Jess

Poets are the greatest believers of love, the greatest fools for it and the ones most likely to proclaim from mountain tops that though their lives be shambles, ash-worn and weary, love will triumph and the love that triumphs will look nothing like we expect. It's harder and comes after suffering and doesn't make things easier and sometimes you still wake up lonely, or you lose it or you never see it. Poets still go on proclaiming. Technically, they should start wearing llama skins and eating locusts because they're about two-degrees away from desert-dwelling shaman craziness.

But we all hope they're right...That "My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone" etc.

So I almost played piano this morning until my fingers fell off, precisely at each knuckle. To give my fingers a rest, I read poetry and so I was thinking about love. I decided not to think about familial love because that exists in a way deeper than I realize and I don't feel like untangling it and making myself homesick.

I hope I'm not the only person out there who sometimes wonders if they can love people in a way even approaching the poetic...selfless, pure and all that. There was a short story by David Foster Wallace I read last month. The character repeats over and over again how he's a fraud, a fraudulent person and all his feelings and beliefs are tainted by this fraud he lives. What you realize in the story, though, is that we're all jointed that way. We're all manipulating and stacking. I think DFW's point was, "Get over it." But he was one of those tricky clever people. I'd have to read the story again.

Anyway. Tangent. I'd like to think I love all the people I claim to love and I know, for the most part, what I say is true. There are some people, though, like my family, who I am rock solid in my assertion. There is no way I could not love them. This is also true of my friend Jess.

Years before I met her, on October 2, she was crumpled in a car and if a lot of things had gone differently, we might never have become friends. She might not have been around, is what I'm saying. This is a difficult thought to think now. A Jess-less world. Terrible thought. She has the best laugh I've ever heard. We almost accidentally kissed on the lips at her birthday party and she remains one of my dearest friends, always ready to perform "ceremonies" to celebrate random events with me because she (like me) thinks there should be more rituals and use of tea candles in daily life.

I love you, Trimmer. I'm glad you're still here.

super powers

Look at this picture, gaze deep into its soul. What do you see? The answer should be whatever's a degree less than all-encompassing divinity and power. But don't say "God" because that would be blasphemous. If you were, for example, to say Batman, though, you'd be all clear and good to go for the next 50 years -- depending on how old you are now. If you're already 50, I'm sorry, you probably only have 30 more years, best case scenario.

So, Batman. Superhero, right? Superheroes in general we can approve of? Yes. Batman is special though and he's special precisely because he isn't...um...special. He wasn't born in a radioactive basement in Kansas, or dipped in the lightening bath of the gods one quiet spring day, nothing he's eaten (and nothing that's nibbled on him) has caused him to break out in wings or gills or magnum force death rays. Instead, he's just got moxy. And, yes, endless wealth. We'll give that a nod. But, in general, he's just average and took a lot of those taekwondo classes, the kind you see when you're walking down an unsightly strip of suburban America and they're usually next door to a furniture store or an empty piano showroom.

He relies on gadgetry, wit and his knowledge of humanity to get through the day. Just like the rest of us. More or less. Right?

So, taking a look at my own activities and lifestyle, what would be my superpower if I were more Batman-ish? I've come up with a list.

My superpowers consist of...

1. Being able to just kill at driving around the roundabout off of the Youngs Bay Bridge. Roundabouts should be one smooth movement, precision is everything. Don't hesitate. Don't doubt. Line it up in your mind like a Tetris game. I have to say, I was born to drive that roundabout. With all superpowers though there's always kryptonite or some limiting factors, like no shark repellent in the old utility belt, for instance. Shark attacks not being things one plans for very often. So...things that dampen my power in this area are: Washington drivers who go to darningly slow and mess up the whole precision aspect of a smooth sail through the roundabout.

2. Going all day without eating. I don't start feeling sick, I don't get cranky, and I could still go on a hike with you if you asked me. If this isn't a legitimate super power, I don't know what is. Kryptonite: I need a glass of water right away in the morning or I'll feel awful. But this is true whether I skip food or not.

3. I can play Tom Wait's "Rains on Me" on the ukulele. This superpower is more akin to how Batman can kick people really hard. Lots of people can kick people really hard. It's not special. On the flip, you'd never want to be the person who CAN'T kick people really hard.

