Meep Meep

The first thing I did when I got back to the city was take a walk in the park. Inevitably, it wasn't much of one. Some people are prone to this stupidity. When I got to the trail, this gaggle of mountainbikers was rolling about like there was nobody in the world but them. Two of them were at the edge of the trail, actually considering going down the cliff. "That's just one of those things, you know, you've just got to go for it." I found myself preoccupied with crashing through the ferns and brush, a stick going between the spokes, and ending up Wile E. Coyoted in the creek.

In Ashland I discovered I missed the small-town, middle-class projection of calm. Walking down residential streets in the sunshine I feel so wonderfully obscure. It's a hipsterdom of neighborhoods. I flatter myself that I don't belong in Ashland's seemingly monolithic community. A far more comforting feeling of outsiderness than skirting the city's plethora of imminent scenes, cliques, and classes.

The next day I told my friends "I think a spider bit me!" I didn't think a spider bit me. But who knows? My cheek felt red, or white--stung, or numb. Did they notice anything, driving off in their minivan? The kids kicking their skateboards up the hill would've made an effort not to notice.

The trail--not quite a trail, going up a small stream overhung with bushes--was a last ditch obscurity. When did I start asking myself what are you doing? At the beginning?

I felt my cheek. There wasn't anything on it, but my fingers came away perfumed. Maybe it was just the raspberries doing what they do.

This is stupid. This is the stupidest thing you've ever done. Well, not the stupidest.

In the mirror there was nothing. Disappointing.

It's getting dark. Oh my god, You're going to be stuck out here in the mud in the dark!

Just because I couldn't (you should really) turn around.

Just because I wanted to get over the ridge and look at the sunset. Something I didn't believe was feasible even when I began, an hour before dark. That must be why I went.

Obviously it didn't turn dark, either. In Ashland I went up to the dam that stores the town's water. It looked fragile. It occured to me that if the dam broke, it would be a tsunami in a canyon. It would destroy downtown. I felt a shiver, but titilation doesn't make things happen any more than willpower.

Subjects

What

We uh filled it in with uh some uh fill.

Like

Oh no, I like popcorn. I don't like what it does.

Spying

Is she a spy?

Words

Water goes out the inlet and in the outlet.

50

Under 50 or over 50, everyone loves it here.

Them

Really all faiths have so much in common.

Murder

What an imagination he has.

Health

I see what comes out of people's bodies.

Education

Wind. You can't see it, but it's a force. It acts on the world.

Observations on Nothing in Particular

At a certain age, yelling is not loud. It's a nonvolume. Not at all certain that these sounds reach anyone. Not even certain that the sounds are sounds, but uncertainty implies thinking.

If painted pearl, cars can reflect so much sunlight that they're very difficult to see, except insofaras the points at which they blind you are abundantly apparent. If you're moving, or these cars are moving, their self-dazzlement is a reminder of their changing location. Parked, looking at them is as mesmerizing as it is painful: very mildly.

1. 1. When a robin doesn't fly away when approached, it's an audacious little bastard. This is thought.
2. 2. The erotics of wildlife are awfully familiar. A shy animal is exciting, a bold one is lewd. Another thought.
3. 3. (1) and (2) don't make much of a story. Not much of a thought.
4. 4. Someone who can narrate their thoughts without being defensive or boring, and without trying too hard to entertain, deserves awe.
5. 5. (4) sounds a lot like the ideal animal, doesn't it?
6. 6. (5) is defensive.

Teeth itch, but can't be scratched.

There's little difference between staring idly at browser tabs, and staring idly at objects in a room. The latter, however, makes better cinema.

It's not surprising that someone whose job is to plan off-campus activities for students is not at all cognizant of the structural problems in their efforts to create belonging. Nonetheless, when such a person states that their policy is "I just tell 'em to get out there!," it's depressing.

