell them that he was a friend. This is about them. My time comes in private.

The grave takes no time to dig. I chose a spot next to Max’s long-since-deceased cage-mate and companion. Together forever, just like on the hillside at Sunset Memorial Gardens. Mere feet from their resting place will grow fresh shoots of green onion, and big leafy heads of lettuce. Guinea pig paradise.

I sit in my office, door closed, taking a moment to reflect. I can’t figure out how I feel. The shock, of course, has yet to wear off. My former grad program, as it is wont to do, is bungling the delivery of the news to students. Just two days earlier, my mother’s husband had passed on. Then Max. Now my classmate. What does one do with all of this mortality?

I place a concrete block over Max’s fresh grave. On the block, I put a sprig of lilac snapped from a nearby branch. I pause. This is when my own collection of loss, both old and new, finds me. This moment of peace for a tiny brown guinea pig is weighted with a million pounds of long-carried sadness. I don’t cry, because that crying has been done. I think about how we carry joy in the same little box that holds our grief. All these deaths are a part of me. All the loss. All the gains, the perfection of tiny sparkling moments of light. All of it. When Max’s companion Fuzzlow died, the kids and I had a little ceremony. We poured a beer on his grave, Compton-style.

When it’s time to open my door, I stand and stretch for a minute, and breathe in whatever extra tolerance I can muster. As the week goes on, as I sit with crying students, my energies directed to them, as I struggle find sleep at night, I think a lot about life. We do that when someone leaves us, and we talk about how we should always appreciate our friends and our lives and our kids and our pets and our ability to breathe, because we truly don’t know when those things will be taken from us. Or, when we are ready to give them up. My classmate made his choice on his own.

I wipe my hands together a couple of times, and shake off the dirt from Max’s final resting place.

There’s a student in our waiting room who needs to talk about the death of his favorite instructor. As full as I am, as topped-off with mortality as I feel, I will put myself aside.

There’s always room in the garden. There has to be.

Lucky in love

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:32:31 -0400

For Boog Powell, it was pulling the inside fastball - whipping around, wrists snapping through the zone like lightning, hips turning like a lathe, eyes following the rotation of the red Haitian-sewn seams - the inside fastball was his and then it was gone.

For Ken Jennings, trivia. For Dave Navarro, notes shredded like frozen steel. For Admiral Perry, ice. For Satan, fire.

For me, love.

We’ve all got that thing. Born with it? Maybe. We labor at other tasks. I can’t garden so well. My sewing skills falter. Socially, I’ve been grinding it out since Tammy Hald asked me for a homework answer in the fifth grade and I couldn’t hear her voice, just my heart trying to pound my eardrums into pulp. I could hear the blood rushing through my veins, carrying my self-confidence away to some distant planetoid within my scrawny pale ten-year-old frame. My knees shook so hard that the needle moved, almost imperceptibly but scientifically valid, on a seismograph somewhere.

I’ve come around as a communicator, with work, and now if asked a question by an attractive woman I can represent my species in a relatively decent way. I no longer sweat at the thought of all those x-chromosomes in close proximity. I can maintain an even strain without going insane in the membrane. But, it’s been a grind.

Love’s no grind.

A few days ago, in a sizable hotel room perched atop the fancy Mandalay Bay casino/resort in Las Vegas, deep in the the brutal/reclaimed Nevada desert, I had the good fortune to marry the woman of my dreams, that girl that boys spend their lives wishing they were with, the tan and gorgeous sunshine of my soul. The room overflowed with love. Friends had flown in from all over, including some I had met in person for the first time a scant 24 hours earlier. They were all there to celebrate the existence of love. My heart did not pound, nor did sweat or shake. I am at my best when I am the epicenter of a universe of love. I am the king of the vast realm of the heart.

Love is what I do.

I can wax rhapsodic about all of the facets of my love-blessed relationship, and trust me, I will. But, it comes down to the ability to give and receive the most beautiful gift of all, and that ability was handed to me, carefully and casually, by my mother. I learned from the day I was born that all of the money and cars and wars and deceptions and executive jobs and washroom attendant slaveries in the world would not hold up to love. I learned that most of the fun of getting there is getting there and that love poured generously and willy-nilly into a hungry world would return, a zillion-fold, before the earth had cooled as they day’s sun set. You give it, it comes back, and if you believe then it will always be.

I’m lucky in love. And love is lucky in me.

Some people are scholars, or poets, or mechanics, or mobsters. Some can carry a tune. Some can make fancy things. Some sleep better than I do. Some are taller, and more beautiful. Some people are achievers.

I’m a lover. And that, my dear loves, is it’s own reward, sustainable and perfect. And that’s all I want or need.

I’m lucky that way.

sunlight

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 13:19:00 -0400

There are cloudless days now, from time to time, and those bring a little mustard-squirt of bright direct early yellow sun under the broken blinds on the east side of the room. She faces me when she sleeps, often, and one of the jobs I’ve assigned myself is to keep that direct light from her eyes. I move my pillows to block the light as I quietly get out of bed. This act of care is how I choose to start my day.

There is a heat vent at the bay window that looks into the back yard, as crowded with life as one of those deep-sea vents in a National Geographic special. Cats, not strange sea creatures, but just as in the sea they gather and hope for food. My arrival bodes well, for nutritional purposes.

I look into the back yard and my gaze is captured by a squirrel meandering across the power lines that run parallel 15 feet or so above the back fence. It’s a lazy high-wire act, this tiny Wallenda just taking his damn time traversing the 75-foot aerial superhighway. How tenuous his life must be, up there in sky, or darting across the street out in front of my house, or avoiding the gathering predators. His tiny heart beats a mile a minute up there as he keeps his eye on the prize, a return to his family, a few moments stolen in the safety of his lair.