4. I can hear sirens in my sleep and distinguish between Medix sirens and law enforcement sirens. But my brain might just be making this up. Kind of like how Batman often trusts Catwoman and maybe only 50% of the time that ends up being a good idea and in that 50% of it being a good idea, half the time he's pretty sure it isn't.

I slept in late this morning and watched "Batman Begins" while eating breakfast (which was mostly kale and carrots, not the best breakfast), so I'll leave you with this:

"Well, you know how it is, Mr Fox. You're out at night, looking for kicks, someone's passing around the weaponized hallucinogens..."

come on up to the house

There's no light in the tunnel
No irons in the fire
Come on up to the house
And you're singin' lead soprano
In a junkman's choir
You gotta come on up to the house


Is it possible to be both completely exhausted, but not? Yeah, didn't think so. Yet I am.

The things that make me love my job have been happening every other minute this week. Unfortunately these same drops o' sunshine are what give me acute work anxiety, stomach cramps, headaches and, in general, reduce me to the level of a nervous dog with an abscess or something else disgusting and painful and needing medical attention. It's a sick, sick world, little pilgrim.

In a moment of distraction this afternoon, I pretended to stab the courthouse deputy with my cell phone. I don't know what came over me. Lack of sleep, I think.

"What are you doing?" he demanded. The only way I can describe how he said this is "faintly incredulous" which makes me think of Jane Austen books.

He then proceeded to tell me that when he's bored and nothing much is happening inside the courthouse, he goes and kicks cars out of the parking lot. Explanation: The courthouse has the misfortune of sharing its parking lot with a museum. Except, of course, the courthouse doesn't like to share. Especially not during the week when juries need to get in and out and the lawyers are armed and sleep-deprived and subpoena-ing whatever moves.

Technically, you can only park there for the museum on the weekends when the courthouse is closed. Of course people ignore this daily.

"Whenever I see them spilling out of their cars with all their cameras, all happy..." he trailed off, smiling to himself. I assumed at this point I was forgiven.

---

I have a new neighbor who shall henceforth be known as Bishop...and her contemporary companion, Anne Frank. Inside joke. Really.

Bishop has taken over C.'s apartment since C. can't live here anymore because there's a county ordinance or court order expressly forbidding it. To help C. keep her sanity during this difficult time, we've started calling the prison she was transferred to "OPB." Her "job" as a top environmental blogger actually refers to work crew duties at the airport. But that's a secret.

---

So I skipped out of work early a few days back. Wednesday, I guess. And by early, I mean, I worked all day except for a few hours in the afternoon when I escaped down the coast and took photos and hiked and ate candy.



---

I met Oregon's attorney general. He used to hunt the Mafia...using a sort of talisman and magical staff, I assume, with all the fierce old magic of federal law behind him. Few can wield that power and not be consumed with the lust for more. Surely as motions are suppressed, the darkness overcomes. Lasses! Lads! Breeches! Unicorns!

Anyway, that's how I like to imagine the attorney general and the outworking of federal prosecution. Someone else in the newsroom, who will remain nameless, looked at my story and pulled up the photo we were going to use and saw a different man than I did. "Why!" this nameless person exclaimed. "He just looks like a big nerd...but he's killed people and such in the Marines and prosecuted the mob. My goodness."

HERE'S THE STORY, in all its objective glory.

And the DUIIs continue to haunt me. My editor asked me to please take "reeling" out of the lede. As in: DUIIs reel drunkenly back in front of the City Council for due consideration. Etc. I thought I was being clever -- typically a bad sign.

dispatches #1

It's beautiful outside. Joseph the would-be-novelist is sitting at a table with his cigarette and black coffee and looks like a lonesome cowboy who might be interesting and have a lot of ruggedness in his life. He writes longhand with a sharpie pen. He produces these perfectly spaced and indented paragraphs in consistent typewriter script. He looks like he might have killed a man, maybe two. Maybe he was a rebel or a revolutionary and now he writes poems. Maybe he's wanted on ten outstanding felony warrants for twenty crimes he didn't commit. He has a beat-up lighter and an old leather bag to carry his manuscripts in. He's written a trilogy of journey novels. Think Cormac McCarthy. Think soul. He looks like someone who would write something like that -- multiple times if he had to.

He has all the accessories to signal a life lived out in the dust and under the sun in a place with too much sky where men are cruel and women lie through satin lips. Bones bleach there and cheekbones stretch out under skin like wings. Joseph looks like he knows something about cliffs and cars and the ways of hearts, bar fights, empty rooms, dead towns and America. All that stuff.

