The Flavor Country

I returned from Le Bois in the early hours. Caught the red line back into town, chatted up the overweight bus driver, and got off right as some girl with a bunch of bags was finishing hugging her friend and getting on the bus. I said to her, “I’m comin’, you’re goin’ huh?” She looked at me like I was speaking the click language. I got off the bus and said to her over my shoulder “Have a safe trip.” She said, “Thanks” like it was some involuntary contortion of her tongue; more like gagging than speaking.

Lesson learned: dudes wearing only a leather jacket over a black wifebeater are not allowed to be friendly at 7am in the morning.

The hard plastic handle of the suitcase rubbed and dug into the flesh of my right hand, only exacerbating the dry and cracked flesh so recently abused by the dust of the treasure valley. Blood occasionally jumped to the surface, just to see what was going on. By the time I reached the house I was fairly sure that I was going to lose the arm. I haven’t passed out like that in a long time.

There wasn’t time enough to do everything I wanted to ID, and one of the things I sacrificed was the opportunity to speak with the dead. And, all respect due to my dearly departed, but I don’t feel terribly bad about it. I didn’t even have time to see all of the living I wanted to, and if I can’t make time for all the living, certainly the dead can wait. I concluded that my dead would probably prefer I spend my time with my living rather than spending it ranting at stones in the ground. I will try to visit them on the next go around. I have a feeling they’ll still be there.

At some point in all the walking and strolling and jaunting, I’ve started to feel acceptance of all the things going on in my life. I’m not going to commit to saying I’m totally there 100% of the time, but I’ve started getting there.

I spoke with Ace today, and things are not great, but they are ok. They are at least honest at this point. I suspect we may both be kind of upset with each other for awhile, but we do love each other and genuinely want each other to be happy, and as friends we seem to be slowly working through this.

I read about something yesterday that I told some of the boys about tonight that gave me some perspective. I don’t know how I missed hearing about this for four years. Apparently in 2004 a dude who felt he’d been totally fucked over by the town of Granby, Colorado got his revenge by converting his 32 ton Earth Mover into a no shit unstoppable tank. He then went on a rampage in, what was to be later dubbed, his “KillDozer” and did, like, $7mil worth of unrequested demolition in Granby. The footage is pretty fucking unbelievable. Here’s nearly-live footage via helicopter. Here’s a link to a youtube search. Here’s a pretty solid write-up of the whole story. And here’s a music video with some of the best footage edited in. In the end his KillDozer got stuck, and he swallowed a bullet rather than be taken alive. And despite having over 200 rounds of ammo and three grenades lobbed at him, he managed to get his vengeance without killing anyone but himself.

Some folks on the internet vilify him as a madman, some eulogize him as a hero. Most seem to take him as a dramatic test case for the bounds of human ambition and the depths of human cravenness. In the end he was a man in an armored bulldozer. But from this man in an armored bulldozer I’m reminded that we are all equally and simultaneously forces of genesis and entropy. We have, at every moment, the opportunity to do something magnificent, or something tragic.
The question is only, “what will it take to drive us to that point?” Also, we should ask “How fucking metal is that?!”

I feel groggy, like I’m just finishing the process of waking up. It’s not pleasant, but it’s necessary. I’m ready to wake up.

I’m having sever trouble getting to sleep, because after today I now have answers to questions that were easier to handle while left unanswered. But at the same time, I know that I am not alone in this endeavor.

While I was in Boise, a piece of scripture kept running through my head, enunciated like a punch line:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…
But tonight I am trying to keep my mind on the line that follows:
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me.

Many folks have roundly rejected my adherence to the old adage that “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” and I think tonight that it’s because it’s a peculiarity of the place I’m from. It’s 1am here, and I’ve been back a total of 7 hours. And everything is the same.

I was struck dumb with the feeling, stronger than it has ever been before. We got in the car and left the airport. My mother’s hair is longer, and my half brothers are clearly older, but the differences only serve to highlight how little things have changed.

I could keep listing new buildings, or paint changes, but every time I saw a new building I thought, “That’s new, but it’s exactly the building they would build there.” I think one could conclude that this town is stagnant, but that’s not it. It’s outside of time.

You can feel it in the air. It’s as though the city doesn’t exist within the regular chronological march of time. It was a perfectly beautiful BOI summer afternoon, and it is a perfectly beautiful BOI summer night, but what is truly striking is the feeling that this afternoon and this night are every single summer afternoon, and every single summer night I’ve ever spent here. I can breathe in the air, and it is the same air I have always breathed here. Not, “it tastes the same” but it *is* the same.

My family’s home looks exactly the same on the outside, but has been severely remodeled on the inside. What is surprising is that the city helped finance the remodeling because this is a classic home, and what they managed to do was take the appearance of an old Boise interior, and turn it into a new Boise interior. Different as it is, there is still the overwhelming sensation that “this is what this is supposed to look like,” and that feeling pervades. Everything is infused with it. I have long tried to convince people I met in other parts of the country to visit here, and I think now that it is this feeling that unconsciously I wanted to share.