The cats rub up against my feet. They depend on me. The ecosystem of my house, while partly interdependent, would collapse without the two responsible adults at the helm. We’re surrounded by lives hanging from a thread. We’re providers, stabilizers, the givers and the blockers of light, preservers of sleep and safety. Each act within this system is a measured effort to keep the system alive.

As I write this, the sun has slowly crept time-lapse-style across the wooden floorboards of my living room. I sit on a sofa at the other side of the room from the bay window, and the progress of time is marked by the creeping sunlight. It approaches my bare toes, and as I watch time unfold I’m keenly aware of my momentary stasis. This is how time catches up with people - they sit on the couch, lie in a bed, living as spectators or as well-meaning people frozen in fear. They dare not reinvent their lives, as they have always been this way, worn this hair, loved this one particular person, had sex in that one position, watched that one show. They pretend like life isn’t tenuous, and linear, and flowing like a rain-swollen river toward some cold and unknown sea.

A cloud has drifted across the sun for now, and my feet are safe. The progress of the sun, though, has not been altered, but obscured. The cats, fed, search for a new place to find warmth now that their pool of sunlight is gone. I try to tell them that it will be back, but in their bones they know that it won’t be back forever.

Et Tu?

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:10:11 -0400

I assume the position, knobby knees in full contact with the hard floor. My jeans, a thousand times patched, seem ridiculously threadbare, so wrong for the occasion, so out of place amidst such splendor.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” Hoo boy… that’s rich. I’m eight, unspoiled by much. To the likely disappointment of the church, I have not yet begun to masturbate, to lie, to drink, to covet my neighbor’s wife and lawn mower and teenage daughter, his Corvette, his fine trimmed lawn.

Hello, my name is Jeff, and I don’t covet shit.

“It’s been, uhhhh, three weeks since my last confession.” And it has. And I didn’t have anything then, either, like an actor who keeps showing up for auditions without bothering to memorize a monologue with which to wow the casting director, who in this case was a mildly disinterested youth priest named Father Bob. Everything about the Catholic church weirded me out, from the graphic depictions of Christ tortured on the cross to the gothic Latin ceremonies I struggled through.

To this day, the scent of incense takes me back to an aisle seat in St. Mary’s, my view restricted like a 60s basketball fan behind one of those giant girders at Boston Garden, robes whooshing by, powerful incense hung by what looked like a little cat-o-nine-tails, mumbled Latin like so much smoke following the men working their way up the aisle. I didn’t understand any of of it… Veni, vidi, carpe your diem, et tu whatever. Like a young Fox Mulder, covered in nascent acne and furtively copping glances at forced virgins in Sunday school, I wanted to believe. So badly, I wanted. I wanted the Latin, the weird smelly smoke, the robes. I wanted to do things that were so bad, like murder someone in cold blood out by the big holy-water bowls, and I wanted to be forgiven. I wanted that imaginary forgiveness for my lurid imaginary sins. What a beautiful tradition of master-scam this was going to be. I needed to understand! To be IN the church!

“Father, I cursed three times, and, uh, took the lord’s name in vain.” My real confession: I had not the faintest clue what it meant to take the lord’s name in vain. I imagined veins, pulsing with holy blood, maybe the father son and holy ghost. And why was there a ghost? Was the ghost good? What was the thing with the veins?

They sent me to Sunday school, and to catechism, and to this day I had to look up catechism to see how it was spelled and if that was what is was called and I still don’t know what it meant. Still don’t know, Google and all. It hangs there, cloaked in smoke and mystery like all else Papal and non-palpable.

“Son, the lord will forgive you.” Thank Christ! I mean, literally, I guess, huh? One thing I knew about being religious was the Hail Marys. With the Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayers, I was good and true, not to mention real damn fast.

I left the confessional booth. In line behind me was a group of people who looked as though they really needed to be there - like if the church had been closed for repairs, a couple of them would have just been swallowed up in the hellish asphalt of the parking lot and called on home. I was happy to give up my spot, but part of me wonders what they did. As I write this, I think about those people in line at confession, and I imagine all kinds of stuff.

Adulthood finds me in a career that consists of hearing all manner of confession, from all manner of people. The way we work, there’s no expectation that anyone will be swallowed up in the parking lot, and although we have an urn of water in the waiting area, it’s for drinking in small paper cups.

You have to wonder, though, about this career choice of mine. No Latin, but there sure is a lot of faith to go around.
—-

I’m selling prints to help pay for our wedding! You can...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:08:00 -0400

Anvil

Balance

Goodbye for now

Harbinger

Late bloomer

Lonesome day

Stand

World within

Trillium

Heron Morning

I’m selling prints to help pay for our wedding! You can buy an 8x10, professionally printed and mailed to your house for 25 dollars. 3 prints for 60, 5 prints for 80. Or, buy the entire set in high-res digital files for just 25, and print them yourself!

Our wedding wallet thanks you. Please feel free to share.

Here Comes Rusty

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:02:00 -0400

Today is Sunday, as many of you may realize after shaking off the effects of last night’s wild debauched carousing. For some, this means a day puttering around in the yard, trimming plants and mixing up large vats of Miracle-Grow in order to make your tomatoes look like they survived, nay, thrived following a nuclear holocaust. For others, Saturday means a trip to the movies after finding a cosigner to finance the cost of a couple of tickets and a large vat of Miracle-Grown movie popcorn with “butter flavoring.” And some of you may just stay home, trapped in the house with a few kids, SpongeBob blaring on the TV as you contemplate jumping out of the window.

