On Fire

Last night I lay in bed waiting for N. to get home. My mother is one of the nicest people I’ve ever known and was therefore reading to me over Skype. The distant explosions don’t exist, I told myself. Don’t pretend you’re living in an alternate history. Don’t look out the window. People’s fears feed them tales that every tap-tap-tap is a burglar or bomb. Don’t be like that.

I broke down around the time I decided it was a volcano. From atop my mounded laundry I peered out, across the city from my latticed attic window. I knew losing my glasses that afternoon was a bad idea. Far from being restorative, afternoon napping had resulted in what I could only assume was a poor pun – glasses-napping. Or they had fallen on the mound, and I was crushing them trying to get a better look at the volcano. Through the green leaves and the blur, there were far-off sparks of orange and red. I watched them rise and fall, waiting, breath paused for another color, listening to my mother’s voice. In the dark, I knew she couldn’t see me pressed by the window, waiting for the colors to change. Half a minute later a burst of blue signaled, “you’re crazy,” and I curled back onto the bed. Maybe someone set a fireworks factory on fire. Why would they all go off at once like that, one endless, constant noise?

When I was younger and lived in Vermont, every Fourth of July we’d journey across the lake to see the fireworks. The water would be dotted with boats, as far off as I could see, crowded in to watch. It was the only time we’d go out on the lake at night, so I remember clearly the dark, and fleeces, and the bright red and green lights on the prow. My parents always told me what the colors meant, and I always forgot – I just knew that out in the blackness, they kept the other boats away.

Poised over the dark water, the fireworks were spectacular. You could hear cheering. In my memory each burst was a separate event. Everyone on land and lake was following the same teasing trail, and the unfurling explosion of color as it showed us briefly what it was meant to be. Then it would fade, and, still dazzled, we’d watch for the following trail, listen for the whistle. And again, and again. The spacing gave way to anticipation, and to appreciation for every blazing design. There was a moment to point, and say, that one! That’s my favorite kind.  Slowly, the whistles doubled. Color on color, they sped up, and then erupted into a full-volume spectacular. The finale was lavish, the fireworks undistinguishable as they exploded all together, letting us know that it was ok we were tired from clapping and it was about time to go home.

Friends often say the best fireworks they have seen are at Reed College. Several times a year, the college shells out for expensive, open-to-the-public displays of celebration. It’s wonderful.  Those who complain about undue noise are missing a little chunk of enjoyment in life, and I like to think they can turn that around at any moment. Reed College is giving back, in those loud evenings, to the community. And what they’re giving is a fireworks display that many say rivals or outdoes the city’s. I enjoy watching them, up-close on the lawn, huddled in with friends. They come with music, and they arc in meticulously planned pattens set off by a machine. Still, there’s no relationship with the fireworks of my childhood.  No pause to just listen for the whistle, for the clapping to fade to silence while we imagine what the next spark will bring. For me, there are too many fireworks.  I want to pause them, to slow them down and watch each one grace the sky. I want them to feel valuable again, unwasteable, fireworks so large your uncle couldn’t afford to smuggle them in from Canada.

I don’t really mind, though. I just rock and hear the hum of the boat in my ears.

I had some friends over for my birthday few days past, intent on doing the best thing I could think of, which happened to be sitting in the backyard roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. We were out there just long enough to find that burning old drawers will not make a good cooking fire before the rain came.  N. and I stood sadly, surveying his smokey little concoction, before pouring yellowed cans of year-old yard Pasbt across it.  Inside, a friend has brought fat sausages filled with Mongolian Beef and Gator*, and the marshmallows were forgotten.  I knew it was a good party because someone interrupted a boy asking me for a prop to make him look pregnant, to ask me for a tie to put on a girl.  We sat up til 3 AM, hooked on Cards Against Humanity.

This afternoon I was unsurprised to find the cupboards empty except for cheap hot dogs, marshmallows, graham crackers, and big bars of chocolate. Happy Memorial Day weekend. I checked to make sure no-one was home before sticking a couple of pudgy white globs onto a wooden meat skewer and cranking up the gas burner. Blue means extra-hot, right? Within seconds I discovered the secret: holding a marshmallow within about a half a foot of a burner would instantly set it aflame. Time and time again I blew it out and inched it forward again. WHOMPH! Darn.

Somehow through repeated engulphments, the middle melted into a perfect s’more. I don’t know how there was enough between two marshmallows to coat my face, my hands, my phone, and still fill the graham-cracker crust, but it spread itself out. Which is why I am sitting here, sticky, happy, and reflecting on flame and explosives.

Enjoy Memorial Day Weekend, folks.

* fat sausages courtesy of Sheridan Fruit Co., which I have often passed wondering if they sell cheap fruit. They don’t, they sell expensive fruit. But their true strength lies in the most delicious sausages I’ve tasted in Portland, OR. I’m a loyal fan of Otto’s Sausage Kitchen, and the Eastmoreland Market has an unforgettable spicy italian with fennel – but these were unbeatable.

Phantom Duck Syndrome

Perched on my porch, listening to distant quacking, my hand quivering on my phone. The neighbors are blaring some mean jazz.  The first day of sunlight in weeks and all I can focus on is my phantom duck syndrome.

The past two weekends I’ve been packed away in basement or theater, making or watching films. The intervening weekdays were spent plowing through all my work to expose time for said dark days.  Now it’s Monday, and I’m reveling in the reversal of relaxation.

I thought I was clever last year when I set my iphone ringtone to ducks.  If I forget to silence it and it goes off, in restaurants or auditoriums or midway through difficult conversations, I imagine that people are only mildly puzzled by the faint sound of ducks.  Somewhere nearby, ducks are just out of sight.  Their voices penetrate the most protected of places.  “Do you hear…quacking?”

Then there are real ducks, and I am unprepared.  Walking through parks, I jump, stutter, and quake.  “I’m sorry, I have to answer my…” and no one is calling.  Who’s that crazy, desperately holding their phone to their ear, hoping someone will be there?  Every drifting quack startles the deep-set part of me that responds to alarm clocks and texting alerts.  We’re trained to respond to it.  And it won’t stop.  And no one is calling.

Ducks moved in next door.  There’s a little turkey enclosure, and I walk past every time I leave my house, imitating their shrills squawking (to the joy of neighbors).  They run to the fence and we talk.  I have no idea what I say, but they’re into it, if mildly confused.  The chickens quietly do their own thing and ignore us.  Walking past a few months ago, I gave a shriek of surprise.  Everyone stopped and looked at me.

“Was that my phone?”

What’s-wrong-with-her looks were exchanged. There was silence. I excavated my bag in panic. No calls. The turkeys watched, puzzled.

“Were those…ducks?”

Someone sighed, half-laughing, and pointed.  Out from behind the turkeys clomped a mess of loud, dumbfounded birds.  Ducks.  And they didn’t know what was going on, but they wanted to be a part of it.  Quaaack quack quarguh quriiack quark quaaaaack!

I made for the opposite street, thoroughly embarrassed.

Now, when I visit the turkeys, I tread quietly.  Sometimes the ducks linger toward the back.  They can’t be bothered to look up.  Other times, they raise a ruckus.  As the turkeys waddle to the chickenwire and chat, the ducks stand firm in the middle, shouting for no particular reason.  Perhaps I am unfair on ducks.  I love encountering them in ponds and streams and lawns (when they are in adorable pairs, searching for places to raise ducklings).  But these are some insolent fowl.

When the ringing is real, I answer joyfully.  It’s a cheerful thing to hear ducks calling you!  I cry “Hey Ducks!” into the phone.  I imagine that ducks are conveying my messages through to another person, and I want to be polite.  It’s little things like this that sew extra happiness into the corners of life.

There has been a great deal written on phantom phone syndrome.  It’s a well-documented phenomenon that we constantly hear our phone go off when it doesn’t.  We feel vibrations, invent pings.  The world is more aggressive, somehow, when we feel like it sends us false information – information we invent ourselves.  We want our phone to ring.  Sometimes we fear it.  It holds power over us.  We hear it no matter where we are, no matter where we leave our communicators.  We can break them.  But they have broken us first, and we will hear ringing from their shattered frames.

So I hear ducks.  I hear ducks where there are no ducks, and I hunt behind bushes, trying to prove that I’m not inventing them.  Sometimes they are real ducks.  Sometimes my phone is ringing.  And often…there’s nothing there at all.  The phantom ducks follow me everywhere. My phone-call fears and hopes, ridiculed by distant, ghostly quacking.

I have phantom duck syndrome.

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Tip: Read this post out loud, replacing the word ‘ducks’ with ‘dicks’

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EDIT: As the sun started to dip, I vacationed around the corner to take pictures of the ducks for this post.  No amount of pathetic human quacking would bring them to the front.  Just as I was abandoning all hope, they bobbed closer, and I rushed the fence with my camera.  And slowly let it droop.  One belligerent duck was having…uhm, troublingly violent sexual relations…with another duck.  N. and I looked at each other in horror, and silently backed away towards home.

Fiction: “Outrunning a Crocodile”

I’m beginning to write for an hour a day.  Today was my first try using a writing prompt.  I’ve maintained writing prompts are lame to disguise my own fear of unmertited communication.  Away, fears!  The prompt?  ”Something happened.”  As follows:

Something happened.  I don’t have legs anymore.

One day, I was gliding along – when I realized I was gliding.
Floating off the ground, I’d say a leg’s distance from it.  But it’s a
hard thing to measure without legs.

I can’t wear heels anymore.  My hips don’t sway.  Everyone knows that
heels make your butt curve back and forth voraciously, a swaying pile
of sex.  When I sway while I glide I look a man on the Discovery
Channel, trying to out zig-zag a crocodile.  Precarious.  Frightened.
No longer confident in life.  Heels are all about confidence.

The doctors say I’m lucky.  Something could have gone wrong with my
legs.  People come to them, pleading – “Please!  Remove these,” and
they can’t give them the gift of gliding.  Here I am, gliding along
all week, ungrateful.  They want to take samples of my legs, boil them
down, and synthesize them for science.  Except they can’t, as I
haven’t got any legs.  It’s a disappointment I’m learning to live with
in other people.

For the first few days I wore long, out-dated skirts, relics from the
back of my mother’s closet to cover my sudden dis-apparition.  When she
pointed out I was using the past to cover something that wasn’t there,
“Just like I used to do when I was your age,” I switched to mid-length
pleasantries, comfortable things in bright colors.  I tell people I
wear tights made from chameleons.  They’re very expensive.  People
respect me.

One day, I will get my legs back.  I trust we will find each other, like
lost loves.  I will discover them in a gutter only I would think to look
in, or the back of a closet, or that I left them in someone else’s car,
“didn’t I tell you?”  Then, I will remember what it is like to have legs.  
I will drag tall socks above my knees and just jog in place, relishing the
soft scratching as they fall down too far, and bunch up, and look
unfinished.  I will refuse to clip my toenails until my lover throws me out
of bed. I will tell my stretch marks that growth is a good thing, and count
my leg hairs out, under the stars.  I won’t remember to exercise, but I’ll
enjoy it when it sneaks up on me.  Hills are everywhere.

