Monday morning, the sun is shining but it’s very serious, it’s phoning it in. Back in my little damp spot of the NW dew point didn’t mean anything. Here when you go out barefoot to get the morning the paper the concrete is dry but the grass is cold and wet.
I’ve been here over a year. My divorce by mail and absence should be coming through soon. I’m acclimated no matter how I try not to be. My son posted some blurb on Facebook bitching about how slow the guy at the gas pumps was at the Safeway on 181st. Here, like most of the rest of the country there is a mandate for self service. Oregon there is a mandate for full service only. It’s that sort of quirky shit that makes me miss the city part of my NW.
Oregon politics are a clusterfuck too. Often as not they wind up like politics anywhere, puffing of chests, pomp and circumstance, red faces and finger pointing and then everyone pulls a lever or punches a button or fills in a blank with a number two pencil and the whole damn carnival packs up and goes home leaving tent stake divots and horse shit in its wake.
Except the wackiest usually win; no sales tax, full service gas, no running in the red. It’s not just that the people think they are pioneers on the cutting edge (except leaning towards oblivion not fame) it’s that they vote that way. Here they voted to kill the number of gray wolves that peaked over the extinction mark. They are calling the great lakes wolf game. The season starts in a few weeks.
There is a book I recommend from time to time. When it was recommended to me the guy who recommended it said it was written half here and half in Portland. I have never found any collaborating evidence for that and whereas that friend was not a liar he was one of those conspiracy nuts and really wanted to be abducted by and probed by aliens, preferably hot aliens.
The book is Dahlgren by Samuel Delany, a guy who, I think, won a Nova award for another book of his I just could not read. I’ll read most science fiction, but I get bored quickly with gadgets explained in great detail. I can sum up gadgets from the turn of the twentieth century until now with a single word; Bic. In 1910 fuel based lighters were desktop affairs for rich people. Gadgets and all our technology basically has progressed to affordable and portable. You could make more complicated arguments, but mine will fit inside them. Even things like the universe have become more compact and portable with things like relativity and string theory. And you can read about it on a back lit LED screen as thin as a half a dollar.
Anyhow, Dahlgren is not a particularly well written book, and whereas I could sum up the plot fairly easily it’s a hard book to explain. It’s also not a simple request to say “just read it”. It’s long and cumbersome and as a story it’s not very satisfying for all your hard work and it will likely offend you at some point. It haunts me more than anything I’ve ever read; not in the sense that, for a very broad example, To Kill a Mockingbird haunts me (e.g. wanting to know at least one Atticus Finch, wanting a hero against injustice). In haunts me in the respect that I sometimes feel like I am living inside that novel.
To sum up the part that gets me about it, and I would completely understand someone not walking away from it with the same read; it’s a post-apocalyptic world without a defined apocalypse, and the survivors aren’t crouched in the wilderness waiting for crazies or zombies; they are in a city, most of them trying very hard to carry on with business as usual. It has always reminded me of Portland where all the weird shit is taken in stride, and not just guys with eye patches and parrots on their shoulders playing a pan flute with a fedora at their feet for tips; but institutional weird shit, even the mundane like only full service gas stations, no sales tax, a state constitution insisting it will not run in the red.
It’s not a spoiler and I’m not insisting that you read the book. It’s probably out of print. You might not like it. The protagonist, the first person narrative for most of the book (no, he doesn’t die, the parts that aren’t first person are more like him stepping outside of himself) is sexually ambiguous, doesn’t really affect any change, and the thrust, a major rule in a novel, of the change in the character is so subtle that one could imagine it doesn’t really even happen. I appreciate the affect, but I’m still not going to call it well written; I’m calling it disturbing. Sometimes I’m calling it way too close to home.
The only reason I can see it written half here (again my source is not prone to prevarication so much as paranoia and … oh, fuck. I haven’t even tried to look him up.) Is that I have, ever since I can recall, had the urge to shake things up here. There is a sort of hazy polite complacency that makes you want to play The Dead Kennedys really loud or shout explicit poetry from a grassy little strip of mown commons. I don’t know, I know it’s not just me, but I know, too, it’s not a universally held opinion. Some people like it. A guy playing a zither or a pan flute here with a parrot and an eye patch would stop from embarrassment, from co-eds in Calvin Klein polo shirts dropping change in fedora with polite thank yous and toned Gluts.
I wanted to leave something snarky for my son about the craggy old coot who pumps my gas and scares me when I look in the rear and see his crazy eyes looking back. My son appreciates the weird but, in part, because he is so very concrete. That’s a strength not a criticism, I don’t mean he’s stoic and stalwart, I mean he is pretty solid all the way through; he’s the guy the guy with the parrot wants to shock and he is unshakable.
I’m awfully close to getting a foothold here. Resistance hasn’t been futile, it just hasn’t been productive. I’m in it for the long haul and I might as well relax into it. I’m personally not in any great danger of morphing into anything resembling normative. I’m a week or two of losing the invisible and weightless monkey of marriage from my back; it’s more like taking off the Guayabera, the eye patch and the parrot and putting on an oxford and not tucking it into the wranglers. There’s eight zillion made-for-TV prison shots that all basically say something like “They can lock up your body but not your mind” and other such happy horseshit. Having been in enough jails, prisons, penitentiaries and such and having worked in one, that’s not an issue and, for the most part, neither is sodomy or flaming rolls of toilet paper. People lock up their minds on the outs all the fucking time.
All that shit about freedom(s), Right(s) and privilege(s) is all so much noise, there’s no such thing, not in the absolute sense, the sense Orthodox atheists and Theists think, not a moral line with a door that only goes one way. It’s more like a post-apocalyptic world in constant flux where you pick the things you ideally want and try defending them and if they slip through your fingers, pick another one. Prison or no, it’s all in your head. One small real world example of the last decade; the people were shocked and outraged that the US army was torturing prisoners. The moral high ground is neither a fixed place nor a real one except for martyrs and criminals. I’m not saying I’m in favor of torture, but when you send a bunch of people with automatic weapons to convince the locals of something, torture is almost quaint. The gig is to just shoot a motherfucker. The gig has no moral high ground no matter how many black and whites you’ve seen of John Wayne giving chocolate to a kid.
Loading comments...