Sure, that’s all a lot of fun. But, back in my day, we had a better alternative. Back in my day, there was greyhound racing right here in Portland.

Travel back with me in time, if you will, to the halcyon days of Murray Kemp Park, now known as the Giant Useless Stadium Formerly Known As The Multnomah Greyhound Track. We always used to wonder exactly who Murray Kemp was. I used to speculate that he was the winningnest jockey at the track. Sure, horse jockeys have to keep their weight down, it’s a tough life, blah blah blah. But imagine the strain of staying under 40 pounds in order to ride a winning greyhound! That is the stuff of legend, my friends.

Be that as it may, and it may well not be… the greyhound track was where the action was. The routine was simple: round up a few friends who shared your status of not having a life, hop into the appropriate car (late-70s American tuna boats were the choice at the track… nothing gained you greyhound cred like showing up in a dented 1974 Buick Electra 225), and stop at the liquor store for a few pints of something that would make you forget that you were hanging out in the equivalent of a smoke-filled barn with degenerate gamblers wearing pinky rings and Aqua Velva.

Once at the track, it was important to buy a copy of the program so you could have something to focus on if your head started spinning from too much cheap alcohol. The truly adventurous greyhound afficianado would smoke a couple of bowls on the way to the track, just to add to the surreal quality. Trust me, if you DIDN’T have bloodshot eyes you were regarded with a not-inconsequential amount of suspicion by your fellow seedy types. The program was packed full of numbers and information, none of which was useful at ALL. These were DOGS. Let a pack of dogs loose to chase something at top speed, and all mathematical probability went out the window.

The cool thing about the programs, though, were the little narrative blurbs describing how the dogs had done in their past few races. “Started strong, faded.” “Out of it from the beginning.” “Jumped fence and ripped throat from small child.” These narratives, while as useless as the numbers (45:04, 77, 98759839348.we==x ???) were fodder for entertaining parody between races. There was always time between races, because the actual race took about two minutes. You’d peer at the program, make funny remarks (“started strong, took out four dogs in a flaming 3rd turn wreck, lost endorsements”), get another beer, try not to stare at the degenerate gamblers (“wow, that’s the biggest goiter I’ve ever seen!”) and listen to the conversations. The track was apparently the first-date launching point for many a Gresham High student, and there were some awesome haircuts to be seen, and some awesome conversations to be filed away for future reference.

You’d place your bet by going to the parimutuel window. If you were still able to spell or pronounce parimutuel, you were required to buy another beer before you made your bet. Many, MANY people bet on the dog who took a crap during the ceremonial pre-race parade. I am not making this up. A dog would stop and by the time he was fully hunched over and doing his business, his odds would drop from 45-1 to 3-2. People would knock each other over running to the windows to make their bets.

Then, the two minute flurry of action. A large fake bone rode along a little conveyer thing alongside the track. The track announcer would intone “heeeeeere comes RUSTY!” and the crowd would go wild. When the bone got to the starting gate, the dogs were released. 40 or 50 addled fans would yell “release the hounds!” and the race would be on. The bone was named “Rusty.” I’m not making that up, either. What a lot of latecomers to the track don’t realize is that Rusty used to be a large fake rabbit. Too many people got offended by the use of a cloth rabbit to make dogs run in a frenzied circle while legions of drunk people shouted, so the rabbit was replaced by a bone. Rusty the Bone. Mmmmmkay.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the race was over. You stared at your ticket until the numbers came into focus and then tore it up, resolving to never, ever bet on a dog just because he had taken a crap before the race. I mean, YOU took a crap before the race, and what had you won? Nothing.

It continued for 13 glorious races. If you were way into it, you could catch the matinee (kids allowed!) and the evening races on Saturday.

I tried the horse track, but it just wasn’t the same. None of the horses relieved themselves before the race. I had no idea who to bet on.

Here Comes Rusty

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:01:53 -0400

Unmown Grass

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:33:00 -0400

The tree is ripe with the promising buds of spring, and its top branches are losing their grip on a fat full yellow moon slung low in the early morning sky. The moon must be a pretty desirable prize, as the tree seems to really be trying, clawing at the last buttery edge, fighting a losing battle but resolute in its desire to not let go. I descend the two slick steps from the front stoop and stride across the unmown grass of my front lawn, on a path to intersect the moon should it fall low enough to touch the horizon. Like the tree, I’m destined to fail. Like the tree, I’m resolute, and I shall make the attempt no matter how predestined the outcome. This is what I do.

There is a squirrel who greets me most mornings. I like to entertain the notion that it’s the same squirrel and that he has somehow been given the honor of guiding me to Oregon street from 108th. I envision a tiny doorman’s costume, maybe a bejeweled walking stick, toothpick-small, and a monocle. I bow to the squirrel, almost imperceptibly, but squirrels are social creatures and I know that I can see him bow back. Together we share admiration for the tree’s attempt to corral the impossible moon. I bid him adieu. There are places for me to be, and I’ve shared as much of my morning with the squirrel guide as I can. I wish good health to him and to his family.

These mornings, I can see my exhalations hanging for a moment in front of me before they dissipate. This is water, and carbon dioxide, and a thousand other things, and it’s a small miracle that an immutable law of physics can somehow render visible something so fleeting. How is breath not a miracle on any morning, though? How can we be so lucky as to possess within us a machine that is wonderful enough to pull life from the air around us? Some morning I’ll leave the house early, and I’ll stand with the squirrel, and together we’ll ponder this in full knowledge that there can’t be an answer to such questions. Not today, though. I have places to go.