Tonight the moon hung down just over the foothills, an unbelievable bright orange, like it was on fire. I sat on the front step and smoked a cigarette, and when I’d finished I walked out into the middle of the street and stared up into the sky, in exactly the same way I have done hundreds of times before.

I explained to Janus the other day that I had long had trouble accepting the death of my grandparents, and tonight I think I understand why. In a place like this, where nothing can change, where no lurch forward into a new era is ever possible, it becomes nearly laughable to try to conceive of accepting that someone living here has died, and will never be seen again.

So this week I will do the same thing I have done every time I have come back here to slip out of time. I will drive out to the edge of the city, and I will talk to the dead.

I was asked the other day if I believe in ghosts, and I can’t say as I’ve ever had an experience that would lead me to believe in them definitively, but here, like nowhere else I’ve been, it seems that we are all ghosts, and that our dead are no more inclined to leave than our living.

When people call me and ask, “how’re ya doing?” I ask them if they want the honest truth or the socially acceptable response?

The socially acceptable response is that, “I’m … y’know, I’m ok. I’ve been keeping busy.
Ace and DB were responsible for me finding out about a site called Tumblr where I’ve established a tumblog. If a blog is like a shit for your brain, tumblr is the urinary equivalent. A stream-of-consciousness catalog of things you comes across on the net. It lets you input RSS feeds from your other websites so that your activity on them also runs into this stream. Yeah, it’s cool, you should totally check it out.

I’ve been doing a lot of walking, because, y’know, walking’s free. Summer showed up late, but it’s here now, and that means it’s fucking gorgeous outside. The perfect weather for walkin’ around, ramblin’ aimlessly, and the like. There’s a lot of shit worth seeing. I dug out my digital camera and signed up for a Flickr account. I considered just using facebook, but their feeds are more of a pain in the ass to use. Flickr’s been cool so far. After the first week of walking, I was pretty chafed, but that went away.

Sometimes I walk down and sit in coffeeshops and drink coffee. I’ve made it a point to check out the various ones in the area. Sometimes I bring my computer and do stuff on it. Like right now I’m typing this blog post. I’ve regained my desire to “get out of the house,” which I think is a result of being in a shared space that I don’t entirely identify as my own.

However, sometimes I stay at home and hang out. The backyard is great for hanging out and drinking a beer or cream soda and smoking a cigarette. I very much like my house and my roommates, but there’s always bound to be a bit of an outsider complex when you move into a house filled with guys who’ve been friends since K-6.

But I’ve got my own guys like that. Sometimes we go out and do stuff like doctor some tickets to get in early to Ignite Portland, or catch a couple of rounds down to a local watering hole. We saw a reshowing of Top Gun on the big screen, which is 10x louder and more homoerotic in that format than on a tv.

Yeah, I’ve been looking for work as well, but I’m leaving for a week in the B-side tomorrow, and I figured that’d be problematic if I started applying for jobs too early. Also, to be honest, I haven’t been able to get my head in the right space to do that. I’m coming out of that though, and have been making some progress.

Today I parted with my on-loan-phone from my old company, and should have a new device in my hands by the time I get back from da ‘Ho. Sprint SERO looks like it’s going to be everything Dann suggested it would be. We’ll see though.

So yeah, how’re you doing?”

That’s the socially acceptable response. But they never want that response. They always say, “um, yeah give me the honest one.”

The honest answer is that I’m hurting. I love being back here with the fam, but every joy is tinged with bitter sadness. Every time it seems to get better, it seems to turn around and get worse. Some days it does get better. Some days it does get worse. Mostly I have a deep disgust at myself. And I miss her. I hope she is doing better. I hope she isn’t hurting. Everyone tells me I have to let go. Letting go is the worst fucking thing in the world. It’s Catullus all fucking over again. I thought I was through with that poem. It would seem I was wrong. nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

In the darkness between Wednesday and Thursday I stayed up all night watching BSG. I’m all caught up now, but the ritual was hollow and empty.

I can’t sleep now, for fear of the nightmares. Though different in content, they have the same theme each time. In them an unknown person takes something that, in the dream is identified as containing my essential being, and makes off with it. I try to catch them, but I never can.

They are not the kind of nightmares where the angst and anxiety evaporate upon waking. The unease lingers all day. I wouldn’t fear it so much if there were any recourse or remedy, but in their midst they are as real as any waking experience.

Thursday morning I stared down the dawn. I stood on Tel Gladstone’s front step, enveloped in the morning mist, forcing myself to face the day. I have seen hundreds of sunrises, but never without the promise of welcome sleep to come. It was simultaneously beautiful, as it has always been, and blanketed in an ugly, unforgiving bleakness I’d never seen before. Every false hope and pretense I was clinging to got dragged out and stretched off into the distance, vanishing at the horizon.