Anyone who isn't an idiot doesn't think of the historical past as merely that foolish time before we understood what we do now, yet it is an almost universally accepted way of thinking about oneself.

Charm is impossible to trust, like Deloware, and charm is impossible to ruffle, like Deloware.

There may not be different kinds of objects. To a young goat, everything is a potential platform, however precarious. To a goat in heat, everything is sex. To the insufferable, everything is encouragement.

If everything is insufferable, everything is sufferable, even pleasant. Well, only if everything were perfect.

Seoul Bound for Eternal Damnation?

Sometimes, I wake up to find that listening to All Things Considered causes nearby people to act as if I just yelled "the end is near!" (They glance over with a frightened expression, cross the street, and grab hold of their wallets.) Generally, I have a hard time paying attention--pleasant ambient noise, reassuring me that things are happening in the world, and that people are talking about them. But not today. Maybe my standards are lower than, for instance, the "rising pressure to increase gas taxes"? The news casters all sounded so deeply bored with the world on which they were reporting that the only communicative act left to them that seemed to broadcast out of their cocoons of despair were puns, and only because puns are the treadmills of locution. I thought I heard Robert Siegel trying to contain his glee at having actually uttered "the hard freeze following the Arab Spring."

I have to say, I shared this enthusiasm. The alternative quickly availed itself when someone earnestly observed that the Diaz-Canel government is launching "what appears to be a carefully orchestrated campaign to ready the island for an uncertain post-Castro future." It's almost as if there are politics that occur outside of the United States.

Generally, if they do, they're threatening and serious, threats taken seriously. They threatened. I'm serious. If you're sick of me repeating myself, I assure you, it's a cycle of transgression. The word "bellicose" was repeated so many times during this hour that I wasn't sure what it meant anymore, if anything. Whatever it was, nobody approved. Others stumbled over words I assume because they too could not get the image of a younger--very serious--Harrison Ford out of there head whenever they started to say "clear," "present," and, no, don't say that one, er, "threat," oh what the hell--"danger." Truly, language was a prickly morass, so uncertain that some took to stating as unequivocally as possible what they take and continue to take at face value. I was witnessing a kind of cold war escalation of rhetoric. Words were not to be trusted and had to be armored with more words, and those were not enough, and some sort explosion loomed on the horizon, or so they seemed to be saying, possibly.

Comfortably Rusty

In my room, the sun primarily does two things. It overheats the room, and it blinds me. Yet I am careful to avoid covering my two windows. I think of the light that comes through them as preicous. My desk is placed right below the windows, so that it is a kind of shrine to the light. My computer screen is in front of the bit of wall between the two windows, so that it does not block the windows, and so that the bright windows do not glare behind the screen. Yet when the sun does come out--the moment for which all of this is in preparation--I squint. Inside, the sunlight is a nuissance, but it seems worse to close the blinds. I feel compelled especially in this city to enjoy the sun. It's so rare. Spending time inside sheltered from the sun comes with a niggling sense of waste. Even reclining in a sunbeam on my bed feels like some kind of rebellion against the compulsion to go outside.

I spent most of the other day outside, in the most beautiful weather since I've moved here. Though, beautiful is not really the word for sunshine in this climate. Illicit, perhaps--the clear sky is so unfathomably blue that I feel that I both really should and really shouldn't be looking at it. It's as if the world's clothes have flown off, which is to say that aside from these conflicting pressures, a clear day is not much.

At the end of that day I found a west-facing porch where food and coffee were served. In a rocking chair I sat engrossed in a book. To be engrossed is as rare as the sun here.

Walking home, I attributed the relaxed state to having worked that day. Work tends to relieve anxiety, turning expansive, anxious free time into constrained, relaxed free time. Thinking this, I noticed that the sun had gone down, and that I was congratulating myself for the remission of anxiety--something I hadn't noticed was there until it wasn't. My thoughts soon began defensively claiming that they were not being defensive. I didn't want to admit that their jumbled, nervous character had returned. My pace hurried. My eyes darted. Surely, I thought, I couldn't blame my mood on the lack of sun?