Oregon street, 107th, Pacific avenue. The asphalt ribbon of 102nd awaits, stretching unbroken from the southeast almost to the Columbia river. It’s the recent recipient of beautification and fresh new pedestrian features. Street lamps, old style, with humming chemical bulbs that poorly mimic the color of this morning’s moon, stronger, harsher, without comfort. No cars at this time of day, as the only people up are the early commuters and the potato chip delivery guy I always see. We’re on the same schedule, he and I, and he pulls out of the driveway and gives me a nod. I wonder if he has a squirrel in his neighborhood who sees him to his car before he climbs into his car, and I wonder if he cares. For one minute, the potato-chip-guy’s imagined squirrel is my muse. What a sweet and complicated world it is.

Once I leave the tree-lined confines of my Lorene Park neighborhood, I’m swallowed in an endless sea of concrete. 102nd gives way to the Gateway Shopping Center parking lot, and for a while I feel as I once felt in a Greyhound bus ponderously cutting across west Texas, hours piled on hours piled on hours, no relief, no change. The parking lot never ends until it ends, and I’m nearly at the train station, and I’m a little sad that the walk is almost over, and I’m a little glad.

Here’s where you live. You live in that moment between inhale and exhale, in that heartbeat, in that acknowledgement of breath and bone. You live in the tree that grasps at the full moon. You live in a river of concrete. You live wherever your gaze takes you, to the last sideways crescent sliver of moon as it dips below the horizon line, to the faux-colonial roofline of an eastside grocery, to the indigo sky that warms as the sun slowly climbs up behind you. You live in every step I take. You live forever in every fold of my clothing, under every fingernail, in each laugh line that I’ve earned. I take you with me on my morning walk to the train station, and I bring you home, and then I find you alive and real in my warm home, and I know what real happiness is. And in the morning, as the squirrel steps out to find me and guide me to Oregon street, you live in me again.

——

Afraid, or inspired?

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:19:05 -0500

I was wandering the internet the other day, no doubt seeking some universal truth or maybe just some freshly-unearthed cat memes. A run down my Twitter timeline led me to this link, a collection of Carpenters songs stripped down to just Karen’s vocal tracks and maybe a bass line.

I was transfixed for a while, both tumbling back in time to when I was sporting some very Carpenter-esque bell-bottoms and other 70s embellishment, and absolutely frozen into place by Karen Carpenter’s angelic, transcendent vocals. Go, listen, and then come back and read the rest of this. Go.

I sat there on my sofa, eyes closed, earbuds effectively acting as a time machine and a temporal barrier to anything 2012. Later, reading the comments on the post, I saw that others had done the same, immediately plopped in the middle of a restless Saturday spent housecleaning with parents, hearing the now nearly lost sound of the needle dropping onto vinyl and wandering for a precious millisecond until it found the first groove on the LP and tracked its way through to the end. I remembered those little spaces between songs on an album, the breathing room between songs, when you could see one tiny etched line that guided the tonearm to the next song, and the next. Album sides were an unbroken inward spiral, and if you were lucky your favorite artist would put a pre-Easter egg Easter egg on the album, sticking some little final song at the end for you that would go undiscovered until one day you forgot to get up and pick up the needle, and it would start, and you’d marvel at the intersection of whimsy and technology.

I listened to her voice, there on the couch, and thought about what it would be like to be an aspiring singer hearing something this perfect for the first time. Would you give up? Would you listen to her command of dynamics, her perfect pitch, the liquid clarity of her voice and just go do something else, never to pick up a microphone again? Would you feel so under-equipped, so unarmed, that your dream would die?

You’ve been there, haven’t you? You design a few houses and then spend a day at Falling Water, you pick up a guitar and strum a few chords and then someone plays some Richard Thompson. You play a few open mics and then you listen to Karen Carpenter, all artifice stripped away, all cheesy double-tracked 70s doo-wahs pulled out without mercy to leave you staring at the reality that you will never get there, ever, and why even try?

You write some things, and you read a William Styron paragraph and you wonder about maybe just chucking your keyboard over a bridge somewhere, maybe giving it a temporary life as a bird, a more lofty life bestowed than your clumsy fingers will ever give.

Or maybe you find a flicker of inspiration. Maybe rather than compare, you exult in the ability of the human mind and your intricate corporeal machine to muster such beauty. Maybe, just maybe, that Styron paragraph and that Thompson chord and that Carpenter vocal are allowed to just saturate your soul and remind you that there is always room for more art, more beauty, more inspired passion in the world.

Maybe no one is under-equipped. Maybe some are just under-inspired, and overly scared, and maybe all it takes is just to try.

Maybe the beauty is truly in the work.

So long, Dr. Gonzo

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:46:39 -0500

(I wrote this seven years ago. Last week was the anniversary of the good doctor’s passing)

Spending your life out on the edge is a lonely endeavor. The people who surround you end up making a choice… they can back away from the cliff, or they can fall off into the chasm. In Hunter’s circle, many fell. Others backed away, some a little ashamed for having done so.

Hunter’s circle was huge. He was friends with everyone interesting – Bill Murray, Ed Bradley, Johnny Depp, George McGovern – yet I always got the impression that he was lonely in the midst of it all. I’ve read pretty much everything he ever published, including two volumes of his letters, and I could never quite figure out if he liked people or not.

Circa 1977 – my introduction to the doctor via the magic that is “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.” I was SO ready for that book, and it seared a lightning-bolt path to my brain stem. It got into my bloodstream. The concept of consuming enough drugs to fell a herd of elephants, and then putting oneself into challenging, freakish situations resonated with me as nothing had before. My friends and I were full to the brim with crazy art, and we had found our palette. We wanted insanity. We just needed an instruction manual.