Looks like.

Joseph is not a cowboy, is not a rebel. He never joined the revolution or ever saw a motorcycle he would know how to ride. Joseph is a would-be-novelist who has written a mind-numbingly dull trilogy about journey and youth with himself as the template -- odd since the tail end of young is several decades back and he never was much of a traveler until the gangs in Los Angeles threatened to kill him and drove him north to my town where I met him in front of a coffee shop and he told me his life story in such a dizzying fog of words that I didn't surface for two hours.

Joseph lives in a low-income housing unit with a fabulous downstairs and series of upper floors crumbling into nothing, propped up with thin walls and the desperate funds of people who can't afford to live anywhere else. Joseph is an aspiring racist who blames Mexico for most of his troubles, everything from a broken typewriter (not to mention his inability to type) to why he had to leave California (God rest her beautiful southern soul). Joseph is an old man and I've noticed he looks older than he did four months ago. He looks like people I've know who got cancer, who died from a sudden chill, who are on their way out. He's also a little bit crazy. Probably he needs a friend.

He doesn't remember me and I haven't reintroduced myself. When people start talking to me for no reason other than they're drunk or crazy or have no brain cells left, I say my name is Kay and I will sit forever and listen to them, paralyzed by my curiosity. Who are you? I have to know. We all have such stories to tell about ourselves, most of them are lies but even we don't know that.

---

"I killed women and children over there and I enjoyed it. Hell, I'd do it again," says the man who I'll estimate at 5'7", in the neighborhood of 300 pounds. His gray hair twists like a pelt down his back. He may or may not be wearing a hat.

He is telling a tiny Hispanic woman that his friend is being held by The Coyotes for $3,000 and they're going to behead him in the desert if no one sends the money. They're going to mail his eyes to his mother. He is telling this small woman (with tea cup thin wrists) that he was in Vietnam, that he slaughtered people, killed them when and where he wanted.

"Oh, no, you didn't," she laughs.

And that's where you came in. He is saying,

"Yep, children.
All the time.
I killed women and children over there
and I enjoyed it.
Hell, I'd do it again."

---

Embrace a good friend, tell her goodbye. In the sun and the remnants of summer, walk across the street only looking the right way once. Do not expect to be so suddenly accosted, literally you blink, and there's a man with a sponge face and splinters in his eyes who holds up a shaking finger, cracks his face into a sideways grin and says,

"Deal or no deal."

Just smile, keep walking.

But like that neighborhood cat who follows you halfway to work and is always leaping ahead and getting underfoot so you fall down the steps cursing, he side steps with ballet swiftness and is dancing on the balls of his feet in front of you still.

"Deal or no deal."

He sees something in your eyes, decides it's hesitation and, being a good salesman, he pounces, shaking his hands to dispel your fears about the deal. "The answer," he assures you, "is already decided."

Someday you will die.

weather underground

Is it stupid of me to be excited about fall? The smells, the atmosphere. The memories, my goodness, floods of them, mostly school related. My childhood, again, I say, my goodness!

Slow down.

I should ask myself these questions:

1. What do I expect to be different about the fall?

Answer: Well. It will be colder.

2. Will rain patterns change?

Answer: No, they'll get worse. Two words: coastal storms. Two more words: gale winds. Three words: death by starvation. Culminating in one word: bleak.

3. So why be excited about fall and the oncoming winter of our discontent?

Answer: ...

...wait, I'm still thinking...

...hmmm...think think think...

Thanksgiving! Christmas! oh-my-gosh-this-chai-is-so-good! Do I even need more reasons? Just let me have my nostalgia, that's all I ask for. I'm taking -- oh wait, I'm sorry, did "Name" by Goo Goo Dolls just come on the radio in this coffee shop? I think it did. Wow, that was distracting. But, yes!, more nostalgia. Bring it on! Pile it! Heap it! Until it oozes.

I like how each season has its own feel and brings its whole "I'm new! Brand new! Buy me" with it. "Seasons?" scoff Oregonians. "What seasons?" But they're probably from out-of-town. Silly hipsters, Oregon has seasons sure as there's a nose on my face, it just takes a practiced...um...nose...to detect them.