But for now, I am gliding, gliding along.  And all I’ve really lost is
my love of escalators, and fear of puddles, and aversion to walking
too close to someone for fear of treading on their feet.  My dates
find it romantic.  Only our arms are in the way, as we walk pressed up
against each other in the dark.

The Dogs of Tanzania

I’d never heard dogs howl at night before Africa.

My brother tried to warn us.  He’d been living there for months, and we only spoke to him a few times, but he let us know we’d be upset at how dogs are treated in Tanzania.  He also told us not to bring anything with aloe in it, as apparently a few years prior a student on the same program had been ambushed in the night by wild bush pigs. The bush pigs that had torn his tent apart and put a few scratches in him, intent on finding his aloe lotion.  He didn’t tell us to forgo clothing and pack our bags instead with toilet paper, which I kind of wish he had.  “Dogs aren’t pets, here.”  He said.  “It’s really sad.”  If you can, imagine that in my brother’s don’t-give-a-damn voice.

Our third night in Africa we moved from a small local hotel along the central city streets of Arusha to a touristy spot nestled (in a protective fence) in the more residential area.  I’m a reliable sleeper.  When our golden was a puppy, he used to spend the night in his kennel next to my bed.  I learned to sleep through his early-morning yip-yipping, forcing my parents to wake up and come down two floors to take him outside.  While this doesn’t reflect well on Past Me, it does show how damn resilient I am to even the most determinedly noisy of dogs.

That night in Tanzania, I could barely sleep for the barking.  The barking, and the howling, and the growling, the low urgent wuff-wuffs of warning and the desperate wiff-wiffs of pain.  In the morning, everyone in my family shared the same confusion.  How had there been so many dogs barking, all across the city?  How did they manage to bark all night long without rest? Why hadn’t we heard a single dog-related noise during the daytime?  A true Hound of the Baskervilles situation.  Yesterday I walked next door to borrow a copy, so perhaps dogs are on my mind.

We certainly saw plenty of them.  They were lying about in ditches and around the sides of houses.  They were small and a light dirty-brown, with uniform drooping ears and sad eyes.  We weren’t allowed to pet them, since so many of them were diseased and we didn’t want to be nipped. They were covered in all sorts of bugs and bare patches.  They shied away from people, which we learned is because people kick them or throw stones at them. We never saw a stray one.

Finally we asked our guide why the dogs bark at night.  He sounded surprised.  “Because they are nocturnal.  They are animals.  Like other animals, they are barking in the night.”  We laughed and told him dogs weren’t like other animals, and thus, they weren’t nocturnal.  He reiterated what he had said, accustomed to correcting tourists on the local wildlife.  “In the day, they are sleeping.  In the night they are barking and protecting of the home.  You hear they are saying to the other dogs, do not come to my home or I will be fighting you.”

Tanzania was wonderful, and people we met were very kind, and proud of being, as they never tired of telling us, “a peaceful country.  We don’t fight anyone.  Christian, Muslim, all is ok here.”  I post about dogs only because the notion of nocturnal dogs is so strikingly different.  A dog that barks all night was doing its job, not harassing your neighborhood’s sleep.  With so few resources and so much poverty, it’s sensible for dogs to be a defensive measure against wild animals or thieves. On the outskirts and in the boma, any number of predators might come prowling for your goats, and in the city, you need to make sure your home is protected at night.  People also viewed dogs as part of a disease problem, and were trying to minimize their risk.  I saw a taxi driver with the build of a rhinoceros hop up inside his car to avoid the small, rare, purebred corgi that a white hotel owner had brought out a few feet away.

While my boy was in Thailand, we talked of dogs.  There, soi dogs roam the streets, wild dogs with largely mild temperaments.  He tilted the computer camera out the windows of the café to prove how many, and within a half a second – there’s one, oh and another, and they’re followed by a third – and back to his tanned face. My boy was chased on his first day, by soi dogs, but after that badge of arrival they were friendly. The cities he went to weren’t as poor as the African ones, and there was enough trash for stray dogs to live off of.  Soi cats, too, dotted the Thai streets.  “Many Thais believe that only the Buddha can be perfect,” he told me, “and cats are perfect. People break or knot their tails so they’re not perfect anymore.”

The moment my family and I made it back to Vermont, we came as close to lavishing excess affection on our own dog as was probably possible.   He gets such a disproportionate amount of attention; it’s hard to measure.  As I fell asleep at night he’d climb up on the bed and shift all 70 pounds into whatever spot I was trying to sleep in, and I’d drift off with my arms tangled across his smelly warm fur.  We’re fortunate and we have plenty of food to feed him, and safety so we can raise him to be a slobbering friend, and we don’t fear disease or wild animals (except skunks).  I love dogs.  I was practically raised by one.  A more venerable, older dog who taught me as a child to cock my head to the side when I’m confused and that headscratches are affection.

I had a lot to learn when I hit highschool.

Geocaching: Muggles in a Land of Secrets

I walk past secrets everyday.

Usually this is vague – secret thoughts and plots, pirate gold, childhood memories, government initiatives, food not on the menu.  This week, the secrets were tangible. Physical, occasionally edible secrets, waiting everywhere!

The excitement came on quite suddenly. I was lazing about in my enormous leopard print bathrobe, trying to remember if I had eaten or if it really counted as afternoon yet.  My roommate and her boyfriend, properly responsible, were shuffling things on kitchen counters.

He looked up from the clatter.  “We’re going Geocaching.  Get some clothes on.”

I broke for my room, swung around, and remembered I had forgotten my boyfriend.  I called out to him: “Get dressed, now!  Geocaching!”

He gave me a bemused, I’m-halfway-out-the-door look, cigarette balanced on the edge of his smile, and finished stepping outside.  I abandoned him and tumbled up the stairs.

A few months ago H, my stop-motion animation and strange junk store buddy, had mentioned geocaching.  We were sitting around the dinner table late at night, new friends and he in a new city and all of us with nothing to do.  I was scratching out a list, noting the missing key ingredient for each rejected plan.  If I came across plywood, or concrete, or a videocamera later I’d remember we needed it.  “Geocaching?”

He grinned at us.  “It looks sweet.  You go out into the woods with a GPS and find boxes of stuff other people hid.  I looked the Portland area up online and it looks like there’s a lot out in the woods.”

I wrote down, daylight.

When months later my roommate mentioned her boyfriend was planning to take her out geocaching, I made it pretty clear that I was coming.  Still, I in no way expected it to be so sudden.  The selective joys of unemployment, right?  I tore through my drawers, looking for something woods-worthy and adventuresome.  Somehow I came out in red spandex tights and a green leather miniskirt, topped with a shirt with diamond decals in the shape of a leopard face with eyes lying uncomfortably close to the actual location of my nipples.  I dug around for a hat Bid left in my room that always reminded me of Swedish climbers.

I re-appeared, breathless and proud.  “Adventure time!”  (Sidenote: Go watch Adventure time.)

My roommate’s boyfriend glanced critically at our dramatic poses and bright colors.  “You’re not supposed to stick out.  You’re in disguise, from the Muggles, you’re like blending in so no-one even knows you’re there.”

“What’s a Muggle?” My roommate called from the kitchen, prompting a re-screening of every clueless thing she’s ever said about fantasy literature.  “Dumbledore…that’s one of the buildings, right?”  I called back.

“Geocachers call people who aren’t ‘in the know’ Muggles, like in Harry Potter,” he added.

We set out.  Meaning, we pranced down the front steps and milled about in the driveway, trying to pretend we knew where we were supposed to go.  Our guide pulled out his smartphone.

“All you need is a phone with GPS, and this app.  And you let it load your location, and” – he tapped it – “it tells you what’s nearby.”  Magic little dots appeared all over the screen.

“…Those are all nearby?”

“Yeah, let’s set it to, say, a mile.  Ok, so it rotates as you walk, like a compass.  Uhm….that way.”

And That Way it was.

There was a bounty of little dots all around us.  We chose from them at random.  The first directed us to an exciting patch of sidewalk.  The description read ‘micro’.  We peeked under bushes and roots and clumps of dirt.

“You’re never supposed to dig for them,” he said as we started to glare at the cache-less earth, and roll up our sleeves. “But the clue says, ‘Silver’.”

“I’ve got it!”  my boyfriend cried, hunched over next to the nearby building.  He was scrabbling at a plastic box-lid, buried in the ground.  It looked…municipal.  But he held up a small, shining metal image of the Virgin and Christ, lying nested in the dirt near it.  “Silver.”

The lid finally popped up.  Inside: a lot of mud, a valve, and some piping.  Whoops.  Anything of note would have long ago sunk into the muck.  We clapped it shut and tried to pretend we weren’t water-supply cutoff terrorists.  Which we aren’t.

It started to rain.  My roommate wanted to go home, where the rain could not follow, and at least pick up another hoodie.  We stood around on the sidewalk and shrugged our shoulders against the wet.  “Let’s—“

“Found it.” I hadn’t even realized our guide was still looking.  But in his hand lay a small capsule, the size of the top segment on my pinkie finger. We shielded it from the weather, uncapped it, and used an unbent paperclip to extract the tiny scroll wedged inside.  Along it ran what I could only assume was a list of others who had visited, tiny marks that might pass as initials and dates.  Our guide made another few scratches, and before I could see how they denoted us, was rolling the tiny paper back up and out of the rain.

Our guide found the goods for our next location up in a tree, on a little pulley.  The can was full of candy, mouldy erasers, and little trinkets – and other booklet to mark our passing.  I packed gifts I had brought into the can, and we hoisted it back heavier.

Giddy with success, the sun back up in the sky, we pointed the phone in another direction.

Half a mile later we were up against a loose stone wall.  “There’s no size listed,” our guide said, “but it can’t be very big if it’s hidden here.  It says to watch out – lots of muggles – act casual.”

Acting casual involved crawling around on the sidewalk peering in the crevice between every stone, and occasionally removing top ones and looking under them.  The procurement of a flashlight didn’t help appearances.  Groups of nearby employees left work and walked past us, clearly wondering if they should report us.  “It’s a scavenger hunt,” I yearned to say, “there’s a clue on this wall.” Or are there perhaps geocachers here searching all the time, and neighbors are accustomed to the fact that hiding in plain daylight, on a open street, while doing an unusual activity was impossible?  Do they take photos from their windows of the daily contortionists? Can you bend over and peer into a wall while not drawing attention?  “I’m sorry, sir, my pet gecko has escaped, and I believe he has sought refuge in one of these crevices.”