There may be too many ways to approach this. I can’t quite find the right way to tell the story of my connection with Dr. Thompson, the gonzo ethic, the sheer release of filling your system with mind-altering chemicals and just letting the fuck GO. I aged out of it. Greg didn’t make it… his early flirtations with drugs and alcohol became a consuming love affair gone bad, and I lost him long before HST gave up his own battle. At some point the aging crazy-man becomes self-parody, and you either back gracefully away from the cliff or commit to the edge. Hunter somehow managed to walk the edge much longer than the rest of us ever dreamed of.

He burned with an amazing talent, which he alternately mined and squandered. Buffoon and savant. His early works smoldered with some of the political rage that later became his hallmark. The stories of his ill fit with the Air Force are truly hilarious. His dispatches for Harper’s Magazine read like someone trying on the Hunter Thompson role while struggling to please an editor half a world away. Eventually, he just let it flow.

That’s what I learned, I think. He helped me learn to let it flow. Thompson and Kesey and Vonnegut, all there to show me the way. Whatever else comes of Hunter S. Thompson’s life, and death, there’s that.

A final quote, from Samuel Johnson, by way of Hunter: “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Rest in peace, Doctor.

And, thank you.

Preoccupied

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 15:17:00 -0500

The trick, they’ll tell you, is to quiet the mind. They’ll tell you that as if quieting the mind were some simple task like turning down the volume on the car radio or banging a broomstick on the ceiling to persuade the upstairs neighbor to ease up on the Black Sabbath. Would that it were so easy.

There are times when you find yourself alongside a cool mountain stream, just like in the meditation tapes. The stream, real or imagined, is running cold with pure snow-melt, or maybe the contents of your week, endless thoughts tumbling over rocks. It’s so easy! Grab a thought, examine it without judgment, release it into the icy tumult to be carried downstream with the rest. Listen for a bird’s distant cry. Focus on your body. Track your breath.

I was co-leader of a mindfulness group once. Think about the many ways that such an experience could change your life, and my wild guess is that you don’t include the possibility of slowly eating a Junior Mint, savoring each second, each influenced taste bud, engaging every one of your available neurons in the experience of sensing a near-flavorless waxy coating melting away on your tongue, burning in your thoughts as intensely as an explosion or an orgasm or the birth of a child. Think about the many ways to change your life. Add a savored Junior Mint to the list.

Each day that I work I ride for a couple hours to get where I’m going, I spend hours unearthing the cacophony of thoughts competing for attention in the minds of my clients and in my own and it happens over and over in a big giant jumbled pile and suddenly it hits us both that we’re by the stream and that the thoughts don’t mean anything. Under the pile, in the whirling orbits of thought molecules, parsed from the remnants of the explosion there is a truth. The truth is the feeling. The feeling is the truth.

I tell people this, over and over, until I start to believe. Your emotions are your one truth. The constructions of words and paragraphs and excuses and histories are giant architectural wonders upon which we’ve collaborated. In the basements of these structures, in the boiler room, at the heart, there’s an emotional truth that we’re hiding. It is, as they used to say, what it is. And it’s always there.

When we sit beside the stream and wait for the truth to slowly bob along in the current, we miss the fact that the current is all that is. And someday, if we’re lucky, we’ll simply take off all our clothes and throw them away, and gently wade into the stream, and revel in the feeling of the cold as the water, unfettered by need for destination, takes us away.

I ride

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:59:35 -0500

It’s 6:14 on a Monday morning. I‘m reassured by the sweep of hard white light skittering across the rails - my train is on time. Back at home, my girlfriend slumbers, having settled back into sleep after a drowsy early-morning goodbye kiss. My kids are still down. While they sleep, I walk the mile to the transit center.

My train is on time. With a pneumatic sigh, the doors open and beckon me aboard.

I ride. Dark or light, wet or dry, I ride. I share space with sleepyheads and businessmen, knife-toting reluctant early risers on their way to culinary school, survivors of the Walk of Shame. We peer at each other now and again, but mostly we bury our heads in our books, our laptops, our phones. I listen to music. The die-hard romantic in me likes to assume that those who go without headphones are doing so willingly, preferring to listen to nothing but the insistent ever-changing rhythm of metal on metal, wheels on track. Not a lot of conversation on the early train. The train home is a different tale, full of the chattering details of the day. The 6:14 is a rolling metal tube full of sleepy reluctance.

I ride.

During a certain time of year, the sun begins to rise just as we cross the river. If the universe was mine this break of dawn over the eastside industrial district would happen at my whim, bathing me in summer light, silvering the slow-rolling waters of the Willamette. The angular glint of highlights on the Steel Bridge would be mine for the asking. The latticework of bridges stitched across the water and receding into the southern distance, the timed criss-cross of cars at a thousand intersections in the already-busy city, the barge laboring toward the Columbia, all would be there for me on demand.

On some lucky mornings we stop on the bridge. Suspended there above the river, our view is exclusive to transit commuters and to the legions of cyclists who now pass us in our moment of stasis. I wonder some days whether our train operator is just exercising his prerogative, remembering the days of childhood when piloting a train over a bridge and then sweeping into a bustling city must have sounded like the best job in the world. As the train starts to descend into Old Town, I hope my operator is still finding some joy in his job. Ihope that amidst all the schedule pressures and time-points he gets just a moment to realize that he’s the one who got to grow up and drive a train.

