Author Archive

• 05.05.08 Currently:

  I’m thirty today. My last day at work is Friday, I’m leaving Portland in twenty-one days, our furniture and other possessions are steadily disappearing from our apartment. Scheduling final meetings with friends near and far. Sitting on the porch I can see the North Fork of the Shenandoah. The water just keeps coming and coming and I don’t know how. It doesn’t look like that much water, but if you consider how long a time it keeps up that steady rate, and how steady that rate really is, even considering the rises and falls in the level; it’s really something. A great deal of water goes through that channel. And then conversely: how although the river is proverbially never the same, continually self-altering, it stabilizes and anchors the life and landscape around it.

  
  Tags: happening.
• 04.30.08 Train trip:

  By the time this posts, I should be out of Portland, in transit limbo. I’ll be traveling to Virginia to visit my family. We’re going in style, on Amtrak, taking the Empire Builder to Chicago and riding in a room. So I won’t be around for the next few days to approve comments or answer […]

  
  Tags: happening.
• 04.27.08 Metric century:

  This afternoon, I’ll be riding a metric century, down around Salem. It’s a hundred kilometer ride. It shouldn’t be too hard, the course is pretty flat. I haven’t done a ride this long since before I was sick this winter, so I am nervous in spite of myself. But when I biked 100 miles before, […]

  
  Tags: feeling.
• 04.26.08 The neighbors’ fight:

  The neighbors’ fight this time was violent. There was lots of noise and yelling. Even banging and stomping. She could hear it through her closed door. She turned her music off.

  He lived across the hall and one door down. She couldn’t sit still. He looked so large and unmanageable. He didn’t keep himself clean. Would he hit her? The girl was screaming. His girlfriend, she recognized the voice, a little mousy one, she’d been around, always squinting. Hadn’t she been gaining weight? Could be pregnant.

  
  Tags: making.
• 04.25.08 Music changes:

  What is it about music? It makes me feel good. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

  I went to a show last night, first time I had seen live music in a while. I can see in my thoughts how my happiness unfolded: at first, it was kitschy. Older men, basically a standard five piece outfit: a drum kit, a synthesizer, guitar, bass, and the vocalist had a hand drum; only they added a guy who can play the saz and the oud, and they called it traditional music. And even I could tell the singer’s pronunciation was terrible, whether he was singing in Armenian, Turkish, or Arabic, and didn’t they even realize the differences between the traditions? The dancers on the floor in front of them, so pretentious! What did they imagine they were doing? I was, in a word, defensive. Over-critical.

  
  Tags: feeling.
• 04.24.08 Touchstone:

  It’s good to see old friends again and see them happy.

  I saw one yesterday after over a year. Time isn’t dealing them out faster than I can take them. He’s up from California for the week for some shows with his band. He looks tanner and thinner, maybe taller and maybe greyer. He’s become an electrical engineer since I saw him last, specializing in solar panels; his wife does belly-dance instruction out of their home and is branching out to clothing manufacture in the kitchen. We talked over salad, humus, and a tempeh-BLT. We talked about Armenia, Anatolian history, music, the price of wood, how to live a full life. He works out doors and his mind is his own, he says, when he works.

  
  Tags: feeling.
• 04.23.08 Morning story:

  She had been on her feet forever. And she was so tired and everything was against her. Doing the least things she had to lift her own lead weight. Her head hurt. Standing behind the counter, brewing coffee, was torture. She would trade one foot against the other, shifting, leaning. Couple customers, it wasn’t seven. Quiet, thank god.

  A man came in with a gust of leaves; and the door thudded shut. He sat at the counter. Hands on either side of his cap he started talking.

  
  Tags: making.
• 04.22.08 Shakespeare and dogma:

  I spoke recently with a friend about Shakespeare, and I realized how far my view of him had changed. In some ways, I still feel the same: I don’t care for the language. It seems somehow overstuffed, inorganic, and too deliberately full of ambiguities; maybe even too full of life, or overstimulated. I don’t know that I would be too interested in defending this point: but it’s the way I feel. Maybe call it taste and leave me to it. So much is constant.

  But then I also didn’t get the characters. I couldn’t understand how they changed, what pressures were on them. It was all over my head. But now somehow they’ve exploded into life for me. It’s a little like learning how to open a pop-up book right, so the shapes all stand out in their proper relation. I just didn’t see the depth that was there before, the several simultaneous motions of the unfolding.

  
  Tags: thinking.
• 04.21.08 Time fetish:

  I can feel a change coming in my life. Of course I know that it is coming, since I set it in motion; but there are indicators that confirm it for me. I touch on them and their texture reassures me.

  There is a certain character to my encounters these days. I get in touch with old friends, I revisit old familiar places I haven’t been in years, I try drinks I had put aside long ago, I see old roommates again. And in each of these circumstances, there is a kind of summing-up; chapters get closed, stories are resolved, the past is put in its new place and its parts shuffle into their new arrangements. The conversations tend toward the historical, or the philosophical. They also seem larger than themselves, and they somehow come from behind themselves.

  
  Tags: feeling.
• 04.19.08 It’s what you’re used to:

  She asked him to move in. They’d known each other a week. She was bored at home, tied to the kid; he had debts and no job. It seemed like the best solution. Someone would be home, she could go play.

  But then he got boring. He didn’t want a job. Or he said he did, but he wouldn’t make a resume, he wouldn’t make phone calls. He’d sit at home playing world of warcraft.

  
  Tags: making.