What felt like half an hour passed me from excitement to frustration.  Not being able to find it didn’t make any sense.  It had to be right here, and nothing tricky to it – nothing but a wall with tiny caves between each stone.   The looks we were getting were increasingly worse, as we tightened our faces and glared, half-upside down, into every little nook.  A gentleman walked past, and for once, smiled.

“I’ve been looking for that one for about a year.  Never found it,” he reflected, without breaking stride – and was gone.

We stayed frozen, shocked, in our strange poses.  Finally, “Shit.  It’s not here.  It’s been stolen.  It’s not real.”  I kicked at the wall.

Our guide turned back to the phone.  “Yeah, well, we’ll know if anyone’s seen it…logs…Someone found it yesterday.”

I did the math.  The chances that it was stolen, of all days, yesterday, were low enough to double back around and put the chances we were just dumbfucks who couldn’t find it at 98%.

We never found it.

“Two out of three, that’s not bad, that’s not bad,” our guide soothed.  “Nearby, there’s one that you have to solve like a puzzle to find, the clues tell you the coordinates, but you need internet to look stuff up—“

“—Nope.”

We set off a different way.

Our final stop was outside a house on a pleasant residential street.  “Are you sure this is right?”

“It says the geocache is on someone’s property but accessible from the sidewalk.”

Someone had stashed a tupperware of poetry on the side of their own driveway.  The logbook was larger than the others, and stretched back years.  All sorts of papers had been left, alongside the odd trinkets.  One was a temporary tattoo in the shape of a heart, reading TRIMET: Born to Ride.  I grinned and swapped it for a photograph from the 1940’s, taken with others years ago from a pile of trash a landlord left out, with an impromptu poem about our day scrawled on the back.  A few houses down, a family was moving a few things back and forth into their house, and a middle-school girl was frozen on the steps, watching us with abandon.  Five minutes later, she was still ogling.

My boyfriend waved as we put the box back and set off.  “We’re geocaching – hunting for treasure!” he informed her.  She was too shy to wave back, but still fascinated, watched us leave.  Our guide scoffed.  “You can’t talk to Muggles.  They’ll disrupt the cache.”

How does anyone find out about geocaching, I had to wonder?

But everyone seems to.  The next day, when I told my Dad, he informed me it was a popular urban sport he’d enjoyed some with friends.  I talked to some women I was working on social media for, and they clapped their hands and said they had friends who had visited and taken them – friends who had geocached in every state, who made their own tokens to distribute to caches, and who had been in Oregon just to visit a geocaching conference, and hence taken them to temporary caches made just for the conference.  What!

We wandered home along flowering Portland streets, finally drawn by a giant wall mural reading DONUTS with an arrow to a just-closed donut shop, where a man with a painted portrait of himself as a saint on the wall behind him served us day-after specials with a unique Portland brand of nonchalance.  We soaked in the paintings of rubber chickens in various conundrums on the walls – “by Dingo and Olive, they’re sweet, remember, I pointed them out of their tall clown bikes yesterday?”  I’m trying to introduce my boyfriend to Portland, but Portland does a damn good job of it all by itself.

Now, as I walk everyday past the tender spot where I know little messages and trinkets are hid, I try not to look at them.  I want to press my fingers against the hiding places and remember they’re there, to experience hidden treasure every day.  I keep my fingers to myself.  The reminder is enough!

Look for the people bent over, contorted, poking their nose where there should be nothing but old cigarette butts and leaves.  Running their hands over worn surfaces, like children who’ve mislaid a secret latch or magic portal.  They look away from you, pretending to be ordinary, pretending you can’t see the box they’re pulling where there was nothing before.  They’re young, old, your neighbors, hoodlums, adventurers, joggers, seeing messages you’ve passed every day and never laid your eyes on.

So I’m telling you, Muggles  –

– It’s everywhere.

The Weather Machine

I was in the Pioneer Square Visitor’s Center when the trumpeting started.  Having just used the bathroom, the masses of Portland pamphlets had captured my attention.  The sound of loud, recorded fanfare startled me into looking up.

The woman behind the desk cried in jubilation, “It’s the Weather Machine!”

There was nothing in sight that might be described with such excitement.

“The Weather Machine!  Quickly, run outside!  You, now!  Run!  Out!  You can’t miss this.  Run and look to the left!  Now!”

I panicked and ran, out through the glass doors, and swung left to find the procession.  Instead, I found the Weather Machine.

A pole I had only dully noted previously I now saw had a line of lights running up it, which were flashing crazily in the daylight.  Gaudy fanfare was blaring from the somewhere along pillar.

It was raining, but only around the contraption. This seemed odd.

Then, whoushhh,  water shot from the pole and pattered over the brick plaza below.  The metal heron that graced the top sank from view into a giant silver ball, and as soon as it had vanished from sight, a beautiful metal dragon fought its way out and spread its wings.  Then the dragon, too, sank out of place, and the golden spikes of a fish adorned with rays of the sun broke through into the light.  The metal animals kept exchanging themselves, the water misted down, and the music continued to assault.  It was hard to make out the flashing lights in the mid-day sun.

I did not expect this.  When I regained my senses a minute later, I noticed other people, frozen in that moment of joyful confusion when statues come alive.  “What the fuck?”

I burst back through the doors.  The woman behind the desk smiled satisfactorily.  “Did you enjoy the Weather Machine?”

It’s hard to be infuriated and delighted at the same time, but confusion is a curious creature.  “How long has that been there?” I demanded.

“Oh, since 1988.”

“I’ve never seen it do that.  No one I know has seen it do that.”   My eyes narrowed in desperation.  Was I mad?  Had I missed a singing, moving, water-shooting statue all these years?  I felt a sense of betrayal.

She laughed.  “Well, it’s been broken for years.  We just had it fixed two months ago.”

Then, she recounted its secrets.  The Weather Machine tells the weather at exactly noon each day.  It does what I saw, for two minutes, as you watch in antiquation to see what animal will come to rest.  If the pole is topped by the golden image of the sun (and, it looked like to me, a fish), the day will be sunny.  The dark dragon indicates a stormy day, and the grey heron tells of an overcast one.  If you know how to read them, the bulbs on the side light up like a thermometer, reading out the temperature.  Whether this is the expected average for the day, or the temperature at that moment, I don’t know.

I tried to imagine standing in Pioneer Square in 1988, waiting to find out the forecast.  The future felt like the past felt like the future.

Now: tell your friends, your family, strangers on the bus:  Be in Pioneer Square at Noon.  See the Weather Machine for yourself!

As I walked outside, I looked up to a bright, metal sun.  I knew it was going to be a nice day.

There’s Something Fishy About Ohio

“Does the summer suck in Vermont?”  My roommate asked me this morning.

“What?  No.  Oh, no.  Summer in Vermont is wonderful!  The sun is out, and sometimes it rains but the thunder always warns you first.  And you can swim in the lake, and run around outside, and garden…”

She looked skeptical.  She also looked like she had just woken up.  “What about mosquitos.”

“We have them, but it’s fine.  You just go inside when the sun goes down if don’t want to get bitten.”

This idea was met with some resistance.  Ohio mosquitoes, unlike their northerly relatives, are out all the time.  I had to admit I wasn’t really sure what Vermont mosquitoes did while they gave humans time to enjoy daylight hours.  Did they sleep?  Was it a pact with God?  Were they Vampires?

“The worst part of Ohio is the spring.  I hate spring.  It’s the worst week in the world.”

This grinchly phrase struck at my tender heart, and snuck from there to my face.  But she was unstoppable -

“In a week the weather changes from winter to summer.  We call it our ‘Week of Spring’.  The fish can’t handle the temperature change so they die and wash up on the shore and rot.”

“…Fish aren’t supposed to do that.”

“Our fish do.  Every year, they die in the spring.  Nothing is right with Lake Eerie.”

“…Fish really aren’t supposed to do that.”

“All summer, every time you stepped outside you’re met with the smell of rotting fish, and mosquitos biting you, and stickiness.  I grew up hating nature.  Then I grew up and moved away and learned: some places don’t smell like fish.”

What do you say to that?

An Evening Sauna

I woke up on Bir’s couch smelling like woodsmoke and other people’s sweat.

…Let me back up.

The internet at my house is down, so I’ve been an information-age refugee at Bir’s apartment.  Heat, light, and wi-fi are all I seek.  Yesterday I wandered in for my customary afternoon facebook-checking and found an intruder.  We eyed each other.

“Is anyone else here?” I ventured.

“No.”

“Oh, that’s fine then.”

“What are you doing here?”  He looked at me as though only one person had the right to couch bum, and that title was in jeopardy.

“Internets.”

A few hours of semi-silence later we remembered we were old friends and he invited me out to an evening sauna.  We filled up the car with folks and headed to a small community farm on some woodsy Portland outskirts.  I wasn’t really clear, but hey, I don’t have to drive.  One of the few advantages to not having your license is never having to know where you are.  When I’m walking I just ask strangers to point me where I’m going, and walk that-a-ways until I reach the next stranger, then ask them.  It’s got its own built-in error-correction system.

The moon was clear and bright with a ring around it so large you didn’t notice until you looked at the clouds.  I’d never seen a ring like that.  I stripped my clothes down to the final layer and padded over to what appeared, in the dark, to be a building.  Hot, heavy air invaded my lungs as I opened the thick wooden door.  My glasses went up in steam.  I stepped blindly in and pulled the door shut behind me.  Clumsy, and with a clunk.

In retrospect I stood there blinking like an idiot, still wearing a mismatching of polka-dotted underwear and rasta-colored crochet bikini top.  Everyone was buck nude, draped over tiers of surface.  A woman whispered gently to me under the soft singing and put a towel in my hands.  I clamored awkwardly up onto a wooden level and curled against the wall.  My friends were a level above me, on a wooden shelf right above my head.  It was so very quiet.  I tried not to move or make a sound.  Then would come the rumbling tones and voices again. Even when there was loud singing it felt quiet.  Someone would say a phrase, a few words or sentences tossed out to the group, and someone else would transform it with music underneath, or transfer into a song.  All harmony was spontaneous.  Sometimes there were just noises.  It quickly became clear that this had been maintained for hours, and would continue on for hours.  Large jars filled with water were passed around.  I was the only one with any clothing on.

The songs were short with repeated phrases, the kind you hear nowadays around late-night communal campfires with new-age hippies.  In the 60′s and 70′s I always imagined everyone magically knew the same songs.  But these are different –  patterns reminding me of mining songs or slave songs, with the repetition and call and response, although I know it’s meant in this context to have a meditative-like effect (or in some cases, just be easy to learn).  Most were about beauty, self, or the earth.

One, however, went something loosely along the lines of  “We are witches, Jews are witches, Jews are witches too.”  I chimed in, trying to keep the words in my head, and not to laugh with the reverent words.  “Witches are Jews,” it continued before delving into a verse about the moon.  Didn’t Jews spend centuries trying to prove they weren’t witches?  I hummed happily along with this absurd thing;  clearly no offense was meant.