Portland had returned to its presumed state of diffuse light.

At the end of the next day--another sunny day, which as someone living in Portland I can only hyperbolically call miraculous--I found myself willing the sun down. It's such a pain, enjoying it.

There is a comic, "Orygun," that is almost nothing but jokes about the rain. Its profusion of tired jokes about how much it rains here make a joke about how many tired jokes about how much it rains here can be made. It's attempting--exhaustively and exhaustingly--to make light of living under the dark clouds of a stereotype of dark clouds. Of course, those same clouds are a blanket to hide under.

They're the kind of jokes that you groan and roll your eyes at, but they can be oddly illuminating. Not because they're true, exactly, but because they extremely state things that are already thought to be true. I'm really just thinking of one joke: "People in Oregon don't sunburn. They rust." This malady of being drenched rather than overexposed sounds like a more recent commentary on Portland's relationship to ambition: Portlandia's "where young people go to retire." These quips ring awfully true, and, combined with the fact of the grey weather, a colorless puddle of truth congeals.

In an autobiographical story published in an old issue of Tin House, Katie Crouch tells her ex in New York--who is there because he's enlived by New York--that he "wouldn't like it here. You wouldn't like the sleepy way people drive." Another membrane that once read cannot be peeled off. The cars do proceed lacksadaisically, politely, as if their drivers are encased in another skin, and driving through a thick liquid.

As Crouch pitting the two places against each other speaks to, New York is perceived as having the opposite relationship to ambition. It's a city whose drives seem right up against the skin, whose drivers drive restlessly. They find Portlanders "so nice."

It's true, benignness is everywhere. People say hello passing on the street, they mythologize breakfast, and half of the pages of both of their popular weekly publications are filled with pot culture. Portland's persona is so laid back, it can't be. What's all that pot meant to counteract, anyway? Have you ever heard such discontented snark than from the retired?

There and Not There

Loosely covered in foil, pale with months of freezer burn, there is a pan of pesto. Most of the space is filled with bags of peaches. I put in a bag of tamales a few days ago.

I have been known to leave parties without warning.

There is a paper shopping bag of fabric scraps and a rice cooker box filled with 35mm camera equipment. There is a dusty painting of an ideology long abandoned, its canvas canted atop large, empty 3-ring binders. There is a light grey jacket on a hanger. Its fabric crinkles.

The object of leaving a party is twofold: to be known for it, and to leave the party. It is to see the stars, and to be seen seeing the stars. The audience is not necessarily there.

What is there, however, is a whole salmon, two-years frozen, kept from smelling, guts kept in. There, too, is a user directory from a computer seven years dead. There are photos downloaded from the Internet. There is a game that may be played but is not. There is a drawer of discarded clothing. There is a box of butter wrappers for greasing pans.

When the party is left behind, it begins again. Events that were not events come under scrutiny. During the party, life outside the party comes alive. Outside, the party comes alive. Neither "outside" nor "alive" are the right words. Perhaps "below" and "up," because whether at or away from the party, there is always a mole.

There is a wooden tortilla press. To use it, plastic wrap must be put between the wood and the uncooked tortilla.

The Holidays

It's that time of the year when people talk about the time of year. The other day I overheard two women telling each other all the things they like about "the holiday season." Under what circumstances does one make an effort to list the good qualities of a thing? "But what I really love," one said, "is the lights." The best she had to say was the very quality this season most glaringly lacks (pun intended). The sun sets at five, and we have a "lights festival." These semantic sleights make me worry about the psyche of my pale ancestors. Northern Europeans seem of necessity a confused lot. I can't help but think, stuck in the holiday vortex, that the idea of sin must've come from this same twisted seasonal logic--if the darkest time of year is the best time of year, then summer must be the worst. Heat and light are luxuries that we must not indulge in, lest we be miserable the other half of the year.