I ride. This was not my childhood dream, to take a light rail for over an hour, to transfer to a bus, to spend a few hours of each workday in transit. I didn’t create this fantasy and then finally live it out. The thing is, though, that this has now become such an integral part of the fabric of who I am that I can’t begin to imagine my work week without it. On the days when I must drive my car I can tangibly feel the fossil fuels burning into hydrocarbon waste as we grind our way down the Sunset Highway and on into the farmlands, only to be slowed behind the relentless single-lane churn of agricultural machinery. I feel a little off as I face forward in my car - my favorite train seats are the sideways-facing seats with unlimited legroom and a place to stash my bag.

If we do get stopped there on the bridge, it’s easy to take a quick inventory to determine who is a regular commuter and who is new to the train. Perplexed looks cross the tired faces of the uninitiated. The regulars breathe in and enjoy the view.

There’s a dissertation to be written about the differences between those who drive and those who ride. That look on the faces of the commuter newbies betrays their dismay at not being in control. We who ride, and enjoy it, have long ago given up the illusion that we are somehow in control of our commute. We’re happy to sit back and let the world come to us, sliding past our picture windows at a stately pace. When we stop, we know that we will start again. There’s a certain gentle peace that comes between the stations, when there’s nothing else to do but offer a silent thank you to the universe for another day on earth. For another ride

The most important day ever

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:07:19 -0500

Your measured breaths, deep and distant, undergo slow metamorphosis. REM. Hypnagogic. Drowsy. Then, eyelids up. Drowsy. Alive. Awake.

Outside your bedroom window is a symphony of birds, conducted by the breeze and by the alignment of the planets. Grasses wave as the wind rustles over slender welcoming blades. Drops of dew, left in night’s stealth, begin the process of evaporation as water returns home to the sky. On this most important day the earth’s rhythms continue uninterrupted by man’s faint scratch on the surface of the planet. As you rise, the earth continues to spin, the mountains incrementally worn by rain and rivers and waterfalls, canyons deepened, geologic time taking an inexorable toll. Your day is less than a fraction of a nanosecond on your planet’s calendar, and this stark fact makes it that much more important. In the wink of an eye Gaia will reclaim what is hers. Your moment is now. This is your day.

You sit on the edge of your bed, and you stretch, and in that moment you are the hub of a giant wheel with spokes radiating outward like the rays of the sun. Your room is full of sound waves. Your room is full of molecules, and electromagnetic radiation, and the dust of a thousand ancient civilizations. In your room, you are both alone and a piece of everything else in the world. Your veins pulse with genetic fragments of all of those who have gone before you, living pieces of history, a map of what makes you both singular and part of your lineage. This is the most important day you’ve ever been a part of. This is your day.

As you sip your morning coffee, you are a creature of infinite possibility. You may don gossamer wings and fly to the sun, daring the sun to melt the wax that tenuously binds wings to body. You may recline again, and find yourself in the middle of a book. You may explore new ground, or care for an old obligation, or seek out a long-lost but still-dear friend. The day is yours, in its blaze of brilliant imperfection. The choices are yours to make and the promises are yours to keep. You can remain open, there on the edge of your bed, there at the dining room table as the moist-warm smell of coffee is borne on steamy tendrils. You can waft skyward with the steam. You can find yourself at the bottom of the cup, telling your fortune with the aromatic traces of leftover grounds.

This is your day. Breathe deeply in the secure knowledge that you exist, and that nothing else really matters. You are what you have. Your feelings are your only truth. Your love and kindness feed the world, and in return the world feeds you, if you are willing to open yourself to it. Each day is this day, and this day is every day you have.

Make it yours. Drink it in. It’s your day.

Afterthought

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:06:42 -0500

In the old days, when the dead were placed on flaming rafts and set out to sea, we would have had about a two-hour drive to the coast. We’d have taken a few cars - probably Mike’s Geo, because Mike didn’t go anywhere without the Geo. We may have hopped into Don’s truck, too, the way we did, with two guys in front and 4-5 of us crammed into the back, everyone passing a bowl around, thumping on Don’s window and laughing at how many bungee cords it took to hold his canopy together. We’d have headed north to Grants Pass and then swung west, diving back down into California and then up to Harris Beach State Park. We didn’t have as much to do then, not as many of us employed, not as many with kids and the other life-hooks holding us. We may have just camped out for the night after building the raft and setting it aflame and pushing it past the icy Pacific waves and out into the open ocean, Greg’s body surrounded by a sheet of flickering orange fire.

As it turns out, our raft-free farewell to our unexpectedly fallen brother involved a Ziploc bag wedged into Carl’s backpack, thrown in amongst the cans full of cheap beer. We laughed darkly at this as those bound by loss often do. What could be more appropriate than a baggie full of Greg?

We hiked, as we did every year, sweating out the toxins of the night before. The banter waxed and waned, keeping time with the grief, in sync with the rhythmic chest-tightening feelings of having lost something that you know is truly gone. Losing a young friend is like dropping something valuable off the edge of a cliff, or having a beloved possession slip through your fingers into a fast-moving river. You know right away that it’s gone forever. No fog of uncertainty, no little golden cloud of hope. Inky black verity. Gone. That part is easy to figure out. The harder part comes later, when you try to fill in the hole that was left behind.

We learned on the way up the hill that about a fourth of Greg was in the bag. Carl had been steeped in the mathematics of losing a family member, doling out portions of ash. Half to Greg’s girlfriend, a quarter elsewhere, and a quarter for us as we walked up Ostrich Peak. When we reached the top of the hill and took our backpacks off, Carl procured the baggie. Finally, someone voiced what we were all thinking — can we smoke him? It may be dismaying to some to know how seriously this plan was discussed, but it was finally jettisoned in favor of a more stately scattering of his remains on the hillside, facing his beloved Rogue Valley, in a spot where we could come talk to him every year when we met for our annual trip up the peak. I think we were all momentarily enthralled with the idea of somehow taking him into our lungs, into our bloodstream. It was needless, though. He was already in there, for all of us. He was part of our collective consciousness, and nothing as cosmically insignificant as death could change that.