My companions celebrated the intense feeling of relaxation and inclusion, and talked about it for days afterwards.  I, however, had somehow chosen the one spot with sweat dripping directly onto me.  A little dripping I can handle.  The constant pat pat pat of other people’s sweat hitting my body was understandably distracting.  I shifted forward.  It dripped on my face.  I push back, and it insisted drap drip drap dripped onto my leg.  My friend above extended his foot over the edge, and I watched the falling stream.  Every part of my body was crying water out.  No idea how long I had been there – an hour?  I patted a nearby friend’s streaming back, climbed down, and slipped out of the sauna.

The cold air had gone from freezing to pleasant with my bodily purge.  I crept to the fire wrapped in someone else’s towel, and dragged my clothing near me.  My feet started to go numb so I propped them up against the fire stones the way the others had.  Quiet conversations, in groups – it was clear not everyone here knew each other, which meant tonight was a special event.  I shuddered as I listened, and tried not to remember the summer, when working seemingly endless festivals led me to a forceful break from new-age-hippies and festival kids of all calibers.  All kinds of over-saturation bother me.  Someone with a calming voice was discussing the moon spirits and the meaning of earth symbols.  A man walked up and started lecturing on how many portals would open in the next few weeks according to the Mayan Calander.  “Mayan Calandar” is one of my trigger words.

I looked about for something else to focus on.  Hadn’t I seen that guy next to me, like, everywhere?  He was informing a young woman about the wonders of Laos and Thailand.  Laos, he told us, was unspoilt by western culture everywhere but the main strip, which had already been tarnished.  “My boyfriend’s in Thailand.”  I said authoritatively.  “I’ll let him know.”

“Have I seen you somewhere?”

“Everywhere?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

We shook on it.  And watched the Mayan Calendar Man graciously gather more firewood, which appeared to mean haul a shipping pallet out of the darkness and carefully poitioning it over the existing fire.  It stood out over the stones surrounding the fire a good two feet.  This method of adding firewood seemed questionable.  But there was fluteplaying and drumming and it seemed best best not to argue.  People began to drift off to bed, wherever that was.  I could kind of make out a large cabiny structure.  Man from Everywhere asked if any of us had been to some film festival or other.  “What?  No.”

“Oh – Hump.  It’s this -”

“- Amateur Porn Festival.  I thought I had mis-heard you.  You go?”

“Yeah.  My buddies and I had a film in it a few years back, sort of a threesome thing.”

“Sweet.”

We chatted HUMP and he said he was going in for it again this year.  I told him I was going to try to put an animation in for it myself.  We were pretty excited.

My friends came out of the sauna, the last of the evening’s cleansers.  They tugged at me to go.

“See you at HUMP!” we promised, fist bumped, and departed.  My friends looked at me like I couldn’t be left anywhere for ten minutes without talking sex.  I’m changing my ways.

The moment I hit the couch back at Bir’s I was berating myself for not writing down the “Witches are Jews” song, and no amount of messaging my friends sparked their memories.  I suppose we sweated it out.  They kept telling me to google it, I kept telling them that only leads to lots of anti-Semitic websites, they kept thinking it would be different for them.  I like to think this the entirety of traffic those pages get – people looking for the words to some unrelated song.  One can only assume some farm member was a pagan Jew who wanted to celebrate dual traditions and made up a song about how their blood and their following were one and the same, as all things are.  My thoughts rambled.  The couch was soft.  And then it’s morning.

Why shower when I can write?

A Triple-Part Tale of Mushroom Hunting

I discovered the beauty of mushrooms as a busy and mildly lazy college student.  They served as magical culinary currency.  It’s ugly to bribe your friends with cash.  Produce a handful of mushrooms, and you can get anyone to ditch their homework and hang out at your place.  A whole bag, or some actual shitakes, and they’ll use them to cook dinner for you.  I investigated cheaper ways to obtain these wonders. This currency can grow on trees, I rejoiced.

Still, mushroom hunting remained for the adventurous and experienced.  I had heard the whispered warnings – mushrooms were dangerous if you hadn’t been picking them your whole life, and only idiots and experts went after them.  I kept my ears pricked for years, waiting for someone to tell me they had fungal degrees and awards and would take me with them.  Take me with you!  In November, when a visiting friend said he was headed out to the park to look for mushrooms with a few friends, I couldn’t ask fast enough.  I think I flipped a few words around in haste.

My friend told me his friend was an experienced mushroom hunter, and that this fellow and his girlfriend were taking the kid they babysit out before math time.  We arrived at Forest Park, the largest park in the country within city limits, at a leisurely 10:30 am.  I had imagined European truffle hunts at 5am with a pack of dogs.   Instead, I was met by a friendly young couple and a baby that may have been able to walk, but certainly not far.  He’d been “a few times, I guess, but I have this book” and she’s been “hah, never.”  The baby had a pretty good grasp of the word “mushroom” and our cutoff time was for (I had misheard) his nap time.

We pointed to a spot on the map with a promising woody name, and strolled idly along among the trees and across the open grasses.  We lingered under pines and poked at their bases.  Here and there mushrooms revealed their wet brown caps.  It was a refresher course in childhood.  As a little thing I had lived with eyes locked to the ground, spying out treasures.  I chose the obligatory ski coat based on the number of pockets, which I diligently counted in alpine store waiting rooms.  I stuffed everything I discovered into those pockets – discarded chess pieces, broken bits of metal, colored plastic and bent wires – until I was a chubby round tomato-colored child.  The ski coats seemed, like my lifejackets, invariably red.  And here I was again, bribing the ground to give up something precious.  The old skills were sharp and there was fungi here, and there, and there.  I snatched them each up in my fingers. “Ah,” my companions said appreciatively, “LBMs.”  Is that good?  “Little Brown Mushrooms.  Practically unidentifiable, to us.”  The mushroom book stayed closed.

We admired each little find’s texture and color and held them out to the child where he was perched in the girlfriend’s arms.  “Mushroom.  You want to touch?”  She would say, and he would shake his head vigorously, or very occasionally, reach out a trembling finger and contact the strange object.  I had prematurely admired them as babysitters, that they would take a child on such an educational adventure.  I admired them all the more now that I knew they were bringing a child too young to even appreciate what was happening, although he was happy the entire time.  Finally, a spread of small red mushrooms got the treatment, and the book came out.  Pages and pages of mushrooms in every color and shape, waxy and slimy, tasty and treacherous, pictures of mushroom toast and mushroom hats and cookies and incredible discoveries.  They were’t edible, it said, but they were suitable as a dye.  My friend bundled them up in a plastic bag, and told his stained white canvas shoes that they were in for a new hue.

More mushrooms were examined and discarded – mid-sized white ones, difficult to pinpoint for sure, and inedible ones.  Mostly there was walking and chatting and idle glancing, not the frenzied expedition I had always imagined.  It was relaxing.  Then, under a patch of low brush reminiscent of ivy, a gleam of orange.  We bent, broke, and rubbed it until we were sure.  A false chanterelle often has a more brittle stem, hollow in the middle. A true chanterelle has a solid, rubbery stem and doesn’t bruise.  It was real.  Nearby, concealed under the same viney plants, were more hidden orange gems.  We cut off the soggy bits and stacked them in a paper grocery bag.  I could barely stand the excitement.  We drove to someone’s house, slit them into thin strips, and cooked them in butter the way my grandmother used to.  The rest we put away for the evening, and made a buffalo and chanterelle pie.  Well, someone brought a package of “buffalo”, and the paper wrapping read “yak”, but no-one there could distinguish the finer points of large beastly flavor.

I had only gone because I thought there was an expert, but I couldn’t help but think about how it had only been a couple inexperienced folks with a small guidebook, a random park, and a relaxing walk.  I had been told so many times that the first mushroom hunt is a disappointment and not to give up; but this was a victory!  A luxuriously flavored yellow-orange win.  I couldn’t wait to go again.  Four days later I flew home to the snows of Vermont and then to Africa.  All I had time to do was poke my head in at the shop where I worked and request a few mushroom guides as my christmas bonus.  Armed with these, I plucked LBMs at the Trimet bus-stop and spent the ride learning the frustrations of defeat.

When I returned to Portland it was January.  Winter rains had set in and out-of-season had no meaning to me so long as it was wet.  Water makes the Pacific Northwest a mushroomer’s paradise, the books told me.  They also told me to ignore our fungaphobic culture, and that there was no danger in eating a mushroom so long as you 100% positively ID’ed it.  Any doubt, and just leave it behind.  If you were sure it matched every descriptor, you could cook up a little, eat it, and then eat the rest later.  No questionables, no uncooked mushrooms, and you were perfectly safe.  A few friends and I headed out to Forest Park with the GPS and the books.  I was the only one who had ever been.

Where we ended up wasn’t the visitor’s center I was expecting, but a back road up the side of a hill that trailed off into a towering mossy forest.  There were other cars there, too, so we parked and set off on foot.  To one side the mud and vines twisted upwards; to the other, the road cut away and down below were the fuzzy green trunks of the trees whose fingers reached toward us, dripping, rows of ferns growing along their backs like spines.

Even off-season, winter life was everywhere.  We found the flat brown plates of turkey’s tails, chewed by the aborigines; a brain-like bright orange mass of goop known as witch’s butter; and dark mushrooms so woody we couldn’t break them off the trees they grew on.  Our reward was clean air and the sunlight through the mist and the vast, mysterious trees.  From the dark underside of a rotting log we plucked several clear white mushrooms.  They were soft and appeared to have been made by jelly poured into a mold – one solid, shaped mass of a uniform gelatinous substance.  They were wonderful to touch, and when we got them home, they turned out to be false hedgehog fungus (after the spike shapes under the cap), edible soaked in milk and honey or candied.  One giant artist’s conk we pried off a tree provided a hard white canvas for the scratchings of a friend.

Last week, I undertook my third little mushroomy enterprise.  Several enthusiastic freshman girls, one of whom had helped found a local mushroom club, hadn’t been out much either.  When I begged them to go with me after a short mycology talk some students had given, I was laughed at a little.  “It’s not mushroom season,” I was told, “What do you expect to find?”  Emboldened by my last adventure, I said it was good practice identifying non-edible ones…and who knows?  “Chanterelles go out of season after the fall, and morels won’t be in till the spring, so you certainly won’t find anything edible.”  I held out secret hopes.  I have never listened well to others on the topic of nature.  I teamed their car up with my books and we headed  to Forest Park.

The girl’s car was hot red with flames painted on the front and physics formulas for the energy and trajectory of it leaving the earth’s atmosphere on the back.  I brushed aside the piled CDs and fended off curious questions about my life.  Little bits of ribbon and hanging objects were stitched to the seat backs and roof.  My best friend is an artsy physics major, I sighed to myself, where do they all come from?