So these are "the holidays"; we get through the dark by inflicting our company on each other as a kind of good cheer. In this, too, it is a time of contradictions. We have the movie cliche that "you shouldn't be alone on Christmas," yet it is a time when friends confide how miserable they and their company are. It is time of gift-giving, but because of this it is also a time of such monumental consumption that shops run out things that during any other part of the year they would have coming out of their ears. It is a time of plenty, and therefore a time of scarcity. It is when those of us with disposable incomes give to "those less fortunate," so that we can forget about fortune the rest of the year. It is a time of relaxation, yet notoriously a time of extreme stress. It is a time of feasting, and therefore it is a time of crowds tripping over each other in the supermarket, glaring at each other for taking the last carton of egg nog. Which, like holiday beer (pumpkin) and holiday coffee (candy cane latte), is a contradiction of a commodity: something so gross you can't sell it the rest of the year. It's also a tautology: because its desirability is time-limited, it becomes more desirable. It's like a dog that lives for two months. It might smell of its own feces, but you love that dog. It's going to die soon.

The holiday split runs deep. I complain about the darkness, but I make it worse by waking up at noon. I make fun of looking forward to the lights in the dark, but I sometimes walk at night just to see the lights in the fog. I think the succession of holiday gatherings resemble nothing so much as a gauntlet, but I look forward to seeing those I don't otherwise see much. But does one see them? Egg nog is drinkable because it, like everything else during the holidays, is caught in the specular mediation of the season. Everything reflects back as the holidays.

If

If you sleep early, will you wake up early?

If you bake the dough, will it rise?

If a word is German and you speak English, is the word funny?

If you eat something that is "versunken," what happens?

If you are onboard ship at night, are there lights?

If there are lights at night, are you onboard a ship?

If you are onboard a ship and nobody else thinks so, how old are you?

If you move while others do not, are you moved?

If you are not moved, do you move?

If, while onboard, you pass an iceberg, does it wave?

If the ship strikes an iceberg, does the iceberg break?

If the iceberg breaks, did the iceberg strike the ship?

If an iceberg does strike the ship, does the ship move?

If the ship moves, do you notice?

If the ship does not move, is it sturdy, or is it sunk?

If you go inside, is it cold or are you?

If you put on a coat, are you more free?

If you are hot blooded, do your nerves work?

If an iceberg felt, would the arctic ocean feel warm?

If the ocean felt, which would feel pride of the other: the iceberg, or the ocean?

If one were proud, would the other hate?

If we are globally warmer, is there more iceberg birthing?

If you are warm in bed, are icebergs breaking?

If one does not break, will you sleep?

Darkrooms

It's almost a decade too late to mourn film photography, but yesterday I was given a clutch of exposed black and white rolls. Their contents are a mystery. There are enough of them that I considered buying new bottles of chemicals, retreating to the bathroom at night, and plugging the gaps with towels. Even though I have the time, it seemed like too much of an ordeal, too risky (I've ruined rolls of film before), and it's all just going to end up digital anyway. At this point, developing my own negatives just to scan them would be an affectation, and not something I would ever do again. While I still have a film camera somewhere in my closet, why buy film for it and go to the trouble of developing the film when I can take digital photos?

Possibly because one doesn't have to be a utilitarian; the goal of photography is technically an image, but its draws are many.

These days, film photography can only be approached via nostalgia--the conviction that the older the thing, the more real and the more beautiful it is. When I did a lot of dark room work, however, was the transition period during which the technical superiority of digital photography wasn't yet established. Even professional digital cameras weren't yet as high resolution as 35mm film.

