solastalgia

i had a conversation recently with a coworker my own age about portland in the eighties & nineties and how amazing it was to check out up coming bands at satyricon. i think we were talking about the KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD stickers. he thought portland was more genuinely weird back then. i've never really understood the keep portland weird thing as it seems to me if you have try to keep it weird it probably isn't really weird and selling bumper stickers about it really isn't weird either. maybe i just don't like how vague the term is. my coworker seemed to interpret it as when portland was much more working class and much less developed. i told him about walking home from laurelhurst theater one night and noticing all these new shops & restaurants, etc. i sometimes feel like it's very negative to criticize such places for existing, as if everything new is bad & everything old is good, for i believe that the nostalgia people have for the past tends to gloss over or even completely deny that not everything was so wonderful back then. our memories can be too convenient for the narratives we want to construct, both for ourselves & others. i thought most of the shops & restaurants looked much more interesting than the drab places they replaced, but i also felt some sense of anxiety & distance from them too. i realized that i feel kind of alienated from so many of the new places because they represent a certain kind of opportunity that i'm either indifferent to or simply can't participate in very much, if at all, which is offering new & interesting ways to spend money. at a certain distance, it's nice that such options exist, and i'm definitely not poor, but i don't really like shopping in the first place and i don't have much extra money to spend anyway. unfortunately, my wages have increased very slowly while everything around me seems to be increasing much more rapidly, which i think is the source of my anxiety about being able to live here long term. i should have realized this before i moved back as i did some research in a book called "Cities Ranked & Rated" which showed that portland was the most affordable decent sized & decent quality city to live in on the west coast. i think everyone else, thanks in part to portlandia, is discovering this as well. that's nothing new necessarily but we may have reached a tipping point where there is enough of interest for the affluent to move here, unlike in the past when it was a much more blue collar town. my coworker said he doesn't like the city portland is becoming and liked what it used to be much more. the funny thing about cities is that they seem so solid but are continuously being rebuilt. it's like a ride you get on thinking it's going to be one thing but might change radically once you are on, or it might not. and because it's so large & populated, it seems like there are very limited options if you don't like how it's changing, especially for the working class. i feel like you're really living at the mercy of whatever trajectory this vast artificial island is evolving toward. for me, this is an argument for intentional community, or at least, living in a village, though those also have their limitations & issues. all of this reminds me of my workplace, a business that has been around for over forty years now and which has a surprising number of people who have worked there for twenty years or more. some of them are very bitter & upset about how the business has changed over years, but what i am often struck by is the sense of outrage that it keeps changing at all, as if they expected both the city & the place where they work to remain exactly as they were when they first encountered them. to me it's amazing that there are still people out there who have had the same job at the same place for over twenty years as i cannot even imagine all the places that have come & gone over the years. i guess it's easy for me to wax philosophical about it as i am treading water with the changes so far, both at work & at large, or so i think. but it's quite different, i suspect, when you start going under more & more frequently, and even more so when you realize that you are getting old and may never tread water in this place you have lived & worked in, and that, even though you never left, somehow everything is gone. 

feeling for the frame

Detail from The Farm, 1921-22 by Joan Miró

hot lips sped past in a blur of snow white as
a woman marches down the sidewalk, sipping 
on her torch as two other women, concluding 
their coffee date, beam beside the wings 
of the exoskeleton they arrived in. 

inked forearms folded across his chest, half black, 
half white backwards baseball cap spilling stringy 
black hair onto shoulders as he paces an empty 
parking space in a black concert tshirt, patterns 
of ink coiling around his calves...

pale frosty red headed woman enters with 
arms also folded across her chest, chin lifted 
imperiously, wearing a cranberry magic eye 
illusion dress. her entrance puts me in a trance. 

a lack of language does not inhibit the toddler girl 
from joining the adult conversation as she drums 
on a vinyl armchair with two wooden stir sticks.
blinking in the tea room, mourning my old enemies.

a ladder leans into blue sky. i look down and notice 
that i too am wearing blue sky but i don't remember 
ever climbing the ladder. this is our sunlit turn, i think. 
our style is failing, flamboyantly bursting toward its 
inevitable conclusion. feeling for the frame instead of 
flowing in the direction you are led. 

you are led, 
you are led.

thinking too much about living

so how do you live except by not thinking about it too much, if at all, he doesn't say, he does not say to anyone in particular unless he counts. could i be more specific? i look up and see a young woman trotting across the street, her breasts jiggling behind a black blouse, her eyes masked by huge gold rimmed sunglasses, fabulously incognito, hiding in baroque sight. like statues in a courtyard or dancers performing deceptively spontaneous street theater, every single woman on the sidewalk suddenly stops to check their phone. i walked around the block before i arrived, to let my mind taste this morning sky.  my legs are tight from walking to & from work all week. it is only slightly cool while the very blue sky promises later warmth. summer has only just begun and i already miss the rain. as i circle back toward the cafe it occurs to me that i cannot remember the last time i spent an entire day outside, outdoors, the so-called natural world, the wild. everything i see here is tamed except the weeds & the raspberry bushes. strange to define what is essentially doorless as outside our doors. a door allows you to both emerge & withhold. open it and you are granted vista, scape of sky & land. could you be out of doors as if you had spent them all like cash? shutless, neither keeping out nor in, and now you have nothing to walk through, nothing to frame your flight from home. you would have no choice but to be always home, entertained by & entertaining creation. a door is also a womb, of course, through which you are born into the world, each time, which makes me wonder if our birth is so traumatic we have to reenact it, again & again, as if we couldn't believe that the world itself was a womb that keeps us warm & fed while we spin through space. for most of my life home was place i could only return to if i was exhausted or driven inside by the elements or by need. this past year i have learned how to be at home after spending most of my adult life rehearsing my childhood escape from its shell of constant crying. an experiment, in a way, in learning how to be with, in learning how to stay, which isn't really something you learn but rather pay attention to, feel the drifting away and in that brief instant, relax the contraction, soften, soften. i always wonder what it is we use to pay, what exactly is attention? and what if you have contracted in a certain way for so long that you don't even realize you are doing it, so seemlessly integrated into the style of your living, even anatomically. last night i watched a movie about a man trying to start a new life, with some assistance, after being released from prison and the connection he makes with his mentor, who was also starting over with a new job in an unfamiliar city after getting divorced. i was struck by how spare their living spaces were, how unhomelike in their strict cleanliness, bereft of sentiment & memory, and how, in the absence of community, we are merely parts fulfilling some function in some larger but not greater machine, rewarded with the slight privilege of consuming in exchange for our toil in the great extraction. there was no meaning. they needed each other to keep themselves from haunting the landscape. on the highway outside the motel there was a long tail studded with red eyes, bleeding beside rows of gas tanks arranged alongside like gigantic rows of aspirin for a land that aches from our too heavy presence. 

inside & beside me, a man i do not know is moaning, has been moaning for awhile now, not continuously, but in staccato bursts, punctuating the music & the din of the cafe with his own morse code of pain, a sort of monologue of moan, as if the only thing he could share was his ache which was too great for words. and just outside the open door sits a little dog that everyone wants to pet, without invitation, as it sits there, patiently rehearsing its devotion toward its owner, a young woman who arrives wearing brilliant white headphones & brutally red lips, whose clean white sneakers glow like pure puffs of stormless clouds, sweatered in bold stripes of maroon, white & navy blue, who pauses for a moment just outside the door, as her dog continues to wait, its devotion perfect, a tattoo crawling like a rose bush up her slender tanned leg as she thumbs a device for a tune.