The rain right now, as we near the end of September, is slightly brackish with faint undertones of something that reminds me of soccer (before I tore my quad), school (before I descended into the hellish, exhausting bowels of college), coffee houses in Eugene, things like bugs and plants dying, and the white room Tiffany and I lived in that first year. There's a kick in the air -- whiskey in coffee, perhaps. A sort of charged up current, something electric and brisk, but the light is mellower now and the water is even a different color, deeper and full of currents.

These little guys, however, takes all the joy out of the warmful-enclosedness: BED BUGS! Is anybody else as freaked out as I am that they're making a comeback? Did you know about this? The glorious bed bug revolution has dawned and we are just nurturing blood bags strewn along their paths to victory. We're those "healing" packs you see in video games. We'd like to think we're the soul-devouring mushrooms or the person with the really big knife. We're not. We're just breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Nations will fall before them. Businesses already are. Don't you read the news? There is no escape.

Bed bugs: Nasty and coming to a mattress near you. Hide your children, hide your wives. Etc.

thread & fabric

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months," said Oscar Wilde

...who was a snob
...who I love
...who is now dead
...who also wrote:

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

---


Photo by Richard Mahar

Most of my body's life has been spent in thrift store clothes. It probably started as a cost thing, right? With 6 kids growing all ways at once, what would you do? You'd go to Value Village and Goodwill on 50% off sale days and buy cheap clothes, that's what you'd do, and you'd buy shoes that are at least two sizes bigger than a given kid's current foot because you know next week those feet are going to put a ruler off its meds with a violent growth spurt.

Oh the days of too big shoes. For me, a tall girl from a young age and the matching feet to balance all that height on top of, shoe sizes have always been galling. Now, at 23, I have so much more perspective. I know my feet are average if not even a little smallish for my height. At the time though, I hated my feet and wearing too-big shoes didn't help my pride. In the long run, it was probably good for my character.

When you're a kid, thrift store clothes always work. How can they not fit? You're basically a glorified oval. No weird kinks and corners. Just slap a t-shirt on and make sure you've got a diaper or undies and everything's good. I spent most of my time in the mud and up trees anyway, my hair unbrushed, my face unwashed. Savagery at its finest. Who cared about fashion? Wearing clothes was just a way to keep from shaming the family name.

Thrift stores continued to work until I was about 14 or 15 and then I hit the Self Conscious Years. My torso outpaced my shirts. "How much spine does one person need?" I wondered. I felt like I had enough to make another person plus a small animal, maybe a 'possum.

I started re-sewing cheapster thrift store clothes to get a more perfect fit. I'd buy 99 cent over sized shirts and turn them into long, fitted shirts. I'd hem pants, resew inseams, do all sorts of diddly to skirts, slash things in half, turn scarves into leggings, dresses into shirts. All my clothes with the exception of...um...undergarments and socks...were re-creations based from salvaged clothing or fabric.

The problem I was addressing: Things didn't fit as simply and easily as they used to. I hate ill fitting clothes. My teenage years were already uncomfortable enough (F.Scott Fitzgerald said: Everyone's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness), why put uncomfortable clothes on top? Still, I wore a lot of terrifying things.

But it was cheap and fun and I got mostly what I wanted in the end without all that bother of actually needing to look for the desired item.

Then I went to college and I realized I could turn it into a sort of hyper moral tenet: Look, I'm reusing stuff we just cast off for no reason. I'm being wise and sane in a gorged society.

I wore the same clothes for years, cutting them up and altering them whenever fashions shifted dramatically or my sense of comfort changed. One long dress I got when I was 14 turned into a long skirt, turned into a short dress, turned into a medium length skirt and then became a thin-strapped tank top. Now it's a halter-strap tank top and is still in my closet.

Yeah, so all of that's done now.

Sewing still happens, but I'm tired of cheap stuff held together with my crooked seams, cobbled together so it looks right on the outside. If you flip my clothes inside out, you'll see a crazy patchwork of corrections over corrections. Also, I'm facing the problem of fit again. Things really don't fit now. I don't know what happened when I turned 20, but I have something resembling curves for the first time in my life. Child-bearing hips? Maybe. They're foreign to me. I have to adjust.

So the point of all this: I bought new clothes and I spent REAL money on them and I don't know what to think. I had a friend who knows what she's doing take me shopping last time I visited Portland and I ventured out by myself today. Sad as it is, I have more of an image to keep up now, being a working professional. Not much of an image, granted, but I want to look competent and my old clothes are falling apart. The back of my pant hems are ragged from years of walking in the elements. Shirts that kept me through junior high to college graduation are threadbare and unfortunate. It's time to move on.