Darkroom developing was taught in high school. Maybe it still is--what is taught there is less knowledge than discipline, which darkrooms require a lot of. I didn't take the class; my prints were sloppy. I wasn't so interested in the meticulous work that photography brandishes as a sign of its artistry. Not because I had anything against work as self-justification, but because I was lazy and I was a stubborn autodidact, which really just meant I relied on other channels. I was taught by friends who had taken the class, so for me photography was about belonging, intimacy, and conversely, solitude. Taking photos I was an obsessive, nitpicking aesthete, but in the darkroom I was a romantic.

It can be a mean place, though, waiting in the dark. In my makeshift arrangement in the bathroom, you couldn't open the door while film is developing. It could take about ten minutes. It's a long ten minutes, sitting in on the floor, listening to the timer tick. That lengthening of time was exactly what I wanted. It's a ritual; there is a great deal of preparation, and certain elements that must be in place. I learned these elements from the same friends who taught me the technical parts, and carried them to my time with myself.

In the contours of this practice's dissemination I detect a whiff of adolescent sexuality; having no similar experience to corroborate this intuition, I can only conclude that the scent is that of an idea of how adolescents get ideas about sex. Nonetheless, there was something erotic about developing photos with company. There was no physical contact, but there was the possibility of touch, or rather, touch diffused. The dark both depressurizes one's sense of inhabiting a discrete body, and heightens the awareness of sensation. A darkroom is not without light, but the lights illuminate photos, not people. Gazes do not meet, but fall on the images made by projector lamp or slowly accumulating dim and red on wet paper. In a room where all attention is on images, the sensuality of the dark becomes like the colorful static you see in the absence of light--atmospheric.

One thing I learned was that above all there must be music. A darkroom is as evocative a place to listen to music as a moving car, but in a different way. Rather than propelling, the music soaks.

But the music, like the dark, can grate. I once boasted that if I were punished with being locked alone in a room for hours, I would actually enjoy it. "Yes, you would," they said, but the truth was that I did this to myself regularly, and it was punishment. It had the same volatility that any extended period alone with your thoughts and few distractions does. "Nonstop you," the Lufthansa slogan that for Elif Batuman "seems to encapsulate the full horror and nausea of human consciousness," is, for the same reason, a good descriptor of being in a darkroom alone. Thankfully, there is one distraction from you, which is the work you do there.

I always hoped that the time would be meditative, which it rarely was. I remember either trying just to get it over with and having to turn off the music, which irritated me, or being caught in a high that teetered between euphoria and anger. Things can easily go wrong in a darkroom, and when your expectations are sky high, overexposing a print can be cause for cursing. I'm not a graceful person, and excitement makes one even clumsier.

More often, though, my moodiness in there had little to do with what I did or did not do. It was simply that there--like the minutes before sleep--you remember things you would otherwise not.

The more familiar you become with darkroom technique, the more you work in your imagination. I did a lot of trial and error, the imperfect results of which stuck around, and cost. Eventually, you get better at estimating contrast filters and exposure timings. On a computer you can do anything, you don't have to pay for paper, and the results are immediately visible. Delay defined the darkroom. Imagination lives in the often frustrating place where it cannot be realized, and Photoshop has made everything easier. Which is what I'm going to use to turn the developed negatives into positives, thankfully.

The Contemplation of Yards

There are for me basically two ways of walking alone in Ashland, the town I grew up in: in which I comopose sentences, and in which I contemplate yards. The former, obviously, is linguistic; the latter is not. The former is manic; the latter, depressive. The former does not feel exhausting but soon exhausts; the latter feels dull, even relaxing, but raises to a suppressed din of impasse. In the philosophical scene of pointing at chairs, the former is essentially solipsistic, concerned with the world only as an aesthetic backdrop; the latter--more properly philosophical--obsessed with objects that cannot be reached. The former is masturbatory; the latter, romantic.

The latter is also more difficult to explain. Everyone who writes and idealizes writing is familiar with the high of phrases coming in flashes. Moreover, it has been, as you would expect, written about extensively. I have not read a word about my suburban flanerie.