We sprung out of the car and into sunshine.  The sat few weeks have been as un-Portland-like as possible: warm, bright winter afternoons in the place of customary gray rains.  Wandering along among the trees, as I had done that first day, we paused now and again to admire the beauty of small, soft brown mushrooms, and for me to shake my head and refuse to draw out my book for LBMs.  Some small false chanterelles lurked about; we criticized their poor disguise.  We did identify some red-yellow mushrooms with a curiously waxy texture, and with that victory, couldn’t have asked for more.

Then, peeking out under the low viney brush, a large, flat plate of orange.  I peeled back the loose leaves and pulled up a magnificence the size of my open hand.  “That look like…a chanterelle,” one of the girls couldn’t help but observe.  “Nonsense.”  My heart pounded as I replied. “They’re out of season.”  The gills were perfect, long and slim.  The stem was thick and bent, unwilling to break.  I cut it with a knife.  It was solid.  The color was ideal, and the flesh refused to bruise.  It smelled of chanterelle.  Was it my memory, invading with delicious reminiscences?

We bagged it.  And then we bagged another, nearby, and dogged the area, searching for companions.  There were in the end maybe five of nearly equal size, and a few small ones, all preparing to go soggy but not yet ruined.  At home, I sliced off the slimy bits and washed off the dirt.  They were perfect.  Perfect chanterelles.  There was no question, no doubt for any of us.  We slit them into strips and piled them high.  We sauteed them in butter and onions and garlic and rosemary.  We cooked bacon, and cooked more mushrooms in the bacon fat.  One bread run later, we had chanterelles sandwiched between fresh white slices and bacon and cooked onions.  The sandwiches of a lifetime.

Stuffed, I sat and watched them try on my green eyeliner and blue lipstick and upturn my boxes of wigs.  They picked 3 each to borrow and tromped off, happy, full, with little saran-wrapped sandwiches we couldn’t finish and strangely colored hair.

Our victory was complete.  We had won chanterelles in winter.

A Final Note:   

The book we used most was All the Rain Promises, And More… by David Arora, a marvelous volume of fungal wit and wisdom.  The author has squeezed as many hilarious and helpful hints as fit into a proper pocket print.  I have a few others, but this is the #1 book I would recommend picking up if you are headed out into the wet woods of the Pacific Northwest.  If elsewhere, I recommend it anyway.  The author is also a master of alliteration, and I am properly awed and jealous.

My Imaginary Boy

Over break I made the common mistake of falling for a boy who was headed for Thailand.

My mother took me to the crappy local supermarket, otherwise known as a bountiful land of food I didn’t have to pay for.  I don’t even know why we went there; it’s such a terrible store that after decades of patronage and at least 3 brand changes, we finally shop somewhere a little further out.  As I loaded up the cart with piles of artichokes and brussel sprouts – delicious kings of the vegetable world – I glanced at the deli and fell backward through time.

He looked up too.  “Kara!  Hey!”  And saw the look of concern on my face.  “No, I haven’t been here all this time, really, I just moved back.”  He’d been in 10^th grade when I was in 9^th grade, and when I’d left Colchester 9 years ago, he’d been working behind that very same Deli counter.  Had I traveled back in time?  He looked taller, if that was possible.  I tried to see if the other patrons were dressed from the early 2000’s, a tell-tale sign of time-travel.  They looked…about the same as when I’d left, too.  Not comforting.

He assured me that he’d moved away after highschool, something about college, some jobs, etc., and he’d come back a month ago to live at his parents’ and work his old high-school position for a little extra cash before spending a year teaching English in Thailand.  It was a pretty good story and I liked all its implications – obviously he was working a shit local job, had no phone or car, and was living in his parents’ basement because he was about to do something handsome and glorious.  Ah, the sacrifices we make!

Perhaps this was an elaborate ruse.  In retrospect, it’s possible he’s hiding out in Vermont right now, and tomorrow he will photoshop his head in front of an elephant and say he’s sorry he can’t call.

I got back to Portland confessably a little star-struck.  “You’ll never believe what happened to me my week in Vermont!” I told my friends, and then relayed details of sorting through old coin collections on New Year’s Eve and watching musicals from the 1960’s on VHS.  “That’s nice,” they laughed, “you’ve found a gay friend.”

“Gay? But…the kissing…I swear!  He’s straight!”

And no-body believed me.

Somewhere in Thailand, an imaginary boy waits for me.

Listening with Ghosts, Or, Airport Musicians

I’ve never properly understood the economics of airports.  It’s evident the goal of those enormous buildings is to be as classy and extravagant as possible; to be the kind of place people leave saying “I’ve just experienced an art museum and fine dining and holiday shopping all while stressing out about catching my flight.”  Do people really book flights based on the art exhibits and blinking lights in the places they pass through?  I won’t properly understand the place that airports hold in our society, I think, until they start having adjoining hotels.  I assume this is already a custom outside the US.  You want to be a destination?  Don’t be just a switchboard.

I’ve written a lot about airports, mostly in bleary letters to friends, drowning in dramatic iterations of  ”soulless” and its ilk.  I’ve grown.  Everything has a little soul.  More is said by: what kind of soul is it?

PDX – it seems crass to say ‘The Portland Airport’ when it literally gave the city its name – appeals to me mostly because of the music.  I also love that it’s small, and that it’s mine, so sometimes there are familiar faces.  But it has this program, with the modern notion that airports are patrons of the arts, which causes there to be live musicians playing everywhere you go.  It’s subtle.  People don’t seem to notice the lone pianist every wing, softly playing along.  There is something deeply unsettling about a musician in the center of circles of seats and benches and lights and fake plants, performing for an imaginary audience while busied travelers hurry on 30 feet away.

Next time you’re at PDX, stop for the musicians.  Let them know that someone is watching; someone other than the air of a place that never thinks of closing.  Think of it like sitting on the forest floor and listening to the rustle and the birds that you had missed in your rush.  The unheard fauna.

Today I heard two musicians, both pianists.  The first was an accident – I had sat near a piano, and young man came by to set up.  I stayed and listened for a while, and saw me looking and called to me over the music, asking me questions and exchanging pleasantries – a new experience.  Was I a fellow pianist?  No, no, I shouted back, I had taken 6 years as a child and can’t play a single song.  He’d put a cute little stocking up for tips and I stuffed a one in the top, an alluring signal to other travelers.  If you’ve only got one dollar, make it count.

The second was in the abandoned amphitheater-like area – you know it, right past where you come through security – it looks nicer every year.  He was playing what vaguely resembled “I Could Have Danced All Night.”  I could tell from the bald crown and occasional pair of eyebrows that it was the same older fellow whose photograph was propped prominently up nearby.  Older folks would pay to sit and listen to this for hours, but here was a ghost audience, and stepping into it, I was a ghost too, apart from the world of travel.  Airports are thoroughfares; they don’t know what emptiness feels like.  The air is like eyes.  I closed my mine and listened to the mingling travel and soft notes moving up and down.  I opened them now and again to watch the eyebrows appear and disappear, and to blissfully lick the chocolate off my eclair wrapper.

He finished and picked up his books, telling me,”I’d stay and play longer, but I have two puppies to get home to.”

“What kind?” I ventured.

He looked around comically, and whispered what I believed to be, “Badasses.”  And then he listed the imposing breeds that they believed themselves to be (rotweiler), followed by tiny breeds that they were (pomeranian).  I didn’t know what to make of this, so I laughed.

He slipped me one of his CDs and told me to keep it, and I apologized there weren’t more people.  He shrugged, unbothered. “They do come and listen.  One person telling me that I lifted the burden from their shoulders is worth more than selling a CD, or a few tips.  Musicians are burden-lifters, that’s what we’re here for.”

So this is a post for the rarely-heard musicians of PDX.  They’re volunteers, classical buskers, driving out to the airport to play unnoticed in hopes of a few CD sales or tips – or to lift the hearts of some weary traveler.  Pause a few moments, stop frozen in place or step away from the hurried and sit, listening silently with the ghosts.

Diggedle Boeing

I saw an old friend from high school the other night.  He was in town for a few days and called me up noncommittally and I insisted we do anything he liked that wasn’t at my house.  He sounded a little disappointed.

“My friend’s mom is in town.  Look, just trust me.”

Fortunately, he had been ruminating on making a few pies that evening, and we settled on that.  He came in to pick me up, I popped downstairs, and ran SMACK into my friend’s well-intentioned mom.  Oh shit.  She spent the following 20 minutes recounting how she had rigged the cat food at her house to come out of the automatic dispenser when you shake it, but had realized upon making it to Portland several days ago that the cat doesn’t know how to shake the dispenser.  This was certainly the worst punchline I’d ever heard to a 20 minute narrative about someone’s cat.  I grabbed my friend and pulled him upstairs.

“You’re right.” He said, “Let’s just run for it.”

We plummeted through the living room and into the car.

The house he was staying at was epically crumpled.  I tried to distinguish the outer paint color – were those tatters the scraps of paint that had peeled off?  Was that wood underneath or paint so old it had turned brown?  It turned out to be a strangely shaped thing from the late 1800′s.  I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house that old in Portland.  Everything here is 20′s/30′s boom, or 70′s boom. There’s something tangibly refreshing about visiting an utter shithole.  You can enjoy the relaxation of don’t-give-a-fuck scrawled walls and broken cabinets and piles of dirty confusion, and then go home and say “My house is very nice, thank you,” quietly to yourself.  My mother used to always say the delightful thing about vacations is it’s nice to go away, and then nice to come home.  It’s like that.

The occupants were wonderful.  It was a jumble of people and I had trouble telling who slept there and who was about to bicycle away in the night.  I’d encountered one fellow a few years earlier, when my friend had first dropped through Portland.  I’d gotten a phone call while buried deep in some manic month of schoolwork.  I can’t remember what part of the year it was, only that sparing three hours to see an old friend seemed like the sky falling.  The day’s activities involved him and his friends walking through the nearby Rhododendron Gardens very, very slowly.  These days, I am content to spend my days strolling about.  But there was work to be done, and I was crazed.  And they were so high.  So very high.  They shuffled along, quietly looking at every bush.  They sat and stared and stared and stared at the ducks.  And of course, they smoked.  It finally dawned on me that my options were to medically slow myself to their pace, or homicide with a side dish of duckicide.  I seized the pipe.

When I got home, I was too stoned do my work, and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in my living room yelling “I’M SO MAD I’M HIGH” over and over again.

Making pies, however, was much better way to see an old friend.

“You like chicken potpie?” he asked one of the housemates as he drifted through.

The fellow tilted his head back lazily and grinned.  “That’s my three favorite things.  Chicken.  Pot.  And Pie.”

My friend thought about it, proposed chicken pot pie enchiladas for the true perfect combination of foods, and they passed the measure.