I can remember passing the bag around, a morbid talking stick, seeing his corporeal existence reduced to a lump of gray ash. No sarcastic smile, no recent southern California golf tan, no worn cargo shorts. I remember saying a few words, crying openly in front of the people who meant the most to me. Laughing.

We scattered him there. The sun broke through the clouds and warmed us. We said goodbye.

Later, as we repacked our backpacks and put away the crushed cans and finished passing the last bowl around, I lagged behind. I stood on the edge of the hill, remembering the hang-gliding ramp that was once there, remembering lying shirtless and young on the splintered wooden platform and passing a bottle of vodka around with Greg and the others, timeless, caught in a freeze frame of all the glorious warm Ashland autumns. I bent to pick up a little handful of the remains, and I pressed them to my lips. I stared for a while at Mount McGloughlin in the distance. Beyond that was the phantom Mount Thielsen, now the rim of Crater Lake, blurred through tears.

As I rejoined the others, I was sure that I could taste just a hint of vodka in the wet ash.

The Stick

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:21:00 -0500

Perhaps the thing that qualifies a place as memorable, or as a geographic feature, or a destination, is that there is something remarkable about it. It doesn’t have to be something “good.” The middle of summer in Death Valley is remarkable, and memorable, and there aren’t many people who would list temperatures of 120 plus as something “good.” But, say Death Valley, and everyone knows what you’re talking about.

Make a mental list of memorable places you’ve been. The Louvre? Lincoln Memorial? Elaine’s in NYC? Sights and smells and sounds, extremes of sensory input and personal involvement, deep emotional meaning… your list is populated with places that moved you, in one way or another, for good or bad.

Narrow it down, now, to the universe of sport. Fans wax rhapsodic about catching a Celtics game at the Garden, or visiting the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field to see the Packers. Wrigley Field has Ivy. Madison Square Garden has history. Fenway has the Monster.

Candlestick Park had the cold. As a skinny, easily-frozen kid, I looked forward to Giants games with a mixture of elation and dread. I loved going to games with my grandfather, a classic cigar-chomping hero out of central casting. I learned how to keep a scorecard early, and by age seven or so could easily distinguish a fielder’s choice from a legged-out infield single.

But, the cold. Despite sitting at games clad head to toe in jackets, sweatshirts, full sleeping bags, jammie pants under my jeans, two hats, everything but a space suit, the Bay seeped into all the cracks and by the third or fourth inning your toes began to get numb. I think I remember seeing some games on warm summer days at the Stick, but the grown up part of me realizes that this may well be a false memory, implanted by my adult desire to cast a golden glow on every childhood experience. The truth, documented in countless articles and aging kinescope footage of old Giants games, is that even on a sunny day that wind would just nudge you into a frozen shaded corner and slide its icy fingers down your back, laughing that whispery Bay wind laugh.

Seagulls swirled, indistinguishable from hot dog wrappers and perhaps tiny children who had been swept up from the third base box seats. My grandfather, wreathed in pipe smoke that I can smell to this day, sat implacably, apparently immune to the cold. His function in my young world was to tell me stories about the Giants, buy me anything I wanted, and listen to me with an air of love and patience that, when I look back, seems like the biggest gift that anyone could ever give a child. I loved the games, all the games, never really caring who won, keeping an eye on Willie Mays, my favorite player to this day, soaking in the impossible green of the outfield, the glowing burnt umber of the warning track, the smell of spilled beer and roasted peanuts.

I can close my eyes, right now, right in this moment, and I can be back there. We had box seats on the first base side. I can remember the angle of our view to the plate, my surprised excitement at being allowed to venture to the bathroom and the concession stand by myself, the rifle-sharp crack of the bat, the surge of the crowd. I can feel him there next to me, the steadiest presence I knew in my childhood, sharp and elegant in vests and hats, never a hair out of place, my hand in his as we walked through the turnstiles.

They are tearing down the Stick, and it’s probably about time. There’s nothing to be lost from a loss of the physical when the place is as firmly stuck in the mind as Candlestick Park is stuck in mine. Baseball, they say, is a game for the sentimental, for the old man in us. Timeless both in historical span and within the architecture of the game itself, memories are easy to keep. The building will be gone.

The Stick will always be there.

The line

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:31:34 -0500

It’s nine in the morning, and I lie face-down and half naked on a padded table, my face squeezed into an open oval so I can see the diamond-patterned commercial carpeting that lines the floor of my physical therapist’s office. It’s nine, and I’m on the table because I’m over the line.

One’s mind wanders when the ultrasound wand is greasily meandering up and down one’s neck. Under the ministrations of “tooling,” a sadistic process that involves poking the pencil-sized rounded tip of a plastic want into interstitial spaces and small gaps between vertebrae, not so much. But the ultrasound is good for thinking. I lie there, drifting, and I think about the line.

I first learned about the line in my early twenties, when I began to have muscle-knotting spasms seemingly out of nowhere. My lower back would, at whim, just refuse to function as normal. I began to have days when I couldn’t get out of bed, made elderly by capricious muscle. Somewhere there’s a pain scale that simply measures how easy it is for you to get out of bed and go to the bathroom.

So began my relationship with my pain, and with the line. The line demarcates that imaginary point that divides carefree functioning from the distracting vacuum-suck of pain. Those who have dealt with such issues know immediately what I mean, though they may have a different name for it. Under the line, life is free of distracting announcements from the central nervous system. Movement is unimpaired, as much as that is possible in modern human existence, and there is no need to surreptitiously seek relief during meetings or drives or fitful nights.