After I’d finished the 4th season, I leaned back against some pillows on the couch and closed my eyes for just a moment. I woke hours later when someone tapped me on the foot and called my name. I woke with a start to a figure standing over me who said, I kid you not, “I am the angel of death.” I said, “huh?” and I heard Janus say back, “c’mon, I’ll give you a lift home before I go to work.”

I was hoping the old narcoleptic’s trick of staying up late enough that my body would simply crash if allowed, skipping REM altogether would make for a more restful sleep. It didn’t work. I pretty sure I dreamed anyway. I may have succeeded in not remembering the nightmares, but not in not having them.

Last night I gave up the fight against my bed. I will take these nightmares until they cease. I keep thinking bout a poem some one I care about once told me. It starts out something like,
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal something something…”

I forget how it ends. It’s 5am. Time for bed.

I woke up at 3pm. I woke up earlier for a phone call, and intended to get up then. Didn’t happen.
I intended to wake up at 11. That didn’t happen either. Today I was going to go down to Free Geek and do some volunteering, so I checked their page to see when the next tour was happening. They’re closed on Mondays.

Autopilot kicked in after the shower. Some days you just aren’t ready to do fore-brain thinking, and on those days you have to let the unconscious parts of the mind take over. I dressed in monochrome blue. Ace always hates it when I do that, but the subconscious will wear what it wants.

It’s kind of like getting in a stranger’s car and going for a ride. I found myself walking down the hill in search of coffee, and my pocketbook mentioned to me that perhaps an adventure in investment was in order. Cross division and wait for the bus.

I haven’t been sleeping well. Or, at least I haven’t been sleeping well for a narcoleptic. Difficulty getting to unconsciousness, and when I wake up, I feel like someone has beaten the shit out of me. I had a nightmare the other night where I witnessed someone steal my machine, KillWhitey, and there was nothing I could do about it. I chased after them, but they got away. I kept thinking in the dream, “Oh shit, that computer was my fucking life! Shit! What am I going to do now?”

The wind is unbelievably wild today. It whips about like an unseen molester, all hands and libido, tearing at your clothes, pushing you around. It’s strange to feel shoved by Mother Nature, but the experience isn’t unpleasant. It is a uniquely rich experience to be in the midst of an environment that feels like it is alive, and has a mind of its own. Florida always felt like entropy. Its winds were vicious, not playful. It doesn’t make any more sense in this town to talk about the sky “threatening rain” than it would to talk about the “threat of police brutality” in a totalitarian state, but if it did I would say that the day is appreciably dry and not threatening rain. I wait for the bus while getting brow beaten by the earth.

Everyone here is young. Even the old people look young. They look young while crammed into the standing-room-only bus out to the Stumptown where I’m going to buy a pound of beans. They look young while wandering aimlessly around the streets, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, yearning for direction. A woman with snaggle-teeth and the worst acne I’ve ever seen pulls a wheelie-suitcase with airline tags on it across Division, pauses next to me as she looks at the bus sign I’m standing next to, stares across the street at the bus heading downtown, then pulls her luggage back across the street, stares at my sign again, and then gets on that bus. She appears throughout this process to be confounded about where she is.

After I buy my beans I will walk to the nearest bus sign, only to see a person no more than four feet tall in a ratty blue hoodie pushing a shopping cart over to some trashcans and proceeding to root through them. I’ll be convinced for all the world that it is a 12 year old until the diminutive hobo turns around to reveal that she is an ancient asian woman.
When I eventually board the bus to take me home, I will stand toward the rear door near a woman who looks strikingly like the cousin we used to call “preggo dick cousin” for inopportune choices she made at her baby shower. The woman will be holding a slovenly baby that has so much shit-brown detritus on its face that it has to have either been recently eating ass or fed way too much chocolate.

My pod will select inopportune songs for me to listen to. David Allan Coe’s Laid back and Wasted warns

“I’ve spent a lifetime
Looking for the answers
Somewhere in search of my soul
I lost it in Nashville
I found it in Austin
I sold it in New Mexico”

And as I stare at this filthy baby, Alex Gibson’s lullaby rendition of Trent Reznor’s seminal work, Hurt, will come on and ask, in absolutely the most appropriately inapropos fashion possible, “What have I become, my sweetest friend?”

This is a city of children. We are all lying on our backs, staring up at some cosmic mobile that rotates visages of airplanes and cows and hotpants and night terrors, trying desperately not to shit ourselves. Being here is wonderful, but it highlights for me the ridiculousness of the binaries we use to talk about aging. Adults are nothing more than children with bills. Babies are a result of biology, not a rite-of-passage. “Growing Up” is more of a myth than the Tooth Fairy.

I will think all of this as I walk home, tossing my beans back and forth between my hands, but before that I will be waiting for the outbound bus to Stumptown, standing in the ballet of winds on Division, nearly choking on the irony of the young, expectant woman who pulls up to the intersection in an iridescent cobalt civic.