I can only describe it by circumloctuion, in part because it mostly resides in memory. I have spend a staggering amount of time in contemplation of yards, but most of it when I was a teenager.

Ever since I began attending public school (kindergarden), there has been a lot of walking in my life. I would say that my parents insisted that my brother and I walk to school, but I don't remember thinking that there were other options. That dawned on me slowly after weeks of other parents' cars flocking to the school at the finishing bell. I don't at all remember being envious. By that time the walks were an accepted part of life. If anything, I took pleasure in not having a ride, just as I used to get excited when the other kids made fun of my brown-bag lunches that often contained pumpkin pie in a ziplock bag, which resembled something that more traditionally excites and revolts children.

For several years, however, I was accompanied by my brother--by protective decree, probably. In company one does not contemplate yards. Of course, the memory of the texture of my mental life at that time is sparse. I have no idea what it was like when I finally did begin walking by myself. Whimsy is certain: I remember looking up at the sky while I swung on the playground swings, wilfully inducing the illusion that the sky was down, the ground, up, and I teetering above an abyss of blue, held to the swing seat by some improbable countergravity.

Whatever those walks were to me, they were cut in middle school by the presence of another companion--my best friend. We lived a block from each other and so walked to school and back together. It occurs to me that I had very little time to myself (not that it was a thing to want, then) until high school. Given my current proclivities, I am tempted to ascribe a psychological cause to the near-fainting spells I had throughout middle school. Perhaps they were a symptom of early adolescence: I was just old enough to have an introverted clash with my peers, but not old enough to realize it. Instead, I spent time in the nurse's office laying down and trying not to black out. There was a certain restfulness in the white of everything there. That is where I might locate the beginnings of the contemplative noncognition that would later attach itself to yards. I spent a lot of time staring at white, letting its texture and light seep into me.

For reasons I don't recall, my best friend and I didn't walk together to high school very often. Maybe our class schedules simply began to differ. In any case, I walked to and from high school, sometimes twice a day because I would flee home for lunch (the clash had reached its apex: I was terrified of campus). The route between home and high school was entirely along residential streets. So I would walk by the same houses over and over. Yet I never got used to them. I saw them change from season to season, but these changes never accrued into dynamic entities that persisted through time. No, every glance at their evocative exteriors constituted an eternity. In part this was a kind of furniture catalogue yard envy. I would look at patios and arbors and wish I had them. Other people's yards are always more appealing. It's only there, indeed, that eternity is possible. Looking at some restful corner of a yard replete with greenery and soft light, I imagine sitting there forever, life solved.

There is a woman who lives two doors down in an enormous turn of the century homestead. Her spacious property is filled with old fruit trees, and a magnificent oak. Her name is Fader, and she does seem to. She takes very good care of her yard. I rarely see her outside, but the evidence of her care is apparent. The patches of daffodils and tulips, the mowed grass and trimmed trees, and the white benches and chairs at particularly nice spots. I have never seen her or anyone else sitting in the alluring furniture. Yet she has carefully placed it, each piece an idyll of sitting.

The yardanalia (for lack of a better word) I see while walking is not always idyllic. Often, it's just strange. Cheesy, neglected statuary signals the otherness of a domestic life. Looking at it, I realize that whoever lives there passes it all the time; that it's a part of their daily life. To imagine such a life is bewildering. Of course, this life quite probably ignores its yard for the most part. Yards are only really noticed when newly reinvented or by people who don't live in them. On the one hand, objects in yards are of little significance to those who inhabit them. On the other hand, this is exactly what makes them significant.

There is a certain pain in passing all of these artifacts of other lives. On a long enough walk, to look begins to hurt. The limits of one life become apparent. All of these lives, these singularities, these things one is not.

When I find myself returning to this mode of walking, I am relieved to realize it is rare, troubled to think it could continue, and concerned by its import. As soon as I've left it, I'm sad that I seem to have forgotten how to return.