Because I don't have real life lurkers on prosebox in Normal entries

This one goes out to the one I love; this one goes out to the one I left behind --- REM

Last day or two I’ve been feeling pretty beat down. No particular reason, or no reason that hasn’t been dogging me all along, was there last week will be there next week. I don’t know, I had REM blaring out of the adequate adequate jeep, came back home, hid in the attic, saw REM posted on prosebox --- It’s the end of the world as we know it. Probably a milestone for them, the beginning of both a bright future and the end. They started having to be REM after that. I don’t think anyone ever had a worse dose of that than U2.

So the video for it’s the end of the world ties in with my mood too. I don’t mean I’ve seen it before, all those music videos you love or hate or are bored of? I haven’t seen them, not sure why but the music video thing just didn’t do it for me. When MTV was new and exciting and not 24 hour reality TV, I only watched it for Beavis and Butthead. I mean I’ve been to that farm, well, not that one, but I’ve been to that place. It’s hard to describe, as an older man it almost seems like mythology I made up to spackle the wainscoting of my memory.

My son is turning thirty one in Happy Valley Today. My wife should be receiving service in Vancouver today; next Sunday the Columbian, Vancouver’s newspaper, will run a long ad “In the matter of the dissolution of marriage …” and I had breakfast with my daughter yesterday and I wrote my childhood crush, and this one goes out to the one I love, this one goes out to the one I left behind. The only really clear image I have of the place in that video was around the last time I really lived in this attic. To make a long story short, homeless junkies had sort of taken over this farm, the old folks in Europe or Florida, the junky kid, well, no one knew who was, and most of the furniture was in the fireplace.

I gave this girl a ride out there, well, she was in her twenties, and I was barely seventeen. I thought I was going to sleep with her. I didn’t. Farm animals wandered around, there was no glass in most of the windows, nobody had mucked out the barn in a long time. Half naked people nodding off on bare mattresses on the floor. It sounds made up like someone who didn’t know that lifestyle was taking a stab at describing it. There are a lot of things in my memory that I describe too loosely, if I tighten them up they become real again.

I know a lot of people with a defining trauma, an event that shapes and molds who they are. I don’t really have one of those, it’s more like a curl of barbed wire, if I’m careful enough I can climb over it, if I’m not I bleed from a thousand cuts, none deep enough to bleed out, most of them aren’t even my traumas --- I’m a witness and I try too hard, sometimes, to be a good witness.

There are nowhere near as many ghosts for me as there should be. I mean that metaphorically, though in a literal sense too. In the literal sense there seem to be no ghosts at all. Yeah, no, I don’t believe in the disembodied personalities of dead people clinging to structure or place, but the objective things people have described as ghosts, before they add their own paranormal/theological conclusions, those I’ve seen and felt a lot of. I have no idea what they are, the idea that they are souls makes for an interesting metaphor, but I don’t believe it. The metaphor being, of course, this place is soul-less.

I don’t think this place, this town is soul-less, I mean I think it’s the wrong metaphor. It’s more like there was an alien invasion and absolutely no resistance and the town was invaded by retarded aliens. That likely makes more sense to more people than the farm with the furniture in the fireplace. If you’ve ever been a local in college town you know what I mean. I suppose you could call Portland a college town, it did have a few universities and several colleges, but it also had a real industry, it’s like calling LA a college town; you could live there a long time without ever stumbling across UCLA or USC (neighborhood wise they are polar opposites like Reed College and the University of Portland). Here the University is the industry. There seem to be even less locals, the gap in age being butt heavy on 18-22 and top heavy on eighty plus and sort of barren in the middle.

Christ I’m just rambling. That’s probably a more demonstrative description of where my head is than actually trying to describe where my head is. For an agnostic I’ve been talking to god way too often and in the least practical way; I ask questions. No, I’m not having a crisis of theology, one of the cool things about God; whether there is such a beast or not, is that he doesn’t insult you with a lot of pat answers, though he doesn’t seem inclined to keep his parishioners from doing the same. I’d much rather ask god questions, especially if he doesn’t exist, than I would some clergyman. I mean I might chit chat with a clergyman who’d been to one of those farms, as long as we don’t have to talk about god. Sometimes I just have questions, it’s more important to ask them outloud than it is to get an answer, some I’d insist were just rhetorical.

I’m spent.