The line is razor thin. It’s “one mil thick,” as the garbage bag commercials used to say. It’s a hair trigger, and it means the difference between a long walk and a cup of tea that’s used to down a muscle relaxant. As much as we don’t want to think about the line, we think about the line. We wonder how close we are. We do the mathematics of pain, juggling complicated algorithms that assign weights to movement and stasis and burden and cold. The line is invisible but not to be ignored.

Those who know the line know the shameful feeling of near-jealousy when confronted with someone who wears their disability on the outside. Of course we don’t want to be that person. Of course we spend our every day in gratitude for our movement, our capabilities, the miracle of muscle fiber and neurotransmitter. But there are days, and we will admit it, there are days when we wish someone could see pain, maybe as a streak of blue on the skin or a radiant glow from the affected area. Maybe in another universe, pain makes a sound only discernible by those who want to take the time to listen.

There’s a silent community of pain when I board the bus, or when I go to the store. We are legion, and we hide it, and we don’t want to talk about it because someone has it worse and we’re still on our feet and we still have jobs and why are we even pretending as though it’s something worth notice? Life hurts, man. Cross the line, pay the price.

There on that table, two people working now, working to use their hands to find the pain and drive it from me, maybe drain it onto that diamond-patterned rug to be washed away later by the nighttime cleaning crew, there on that table, pain is the all star. Pain is the invited guest, to be discussed and diagrammed and banished. These people know the line, and they will push the pain down under it and give me worksheets filled with line drawings of imaginary hurt people, doing exercises to make the hurt go away. And I’ll take the sheets, and I’ll thank them very much, and I will go about my life with the knowledge that the sheets help, but the line always wins. No matter how much music and meditation and morphine and muscle fiber there is in the world.

The line always wins.

Sticks and stones

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:22:25 -0500

There was snow this morning. Portland snow, drifting diagonally and full of false promise, white crust on the lawn, cats curious, cars full of people on their way to apocalyptic grocery store runs to stock up on things that they’ll be able to get just as easily on bare pavement tomorrow. We hope for snow here so we can talk about it with our internet neighbors, so we can laugh at drivers and revel in the beauty of all those white-rimed trees lined up in our pretty town.

Elements matter. It rains here a lot. Our sky is beautifully dimensional more often than not, clouds piled in every direction, sun peeks and rain fits. At this time of year a walk rewards you with the smells of life and death, moisture borne on the winds tumbling through the Gorge or bearing drifting seagulls on a coastal breeze. There’s a whiff of decomposing leaves, sharing airspace with the mystical scent of bamboo and grass.

I stopped on a walk the other day and picked up a stick from the sidewalk, and I marveled for a moment at how it seemed to hold the truth about everything in our corner of the state. Moss curled around a small bud. Insects had eaten at it. Parts were sun-bleached. It was wet from the rain.

Our winters here are described as “mild” but I don’t know if that does them justice. In so many parts of the world, people ride out the winters from inside their houses, or jump from air conditioned car to air conditioned office in the summertime. In Portland we eschew the umbrella and choose layers, because the sun will come out, because the rainstorm-driven wind will turn it inside out and leave us holding a chrome stick with no recycling bin in sight. We walk and bike, and then we dry off or heat up or cool down.

Like that stick we bear the markings of each season, all of us, some wrinkles from the sun and a little bit of lichen from our time glorying in the rain. We’ll bend if we need and we’ll eventually find our way back into the ground, covered by the warm moist scented leaves. In time, coaxed by the sun, we’ll return with the spring and find our places once again.

Counterintuitive

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:23:14 -0500

It’s Monday morning, and it’s filthy jet inky black out there. Feels that way, anyway. I pull the strap of my bag over my shoulder and I head out the door.

I put one foot in front of the other on these mornings. I give thanks for the lack of rain, or if it’s raining, for dry feet. The path is the same, every day… cross the street in front of the neighbor’s house, diagonal weave across a dead dark expanse of asphalt, hop the sidewalk, push play. Music seeps in to my soul, some days more slowly than others, and as the rhythm establishes itself I pick up my pace.

I always think, right at first, that music choice matters, but the funny thing is that it makes no difference at all. Whether it’s those first few steps, those breaths of fresh air, the sweet assault of the cold bracing dead-quiet early morning, whatever it is I’m moving more quickly now, expanding into my day. I start tiny, a speck on the neighborhood map. And I grow.

Thoughts of work float into my consciousness. I acknowledge them and gently encourage them to be on their way. There will be time to work when I get there. This is time to grow into myself, to take up the room I need to take. This is time to come into the world.

My feet contact the pavement, the ground, the concrete, the leftover rainpuddles and condensation settled into dips in the giant parking lot I cross. I feel the world in my feet. I feel the world move into me and make me the world. I start so small on this walk to the transit center. I start all crumpled up and sleepy and I let the world feed me until I am the world.

The parking lot is huge. Above it is scrawled a line of trees and clouds, daring me to be larger, a crossbar to high-jump. There is a lightening in the east reflected in a bank window. The sun is pulling me upward now with just a hint of its presence. I grow. I take the lot with one stride as I scurry across it, a collection of molecules, a presence as giant as the distant fiery ball of the sun. Big as the universe, small as a blade of grass.

This is all it takes. It seems like such a secret, and begs incredulity. Work so hard for so long, and then you give up and realize that you’ve done it. You’ve been a part of it all along. You’ve been all of it all along. Breathe in and take what’s yours, for it is all yours. Give everything you have, for none of it truly belongs to you.

We are all so small. And we are all as big as the universe.