I tried to explain to my friend my ill-fated history with pie, but he smiled firmly and told me I was to brave the crust.  It’s his mother’s recipe.  Straight from the Queen of Pies, he assured me.  Put anything in this crust, and people will flock to eat it.  I ended up making three crusts, so the secret is branded in my memory, and now it is my secret too, and so I share it with you. The magic words were:

1 3/4 cups of flour

2/3 cup of crisco

1/3 cup of water

a pinch of salt

stir with a fork

The crusts were easy to roll and flaky when baked.  I spent a half hour making little dough flowers on top of the potpie.  In one evening, my friend had transformed me into someone who thought they could cook.  Someone who knew they could cook.  All I have to do is throw anything into the magical crust.  As one girl happily announced mid-bite: “this could make dog shit taste delicious!”

After this, I sat and watched a girl stick-n-poke tattoo a fellow for a while.  I’d never seen the process before.   She finished one, and began mending another that wasn’t very clear.  As it began, he told me he’d been drunk on his birthday, as is the birthday tradition.  They’d be listening over and over to this French song, the main word of which was diggedle boeing.  I was about to tell them that I had failed 7 years of French, but I was fairly sure this wasn’t a French word.  They played the song, and some lovely french voice sang all sort of legitimate-sounding foreign words – but ended the chorus each time with an emphasized diggedle boeing.  ”We should get this tattooed!” had been his drunken epiphany, and the pair of them had stick-n-poked diggedle boeing across each other’s thighs.

I watched as she taped together two pins, straight from the traditional tomato pincushion, and attached the pair to a colored pencil.  She began dipping the apparatus in a lid full of india ink.  As I watched her poking and him squealing, all I could think of, stupid dork that I am, was John Wilkes Booth, doing the same thing as a child in the 1840′s tattooing his initials on the back of his hand.  He could have tattooed diggedle boeing instead, and we might have had less fuss over whose body it was.

We watched Ace Ventura – it was the second, racist one, not the first, transphobic one  - and I chatted with a young man who works at Goodwill.  First off I asked him if what I had heard was true.  Whispered rumors say that if Goodwill employees even set foot at The Bins, they’re fired.  If they ever catch you there, you’re done for!  He was apparently told that if he wanted to visit the Bins, just to see what it was like, he had to call the manager ahead and set up an appointment, so that he could be walked around and carefully watched to be sure he didn’t purchase anything.  They told him that all such practices were in place because the system had been abused in the past.  That’s right, there were actually Bins get rich schemes concocted by Goodwill employees.  After all, one can just load up a truck with valuables, drive it to the Bins, call in your partner, and have them snatch up the shipment.  Welcome to the villainous world of Bins crime.

The Bins, for those not from Portland, is a warehouse packed with foul-smelling bins filled with things that didn’t sell at Goodwill, or couldn’t, or that they never bothered to sort.  You pay by the pound.  The sweet spot is around $25 for 25 pounds of clothes.

I asked him what was done with the clothing afterwards.  I had always imagined it was incinerated in giant evil vats.  I had read recycled-clothing tags recently that intimated something similar, if less sinister and with a lower potential for creating Batman villains.  But I had also heard that all the excess clothing is shipped to Africa, where it provides cheap clothing and leads to all the pictures you see of starving African children in t-shirts.  I’d also heard it tanked the local clothing industry, making it harder for Africans to make a living making textiles.  All he knew on the subject, he said, was one terrible bulletpoint that had stuck with him from training.

You know those giant swathes of shoes at the Bins?  You remember the hours of your life you lament wasting, searching for the match for that perfect shoe?  Shoe bins are well-known to be the most tormenting.  If you find the right shoe, there’s only one, and overturning every shoe in a six-bin-range doesn’t kick the nagging worry that you just missed it.

The good news is, you didn’t miss it.  It wasn’t there.

The totally-fucked-up news is, those single shoes actually go somewhere after the Bins.  They’re rounded up and sent to charities that work to fill the demand for single shoes.  Because in countries with serious mine-injury problems, people need single shoes.

Next time I got to the Bins and find that perfect single shoe, I’m going to put it down and say, “Maybe I can walk away from this.”  Literally walk away from it, because I won’t spend my life wearing single shoes, and I can be grateful for this.  This shoe’s imaginary partner doesn’t matter enough to spend half an hour in a livid hunt.  Maybe this dollar is better invested in a mine-extracting charity for places where having a single shoe is commonplace.

Although, I know as I put it gently back that this shoe won’t find a new home among the crippled and impoverished peoples of the world.  No way are they sending them a 6″ red stripper heel.

The HUMP! Experience

I just returned home from Portland’s HUMP! mostly amateur porn festival.  It’s so cold in my living room I can see my breath.  In order to type this, I have to pull my fingers out from under the laptop, where I have been warming them.  I hope you appreciate this sacrifice.

I’d never before been to HUMP.  Clumsy timing, sold out showings, and life in general interfered, making me cringe at the mention of it the way you do when classmates discuss a paper you never turned in.  After all, why hadn’t “that weird porn girl” been to the gala porn event of Portland?

I have noticed this mistake repeatedly.  People seem intent on the idea that if I am into something, and therefore, known for something, I must know everything about it.  When I ask my produce-department roommate what the mysterious beans growing in my garden are, and she replies “Hell if I know,” I accept this as a legitimate answer.  When someone’s relatives learn I am a Civil War lover, they settle down to buff behavior, quizzing me on how I would have fought specific battles.  It was a really big war.  I want to shout, “I know nothing about it!  Leave me alone!”  But I know my friends will reach into the database above their shoulders and tell me if they can uphold fluent discourse on every general on the Union army, surely a Civil War studying History major can manage a handful.  It’s shameful.  I try never to mention the Civil War.

At this point in writing, I took a brief break to ponder while singing “What’s the Use in Wondrin’?” from Carousel, at which point the chair abruptly fell apart under me and collapsed.  I am going to try a different chair, and not singing.

HUMP! was wonderful.  For those who don’t live in Portland – or live in Portland but don’t read the Mercury, or have a policy not to look at posters of stuff humping other stuff – I’ll just let Wikipedia do my work for me, and sit back and enjoy this new chair:

The HUMP! annual film festival in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, initiated in 2005, showcases home-movie erotica, amateur sex cinema, and locally produced pornography.[1] Films are rated by the audience, and awards are given. The films are then destroyed before the live audience at the final showing of the festival, by the master of ceremonies, Dan Savage.

Dan Savage told us repeatedly that if any cell phones or cameras were seen, they would be “Taken away, not returned, and never heard from again.”  We repeated the last word of each phrase over and over again until he was satisfied that we were all envisioning our precious electronics wrestled from our hands by large gay attendants and whisked away to some dark room, or crushed on the floor in front of us.  He also emphasized no assholes in the audience (“only on the screen”) – that we could howl and sob and curl into the fetus position, but we couldn’t be disparaging about the fetishes or bodies or relationships on the screen.  Hearing this felt amazing.

The curtains literally opened and the shorts began.  My favorite was a feeder flick where two lovely young folk (one or both of them were transmen) smeared donut after donut over each other while having gloriously happy sex in the sunshine.  I’ve never been comfortable with the notion of mixing sex and food, but I have to appreciate when a film can be so attractive and moving while centered around a fetish I just can’t find sexy.  That, or popular porn is just so heinous, that seeing two legitimately attractive people looking honestly joyful about having relations with each other is a glimmering light in the darkness of mainstream perversion….seen through a curtain of donuts?  I have to stop with the metaphors.

One of the shorts was on knife-play.  I had heard people mention before that folks just “aren’t okay with that,” but I’d never understood it.  It showed a few minutes of a sadly faceless man (per mainstream BDSM conventions), running a penknife along a woman’s curves.  She was in her late 30′s or 40′s, attractive but slightly trashy, with fake blonde hair and a flat dark shade of red lipstick only ex-goths wear.  She kept her eyes on the unseen man, focused and unflinching, which was a very nice derailing from aforementioned conventional failings.  Finally, when the audience was already muttering uncomfortably, he smoothly slid the knife into her orifice.  Most of the audience made a noise of alarm.  It mixed with what sounded like boo’s.  I’m not even sure if people knew themselves what noises were coming out of them.  Was that a hissing behind me?  Or just a miserable exhale of breath?  But from what I could gather, people weren’t just turning aside in personal discomfort – they were defending the woman in the film.  The knife slipped back out, bloodless, and the short ended.

If it says anything about the Portland/Seattle, 2/23 shorts centered around inappropriate use of video game controllers, and another 2/23 featured the deadly sexy James Bond.  Strangely absent amongst the many gay and straight flicks was any strictly lesbian action.  The most amateur of the shorts had two nude women swinging light sabers at each other, but that was about it.  I looked it up, and they included the closest things to w4w that they received, noting that it varies a lot from year to year.

This was the classiest version of the evening I could have imagined.  Most of the films weren’t very hardcore.  Most were very funny.  The audience was tipsy, but a classy, lighthearted, non-sexual crowd.  I always wondered about the experience of seeing Deep Throat in theaters in the 70′s, when “porno chic” was in its brief phase, and it was moderately acceptable in nicer circles to attend and discuss humorous porn films.  I think I just found out.

I append this entry with an email I just received from a drunk friend.  She sent me a photo of something not quite dildo, not quite gun, and I confessed I couldn’t tell where the metaphor ended and the penis began.  She wittily sent back,

God knows there’s enough porn out here het invol Ed fucking propels with actual guns

The metaphor doesn’t weed much help

 Penis penis penis

Sent from my iPhonech he

That final line is actually the close of a montage of email line endings, which I can only assume she has been sloshedly retyping to fit her mood over the course of the evening:

Sent from hmy iPhonen  I so drunk

Sent from my iPhoneys  – stl drunk

I  Sent from my iPhone while drunk  U

Sent from my iPhone yep drill drunk too many shots

 Sent from my iPhonech he

Sacred Cookies, Or, My Life as an Unholy Cook

I just slid the foulest cookies into the oven.

I doggedly maintain that if you present people with enough food, they will eventually begin to repay you in more food. As a perpetually hungry person, I see in many relationships this latent possibility for food to begin appearing, if only I can trigger it. The best way to flip that inner switch, I reason, is to offer them food again and again.  One day, they realize what a joy it is to share food, and begin happily reciprocating. People are like a garden you invest food in, and more food comes out.

This has almost never proved fruitful. Usually, the people who are going to offer you food will do it whatsoever you do, and those unaccustomed to sharing will turn their nose at the bounties you offer them. So when I found that the gaming group I just joined seemed already ripe to my peculiar brand of training, I was pretty excited. People were offering to take turns. People baked sometimes. Pressure was low, results were high.

