The last few days I’ve been thinking about being a kid. Some of it is even voluntary. I mean like zero to maybe twelve. The world was pretty magical; huge piles of snow, baseball from dew to dusk, pretty polish girls. Somewhere in there one of my early memories came back. We had just returned from Cambridge England, a year sabbatical. I remember how familiar the house seemed and how alien the world. It’s that feeling that I can’t shake.
It’s a deep memory because of the confusion, the emotions I couldn’t articulate; embrace or shove away, laugh or cry. I can articulate the feeling better now. This is not my air, not my water, not my land. It’s stagnant and decaying. Wait, it’s a sick decay, I don’t mind decay, it’s what new growth comes from. Sick decay is just rot, like dry rot in wood; it looks stable but it crumbles under your weight and not even lichen will grow in the dust.
I had this girlfriend in between marriages. She assumed I had a horrible childhood because I told her about all the hitch-hiking and early adventures in sex. We were in bed and spent or I might have gotten angry. I stroked her and said I had a great childhood. That small conversation has haunted me for twenty five years. From age thirteen on I was trying my hardest to get out of here and when I was here I was reckless.
I also almost remember being homesick when I moved to Portland. I think, perhaps, it was more the deep understanding that I’d likely never see my old friends again or that when I did we’d be alien to one another. I don’t recall pining for this place the way I do for Oregon, with a bone weary longing like the loss of a loved one. On one very real, pragmatic and non-romantic level though, I miss air and water. I almost feel claustrophobic outdoors, more so than I have ever felt in a crowded elevator. With the elevator you know the doors will open sometime.
The GF called with a migraine. She says today is migraine weather. It’s the first day in over a week my eye and head doesn’t hurt. That’s why this entry, rough and ill hewn as it might be, is important to me. All of us spend a lot of our time pretending we aren’t annoyed, bothered, fraudulent, afraid — a whole host of feelings with an even larger host of covers, of ways of saying “hi, how’re you? It’s so nice to see you.” Instead of shouting “I want to die, I want to Fuck, I want to blow things up!” Sorry, just examples. I don’t want to forget the air and water, or, rather, I do but then it’ll be mysterious why and what I’m covering.
I mean we cover shit to ourselves. Probably poorly chosen examples; dying, fucking and blowing things up are too powerful of impulses to stay buried. At least two of them are primal racial conscious impulses and inevitability. My days are unstructured, but when they were I had to tell myself a million lies to get out of bed, brush my teeth, dress and go out into the world. Million might be hyperbole and lies isn’t the right word; I had to create who I was for the day. It was simple enough, I didn’t have extra identities, but, in keeping with the already poor examples, I needed reasons not to shout at the world I want to die, I want to fuck, I want to blow shit up! The means for which have always been at my fingertips.
As I might have mentioned I’m going to Oregon for my daughter’s wedding this fall. My biggest fear is that I won’t want to leave and all this maudlin sighing will turn to resentful huffing and puffing.
And there is a bigger badder question, especially if my complaints about air and water are just noise, if not migraines what the hell is wrong with my head? I can’t really handle one more chronic health problem. The GF, who knows these things, thinks that a reasonable doc would take a pet scan. What the hell? Brain cancer? I don’t know. I doesn’t hurt now. If there is such a thing as migraine weather … I went for a drive and a bit of a walk, kept things short in case migraine weather crept in, but did it just to test migraine weather. I don’t know.
I can’t believe That Saunders took the democratic primary in Michigan and, I think, Trump took the republican one. Growing up here politics were vibrant, from the very liberal campus and protests, to the stoic conservative farming communities to the east, north and south. Trump and Saunders are not even real candidates. They are extremes of left and right. Well, no, not really, but for presidential candidates they are as extreme as the middle will hold. This town and the GOP seem to be following the same path; self-destruction, slow and calculated, sick decay.
I was reading some article about all the people who swear they are leaving the country if Trump gets elected. The article was about the five easiest places to visit without complicated visas and such. I thought it was a joke at first, but by the end it seemed more like an advertisement for travel disguised as an op ed. As an Op Ed it was cynical fluff which is a lot like a peanut butter and sardine sandwich. I think a motherfucker who wants to go would have already gone, you don’t need an excuse like a stupid electorate. The American voting public and I don’t agree very often and I’m a motherfucker who would go live in another country, and yet if that was my excuse I’d lie and make up another one. It’s a more pleasant way to live to be going somewhere than to always be leaving.
By way of consistently poor example; I want to die, I want to fuck, I want to blow shit up is also I want to live, I want to … um, fuck, I want to build things. It’s a matter of perspective. I’ve got shitty perspective right now and all my fancy tricks to change it aren’t working very well. The perspective, change the perspective. When it comes down to it if I want something bad enough I take it or do it or whatever verb fits. I wouldn’t, however, move to a country suggested by a poorly disguised op ed. One of their suggestions was way north Norway, an area I can’t pronounce, where though it’s impossible to get a work visa or a job or citizenship, apparently no one gives a fuck what your status is. They had a picture of what looked like snow dunes.
I looked at the clock. It’s 333. That’s got to mean something.
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