My hope is that buying this new clothing will not only keep me in clothes for the next seven years, but it will make the whole "What do I wear?" question easier. It was getting to the point of asking every morning, "What can I wear that doesn't have holes? Oh shoot, well check this off the list. Where did that hole come from? When and why? Dear lord!" or "What, of these holey ragged clothes, can I combine in such a way that the overlapping fabrics will conceal the general decrepit state?"

It was complicated and I don't like spending that much time just figuring out what to wear. Silly. I need to be able to get ready in five minutes and not be hung up by what's on my hangers.

So now I have what I need: a new pair of jeans, a pair of slacks for when I'm in court, some nice shirts, a serviceable/comfortable/adorably-appointed gray and black skirt.

Exciting, yes?

Also, I have the tights pictured above (left), but those are just sheer frivolity. Yay frivolity.

---

In other news, I think this story gave me an ulcer. Court stories always do.

I'm looking forward to Monday. Why? Oh well, I was just out, you know, drinking whiskey sours with a co-worker and we were walking back home when she spotted some police lights flashing outside a bar. Interesting. We continued walking forward, round the corner, come to be all of the officers on duty from all the agencies in town are outside this bar. About six cars with screaming lights. Whaaaaaat?

A brawl! Hoorah! People in custody are kicking at the doors inside the back of a squad car. Witnesses and sideline brawl participants are hugging the sidewalks wailing in drunken abandonment, all of them completely confused. Cops are standing around, arms folded across their chests or hands resting on top of their radios. Dark night, neon light. The bar is emptied and closed.

I snapped into reporter mode, caught the eye of a deputy who knows me and started demanding things.

---

When I'm typing up the police dispatches in the morning, I listen to this song:

The sheriff pulled me in and he sat me down
He said, you make no mistake
I know just what it takes
To pull a man's soul back from heaven's gates


Here it is: "Black River Killer" by Blitzen Trapper

the sordid tale of the pants

Hole -- in pants -- the pants I wear every day without fail to work and to court and to all places my legs must go modestly clad -- hole in back of pants. Oh my.

After utilizing scotch tape, I wore them anyway.

But now I need
New Pants
or Patched Pants
or a body that does not require clothing. That, of course, is the eternal ideal. Thanks, Adam. Stupid original sin and now no one gets to be naked EVER. Nor do we get to live in what was probably the most supremely amazing garden in the entire world.

---

Things that are happening right now that I wish would stop happening:

1. The child who, as certain as a metronome and just as vile and pointless, is pinging a metal ball against a metal table and staring all bored at his brother...

2. Inciting his brother into an epileptic seizure of activity. Must run! Must squeal! Must stomp around and cast paper to the ground! Must do this all in a coffee shop! DIVE DIVE DIVE!

3. Coffee. Why am I still drinking coffee? I can feel my DNA tightening into an even more helixy double helix.

4. Child #2 telling me what he's doing from second to second and giggling all crazy whenever I glare at him.

5. Perhaps I should stop hating the future of the world. It's playing peekaboo with me using a copy of The New Yorker. Kind of endearing actually. Cheeky cultured brat, I will not let you beguile me with your native charm and the fact that you're about 5 years old and need to wear glasses(a-dorable).

6. Child #1 kicking the couch I'm sitting on. Dear God, stop! Why are you like this? What sort of horrible trauma are you repressing right now that makes you act this way?! Stop kicking the bleepity bleep couch.

7. Time -- just in general. Stopit.

8. I want THIS to stop happening too. I don't know how this makes you feel. It makes me feel anger and sadness and nausea and as if perhaps we live in a cruel small world that suffers and sobs and is not heard very often by people who should be listening.

---

After a late night (2 a.m. ish?) and a morning wherein I could not sleep past 6:30 (technically, after a week of getting up at 4 or 4:30, 6:30 is sleeping in to my confused body), I decided to go hiking. Somehow got down a steep slide zone without killing myself. My legs were shaking. Not a good sign. I cut the expedition short and instead spent a good half hour sitting on a piece of driftwood someone set up like a bench atop a rocky outcrop. I watched the sea lions leap in and out of the waves, staggering their above-water appearances so that it looked like a sea monster was undulating and uncoiling out in the ocean.