My sole quest for the day was to bake something – anything – delicious to bring. I must maintain the tradition. Someone brought cookies last time. I would bring cookies this time. This obviously indicated that so long as I fulfilled my part in the cycle, someone would bring cookies next week. The cookies of the future depend on me. I am but a cog in the great machinations by which cookies appear every week. This is a moment of serious responsibility, and I face it without fear.

I am a terrible cook. I hear being a terrible cook and a terrible baker are different acts, but I am unable to distinguish them. Just like I am unable to distinguish olive oil from vegetable oil, or experimentation from blatantly disregarding the instructions.

I picked the simplest chocolate-related recipe I could find. I was about halfway through the grueling process of mixing ingredients in two different bowls and combining them, before I realized I had already fucked up beyond belief. By the time I scooped the chocolately batter onto the tray, I was crying, defeated by the lingering taste in my mouth of what was to become unmistakably terrible cookies. I ignored the instruction to coat the top with confectioner’s sugar. It seemed unimaginably cruel to make something so tainted look even more delicious.

I have a special inability to prepare food. Early in my attempts, so-called ‘friends’ used to gather to watch the debacle, helping to boost my culinary self esteem with “Oh, let’s see how she fucked up this time!” I have melted burgers, burnt rice in full pots of water, and mixed concoctions so unholy that they are still crusted to the counter in old rental houses. When I walk into a kitchen, I enter an alternate universe where anything is possible so long as it is horrible.

I blame this in part on my early baking experiments. Seeking to make cookies, I would determinedly stir flour and water together. Getting the right consistency was tough, and, I assumed, the basis for good baking. Eventually it would mix into a paste I could put in the toaster oven, and a little while later I would be rewarded with what I assumed to be primitive rubber. My parents would gum it appreciatively (it was unchewable), and we would throw it all out, mission accomplished. As I grew older, my brother and I discovered if you added sugar, it was marginally more consumable. Recently, I asked my mother why in the world she had stood by while I manufactured plastic. I know she isn’t a baker, but would it really take so much work to show me how to add in a few eggs? “I’m sure I tried, and you were stubborn and wanted to do it your way, and wouldn’t let me show you,” she said, and I couldn’t argue. Neither of us really remember it.

For my coup-de-grace, I just burnt this batch. No, I’m trying to be optimistic – I “over-hardened” them. But in walks my housemate, who insists they taste just fine. I guess she can’t identify the lingering hint of olive oil under the extra vanilla and chocolate I desperately dumped in.

Now I can bring this to a close, and go do my part in the great cycle of cookie-bringing.

If my offering is acceptable, I believe my reward will come.

In Which I Am Harassed Extensively by an Old Acquaintance

Fairly overwhelmed by the end of the day, but I’ll try to tell things in order.  Skip to the middle if you’re only here for harassment.

I made a special note of two things today: paint chairs, and learn how to “blow sugar” to make bubbles on top of confections.  I’m a terrible baker, but a nice older lady I was talking to today mentioned this concept, and I was blown away, no pun intended.  She also told me that painting chairs was incredible satisfying, and the concept stuck.

The first of what I assume will be many Burner conversations happened today.  I knew, from people mentioning it with unbelieveable frequency, that people who have been to Burning Man “know each other on sight” and “are always friends”.  I dubbed this nonsensical for 3 reasons: the incredible diversity of subculture I saw at Burning Man; what I have dubbed “B.M. Asshole Disease” where you come back from the playa having caught something that makes you act like a dick; and the likelihood that you will enjoy the trust and company of every one of 50,000 people.

Today I was sent for a coffee, which allows me the pleasant experience of buying coffee, with no requirement to drink the stuff.   My boss knows that I don’t understand coffee, and always kindly writes what he wants on a little scrap of paper, which I proudly present to the baristas.  Today it was a large bearded man with a map of Burning Man stamped on the pendant around his neck.  I leaned to the side and said slyly “Nice necklace.”  A calculating glace back, “You know what it is, I trust?”  A cool, “Of course.” We both grinned and talked for 5 minutes like old friends – or rather, like people who meet with the relaxing insider knowledge that they have hundreds of mutual friends.  The other barista poured me the customary frothy heart-on-top drink (my understanding of coffee), I cooed accordingly, and waved goodbye to my friends.  Outside, it struck me.  That was it.  I was in some sort of cool club, and it felt awesome.  This is how BM Asshole Disease strikes.  But as long as I don’t lose my appreciate of non-Burners, I just get a wonderful excuse to make friends with strangers who suddenly trust me because we share something.  For other people, we share a home state, or a favorite color, or a fear of the dark.  I share a little something with everyone, I like to think.

The fellow from the Leatherman factory came back in and gave me a coupon for when I visit, since he doesn’t know many people having just moved here.  How sweet!  I can’t wait to go check the place out.

I headed home only to find I had somehow misread the bus schedule and yet again had a while to wait.  I sat with the usual.  I waved to a group of cheerful looking punks, or anarchists, who per tradition liked my hair.  For a while I watched a young man trying to sell a case of cigarettes on the cheap.  Finally, bored, I walked a few streets up, figuring I’d burn time by finding the next stop.  Looking to my left, there were the punks.  And all around me was a tension, and there were noises from afar.  “What’s going down?”  I asked, “Did they clear the parks?”  Apparently the parks had been taken by the police in the afternoon, and the displaced crowds were reaching critical mass and headed to Pioneer Square.  They enthusiastically demanded I come with them, and were friendly and persistent enough that I ditched my immediate plans to bus home and walked with them to Pioneer Square. “I can’t believe we bought cigarettes that cheap,” I heard one of them say.

About halfway there, as we happily bantered about the occupation, an old college-mate of mine who I hadn’t seen for about 2 years walked past.  She’d left Oregon after she graduated, so I was surprised to see her.  Before I could open my mouth to say hi, she turned around, pointed at me, and yelled “She’s a racist,” before hurrying onward.

I laughed optimistically.  She had never been a particularly nice person, but we hadn’t had any problems when in school together, and she had never taken issue with me, and really, several years had passed.  More importantly, I’m not a racist, and have never been mistaken for one before.  I guess in her time off her sense of humor had kind of twisted, and she’s replaced “It’s been a while, nice to see you” with the conversational “She’s a racist.”  My punk friends laughed incredulously.  “What the fuck is wrong with that bitch?”  I shrugged and said I hadn’t seen her in years.  “Fucking bitch, she’s crazy.  You can’t be racist, you’re hanging with us.”  One of them happily volunteered that he was half Irish, and we finally did names.  The posse appeared to be composed of 4 punks and one homeless guy.  The youngest kid was named Dumpster.  The tall, muscled black punk shook my hand as “Black Daddy.”  “I don’t know if I can deal with that, I’m racist.” I laughed sadly.  He roared and slapped me on the back.  You could almost mistake the line of tattooed staples over his eyes for eyebrows.

We arrived at the square just ahead of the crowds.  They had erected the enormous Christmas tree earlier in the day, and it remained roped off with piles of limbs deemed unsightly or unstable lying where they had been buzzed off.  If anything would piss the higher-ups of Portland off, I thought to myself, occupying Pioneer Square would have to take the cake.  Prime holiday season was about to come in its lucrative full-swing to the downtown, and Pioneer Square was the heart – or at least the face – of it.  They’d arrest every living thing in a 3 block perimeter.  The massive march started to slowly filter in.  We stood at the center, near the mic, waiting for everyone to get there.  My classmate from earlier, Diana Olivia, stood nearly next to the mic speaker.  She look busy, so I didn’t bother her.

A nicely-dressed young woman with neat dirty blond hair caught my eye.  “I love your earrings!” she ventured, wondering if they were by the same fellow she had seen on Alberta Street selling clock-bit jewelry.  I’d made them instead, and – then out of my peripheral, Olivia appeared and tapped the girl on the shoulder. “I need to talk to you for a moment.”  She pulled the girl away and I watched curiously as she hunched over, wrapping her arm around the other girl, bending her head low, and whispering to her.  It looked like a football huddle, I mused.  Probably some important Occupy Portland business.  Maybe they’re both leaders.  There are so many leaders.  I caught the word “fascist”, and nothing else.

The girl stood back up, and I opened my mouth to talk to her again, when I noticed how nervous she looked and that she wasn’t making eye contact.  I suddenly understood.  I relaxed my entire body to look at nonthreatened as possible. “What did she say to you?” I coaxed softly.

“She uhm doesn’t like you very much, I guess.  She doesn’t want me to talk to you.”
“What, really?”
“Uhh anyway the mic is starting now so it doesn’t matter.”  She turned away as quickly as possible.

I decided not to think too much about the utter absurdity of someone I had gone to college with, been on good terms with, and hadn’t seen in 2 years going to the trouble to tell people I talk to not to go near me.  I kept smiling and listened to the fellow on the mic. It seemed like more important things were happening.

They were not.  The mic check went nowhere, as it turned out after a minute or two of asking the crowd to be quiet, that not all of said crowd had arrived yet.  They decided to give it another 5 minutes.  I looked up and Olivia was standing maybe 10 feet away from me, with no-one in between us.  I try to be a genuinely nice and understanding person.  Supposing that she seemed to have some sort of issue with me, and it was probably a wacky misunderstanding, I smiled hopefully, opened my mouth and made it about two words into,“Hi, it’s nice to see you.  Is there a problem?”

She started screaming.  Screaming that I was a racist.  Waving her arms and pointing at me with more fury than I’ve ever seen in a person not on TV, she screamed that I shouldn’t even fucking talk to her.  That I should get the fuck out of here.  That I didn’t belong here.  She screamed at me to go the fuck back to the East Coast where I belonged.  Her wrath so overtook her that it was hard to hear all the words, or perhaps I was in shock.  She kept screaming something about how “at college this girl was knows as the leader…” but I could never catch what I was the leader of.  She wasn’t talking to me except when she told me to get out, to go back East.  She was talking to everyone else.  The entire square.  The current heart of Occupy Portland.

And then she stopped screaming, and stormed away.  I kind of stood there.  There was an terrible pause from everyone around me.  And then everyone realized the accusations had stopped and started moving again.  Or maybe that was me, and the world stopped being frozen?  I smiled feebly.  The punk kids nudged me out of it.  “Fuck that bitch,” they reiterated “What the fuck is wrong with her?  Right?”  Dumpster high-fived me.  Somehow this made me feel about 200% better.  I shrugged at everyone else and looked appropriately baffled.  One guy shook his head and mumbled “This is the sort of bipartisanship that tears this movement apart.”  Another advised “Let’s leave personal issues out of this.”  Things were ok.  Everyone seemed to be assuming we were just both crazy bitches with some crazy past.  But my heart wouldn’t stop trying to fight its way out of my skin.  Did everyone think I was a racist fascist something-or-other that they should stay the hell away from?  Why wouldn’t they?  Why would someone be that angry without cause?  They must assume there’s something seriously wrong with me.  After all, she’s the girl standing next to the microphone.  Warning everyone away.

The dirty-blonde haired girl approached me and offered shyly “I actually don’t know her very well.  I think from what I’ve seen maybe she treats everyone like that.”  I thanked her and tried to explain I didn’t even know the girl very well, but it sounded false.  Finally, the mic started back up.  The punks took off in search of the front lines, complaining that the police hadn’t made it here yet.

I stood for another 5 minutes where I was, and shouting out with the human mic.  My furious college-mate returned and took her place back at the front by the mic.  I didn’t want her to think she had gotten me down, so I smiled just the same – well, a little more sad and battered – and shouted as loudly as I could.  After that I wandered up and sat on the stadium steps, and listened from there.  My other boss sent a text out warning that there were riot cops amassing downtown, and to get out of the area.  I admitted I was in the heart of it and told him I’d take off.  I had been intending to get home, anyhow.

I smiling and trying to laugh it off as the craziest thing to happen to me this month, but I couldn’t calm down.  I spent the 20 minute wait, and most of the bus ride, on the phone with a friend trying to dissect what had happened.  I recall many examples of my classmate inappropriately accusing other people of racism (it was considered by many to be her identity hobby), but she’d never found an excuse to do it to me.  We’d never had any problems, and if we had, she would have said something, accusingly but without screaming.  What had changed in two years?  More puzzlingly, what was I the “leader” of?  She had mainly known me as the leader of the gaming club, something she’d teased me about many times.   I don’t remember boardgames being a bourgeoisie crime.  My friend worried what would have happened if the riled-up crowd had been less understanding.  We worked through every conceivable angle – did she associate me with someone who over the years tarnished my name with theirs?  Had some sort of rumor been started several years ago and boiled over? Nothing, plausible or implausible, came to mind.

In the end, it all came up puzzling blanks.  I can only assume that in the past several years, she’s decided to distance herself – violently – from the college she went to.  She’s lashing out at anyone from her school who is white, or upper-middle class, or from the East Coast.  So I feel obligated to say: if you see her, just walk on past.   I can’t honestly recommend her newfound conversational abilities, and I think she’s changed a lot.  And is, uhm, going through some kind of phase where she hates everyone she used to know so much, that she needs to scream about them to everyone nearby, and accuse them of being racist, fascist, East-Coast, Leaders of Horrible Things.  Since it didn’t appear to be about me particularly, I have to assume it could happen to any number of people.

I made it home, about ready to throw up, and tried to eat some food and regain focus.  I think was in mild shock, since I can remember the first few things she said, and her walking away, but the middle of the tirade is a pictureless blur I couldn’t make out many of the words during.  On the bright side, I learned that in highly humiliating and uncalled for circumstances, I can overcome the fight or flight response and remain sadly smiling in place.  On the downside, I was called an East Coast racist with no provocation at the relatively quiet, waiting center of the Occupy Portland movement, in the middle of Pioneer Square.

As my roommate later consoled me: “You were screamed at by someone downtown. That’s like, every day downtown.  Usually the screaming person looks crazier.  Seriously.”

A Day’s Worth of People

I haven’t blogged in a long time, partially because I never seemed to find myself with extra time.  Now that I’m single, I find myself with both time to do things, and write about them.    I have trouble remembering the myriad experiences I have every day, most of which I really enjoy.  Maybe it’s time to write a few down.

I’m working at a pop-up shop downtown.  It’s my first job in retail, which is funny, because I help manage a storefront at a different shop – but I never end up working in it.  In highschool retail seemed like a dream job.  The warm fuzz hasn’t warm off yet.  I miss thinking hard about business things – but I am exhausted from focusing all my social know-how and interacting with everyone as productively as possible.

I’ve never had any reason to buy hand cream or lotion, but my favorite thing on the floor at the shop (‘the floor’ is what I think you are supposed to call where customers are, but it seems confusing, given the actual floor being a thing) is the beauty product samples.  I spend all day fidgeting by rubbing doses of sweet-smelling ointments into my hands.  Unfortunately I rarely remember to stick with just one throughout the day, and end up a cacophony of pleasant scents.  Worse yet, when I open the glass cases to show customers some prize piece or other, I invariably find fragrant little fingerprints all over the glass afterwards.  I spend the time when I think no one is watching vainly scrubbing at them.

It’s hard not to love getting to talk to so many people.  A little sample of today:

- One man moved here a few months ago from a small town in Michigan.  He can’t stop thinking about how different and wonderful it is here.  He loves the rain, because it isn’t snow.  He loves wandering around all day talking to strangers.  He asked me about the differences between Vermont and Portland, and I admitted that the thing I noticed missing was a peculiar New England brand of old folks.  I miss the way they communicate in such a gruff, witty, sharp-edged way, and then have really sweet soft centers.  They say what they mean, but they mean well.  He looked somewhat confused, so we moved on.  A job with Leatherman drew him here, and so I learned that Leatherman’s headquarters is here in Portland, and this is where they make most of their wonderful utility knives.  I told him emotionally that when my father gave me a Leatherman, it was one of the most important moments of my childhood – I had always wanted one, but thought that because I was a girl, no-one would ever think to give me one.  One day my father said, you have a Leatherman, don’t you?  And upon my confused ‘no’, he marched right out and bought me one on the spot, saying ‘Everyone should have a Leatherman.’  They give tours on Wednesdays.  I am so going in January.

- A very nice woman in clean, white clothes with a fashionable white baseball cap and perfectly cut black hair told me she was from California, but originally from Vermont, and we both had a wonderful surprise.  She’s living in the Silicon Valley right now, and was happy to spill about it to a fellow New Englander.  She said with no prompting that what she misses most is the sharp, honest, and blunt (unlike tools, NEers can be sharp and blunt at once) communication.  In the Silicon Valley, her employees are horrified to hear her honestly say, “Please don’t do that” to this or that inappropriate action.  Instead, she’s expected to passive-aggressively complain about it to someone else.  Direct communication is taboo.  Everyone is so busy that when she says to her girlfriends “Let’s go out and grab a coctail”, they say, “in a month, let me pencil it in”, and then reschedule 3 times.  She’ll be celebrating her birthday a month late because that’s when it fits in her friends schedules. She was charming, and successful, and had just the right shade of tan cover-up, and was quite fed up with where she was living.  “I get out as much as I can,” she told me.  “I go on work trips to New York or San Diego, or anywhere, as often as I can get my boss to schedule me.”  The worst part, she finally sighed, was the men.  With a 5-to-1 gender ratio (or something like that), she thought the men would be happy to go on dates, but she says they’re composed mostly of undateable nerds.  “They tell me, I’m dressed too nicely.  I say, you’re not dressed nice enough.  So there.  I have to import men to date.”  I honestly really liked her.

- A woman who makes things out of books bought my favorite book-cover handbag.  It was partially related to the fact that she had recently painted an eel.  “I don’t know why I’m doing this – it’s the last sort of things I should buy.  And I’m against things made of books that destroy them, like this.”  So am I, but that was the most amazing handbag.  It had a happy, graceful watercolor of an eel and read “HOW DOES IT FEEL” across the top and “TO BE AN EEL?” across the bottom.  I loved it.  I’m ashamed to say I nearly teared up seeing it go, even though I wouldn’t have bought it myself, but she promised me it would have a good life touring France, and occasionally Maine, and I had to agree that sounded very nice indeed.

- I’ve spoken to a large and varying number of women who are in Portland for the Women in Technology Conference.   It’s inspiring to think of all those women in male-dominated technological fields!  It’s hokey, but I mean it.  Some of them told me that some of the booths at the convention give away free lip-products and nail polish, and the girls have been painting their nails together.  Some people are against it, they noted, but they liked it.

- There’s a culinary institute upstairs.  Yesterday I learned from a pastry chef-in-the-making that meringues are meant to be browned with a blowtorch, not baked, and that they’re liable to burn up.  I immediately texted my meringue-making friend with a blowtorch and a penchant for burning things.  Texted isn’t in spellcheck.  How old is my copy of Microsoft Word?

- Yesterday (yes, I’m  sneaking in two things not from today) a young man from the UAE told me he has 40 cousins in Portland.  He said it’s nice to have family, but awkward to be running into cousins everywhere you go.

- The young woman who paints the astounding number-paintings at the Saturday Market confessed she liked my outfit so much she had secretly taken a picture of me.  Specifically, when I was up on a stepladder bending “librarian-like” to reach a painting on the wall.

Clomping through the cold to get to the bus home, I was waylaid by a girl playing ukulele.  I watched her play until her fingers were too cold to hold up to the strings anymore, trying to pick up tips.  I started two days ago, so I’m atrocious.  I gave her the second half of my lunch and half a roll of ritz crackers instead of a monetary tip, and she happily gobbled them down while we chatted.  She was a charming Lewis & Clarke student who had escaped a rural Oregon logging town.  Everyone where she had come from married their high school sweethearts and hunkered down to a life of toiling in the hot, chemical-filled mills, or as a logger.  The women would work other odd jobs around town as well – waitressing and whatnot.  She said fuck no to that, and is studying to get a degree in musicology.  I assume this makes her a musicologist, and am pleased to have taken my music-related failings to her.

When I finally make it out of the cold and onto the 17 bus, a young man sits next to me, and I’m cheery enough to bother him into conversation about the weather (namely, the cold of it).  I indicate that it has rather crept up on me, and he rebuffs that had I been paying attention, there had been several days of warning chill.  It turns out he is a friendly and handsome fellow, the latter because of his full green eyes.  He charmingly notes that he will need because of said weather to begin carrying a handkerchief to wipe his dribbly nose with.  In a sudden moment of remembrance, I dug a fresh, pink-flower embroidered handkerchief out of my purse and handed it to him.  I told him it was for keeping, as I probably had hundreds at home, 25 from one grandmother, 25 from the other dozens more from high school when I used them and bought them at thrift sales, another bundle from the Bins.  It turns out he used to have lots of handkerchiefs too, but he cut them up to make neck scarves for his very tolerant cat.  I wondered later if admitting to owning potential hoards of handkerchiefs was a bad call and made me sound like a crazy cat lady, but seeing as he was in similar dangerous territory for putting scarves on his cat every morning, and taking them off of his cat before bed at night, I feel a little better.  His stop came, and I assume he went home to tell his friends he had been given a hankie by a stranger on the bus.  I hope I see him again sometime.  I suppose these are the situations that make missed connections so colorful.

Now I’m at home out of the cold.  I’m huddled typing on the kitchen floor, which happens to be where the electric heater vent is.  It also happens to put the chip rack at about mouth level.  My roommate has come home with luxurious fruits from the produce department she works in, proclaiming that we need to learn of her ‘other life’.  I have tasted the best grapes of my life.  She’s trying to get me to go to a drink & draw, although from the flyers, I think what they do is get a lot of people drunk on wine and have them all copy the same Van Goh painting.