I sincerely apologize…

It’s been a hell of a month and it seems knowing me was a sure fire way to have some trauma in your life:

Three people I know lost loved ones this month, one losing two friends in seperate overdoses. A friend’s grandfather also was admitted to the ICU with a highly elevated white blood cell count but no tests have proven conclusive last I’d heard…

My parents’ both lost their cars in one fell swoop. A high speed chase ended in my dad’s van which ended in my mom’s car. Both rear axles were snapped and the insurance company towed the derelict husks away in exchange for a total of five grand which, as you probably know, doesn’t buy a new car let alone two. This instigated a week-long mess for the folks which involved trains to Sacramento, cell phones landing in Salt Lake City needing to be returned, locking keys in cars (on loan) and a faulty oil change dumping everything on the street and leaving the car empty and needing to be towed to a diagnostic by Honda. When I last saw them they were just finishing the paperwork for the accident a week prior and looked pretty worn out.

My roommate had a late night collision leaving his bike a little fucked, the car unfucked and some staples in his head. Black eye, swollen face, light concussion ambulance ride and a night in the hospital. After a couple days being cared for by his mom he returned home wearing huge and ugly sunglasses but in a chipper mood.

Two friends spent time in psych wards, one brought by the cops and one on their own terms. The spiral of impact these events had on others was enough to wipe me out for a month on their own so luckily they happened within a week of each other smack dab in the middle.

One friend decided to check into rehab which I guess is good but also carries a lot of bad into the conversation. The same head-trip as the last paragraph, I suppose: where were you before all this happened and why do you think trying to deal with if after makes up for the neglect and carelessness you showed not being there for people… Ah…

Hell, I was declined for the first credit card I ever applied for because I don’t have any references. How do you get references? You have previous credit cards. They offered me a lower limit pre-paid card but frankly I just wanted free airline miles so fuck you and the pigs…

Feel like I’m forgetting things and to be honest I probably am since I lost my ability to think about two weeks ago and have only slowly begun to sleep more than six hours at a time and complete sentences again.

It wasn’t all bad: a friend of mine found out she was pregnant (which was good news) and two friends just announced today they had birthed a baby girl. Two friends got married (to each other, which is easier to deal with) and I was allowed to watch. A lot of people were in town who I don’t get to see very often and it was great to be able to spend a little bit of time catching up. Then again my friend in from Minneapolis was hung over when we met (we only had an hour due to my dealing with some shit and his previous engagements) and tho he was doing well it did come out that someone we had both worked with and been friends with years back had been killed a couple years ago in an accident. Tho by a bow or a boat I’m still not certain. Anyways, it brought the already quiet and still morning to an even slower speed.

Anyways, a pretty polarized month. More eventful then most, to be sure, but I’m not really made for constant activity of the best sort let alone the worst. Again, I’m sure I’ve neglected to write something down so if I’ve missed your personal trauma and you would like an apology just get in touch. If I neglected your happiness remind me of that too unless I just pissed you off…

Sorry for another indulgent, off the wrist posting. No pics, no links, no regard for the world outside my head… Shame, for shame! I promise to get the pony started in July with actual research and thinking and cross-references and babies flying out of carriages and shit… Seems like I’m dripping topics from my pants right now.

Let’s be safe out there.

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After a difficult internal debate the votes were tabulated and it was decided that attendence was unavoidable. The walk down Townsend, left on 4th, right on Bryant was made, ending in a small doorway concealed from the street by a small sickly tree. Two windows on either side, choked with neon lights looking more like fire hazards then enticing adverts. Inside the darkness that only real despair can achieve– a dim sallow light accenting the filth and decay instead of chasing it from the room. An odd place for a company holiday party, but then again it was an odd company.

It was a small bar that never felt full. The door leads to a short bar on one side,one bathroom and a wall directly across. Three beers draft but one was Beamish and since there were drinks already paid for (for the first hour) and they didn’t seem interested in how old I was Beamish was the drink. A jukebox past the bar in the corner hanging off a partition had been plugged full of quarters and Myrna, the company founder, had selected every Eagles and Bee Gees song she unearthed. This was not irony, it was sad. In quieter times the jukebox was cheaper than most but the selection reflected this and many times the same songs were played.

Past the jukebox, behind the partition it hung from, was a small raised platform with a couple dartboards and a couple small tables making a game of darts impossible. They had a sushi spread that day, pizza showed up later, and the writing staff held court looking down their noses at the tech staff who seemed to dress in the dark every day. Across from the platform was the pool table, cheaper than most, about a foot shorter than most. Five or so booths stretched back from the table to the end of the room, two more dartboards hung amidst Budweiser banners and sad little pennants.

So we sat, milled about, talked about work or the latest internet gossip. Myrna wittled away her sobriety and staggered thought the proceedings with flushed face and began singing along to the soundtrack. I sat at the bar with two of the bitter tech staff talking shit. The bartender seemed bewildered by this flood of people and tried her best but her ability to work in such a fast paced environment was not quite enough to make her seem comfortable.

This place was great, even crowded with the social retards and fashion wannabees I worked with at the time. Bars were never places I wanted to be but this wasn’t a bar so much as a clubhouse for people that had been kicked out of the more reputable clubs. On a normal night you may find a couple quiet drunks at the bar watching TV, whatever game might be on, or talking their non-conversations with the bartender. Occasionally a pool game, occasionally a couple at a booth playing Scrabble. It was a neighborhood bar in a part of town that was predominantly commercial and industrial, a part of town that was desolate at night except for the periodic rattling of a shopping cart or roar of a rice rocket headed towards the freeway. It was a half hour walk from my house but one I made eagerly.

A friend used to work swing shift and I would swing by when the crew got off. Everyone would caravan down Bryant as fast as possible and order two or three drinks upon arrival. The bartender passed out makeshift ashtrays and wandered around the motley collection trading jokes or just milling about. She would make last call at two and seemed to appreciate the business if not the company. Of course it was just as likely to be closed on any given night, without warning and often without any indication it had been closed forever.

It’s been closed forever, gutted and gone. No more Eagles Drift In Lounge. Just another casualty.

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Walking down the stone steps running alongside the house from the garage to the lower lawn I find a deer has wandered into the trees just beyond the backyard. It seems unconcerned at being surrounded by houses, distant cars, hammering and voices; not wanting to push my luck or disturb the animal I carefully continue down navigating the dried fallen leaves as best I can. It doesn’t take long for my clumsiness to announce my presence but still the deer doesn’t care– just looks up at me and evaluates the threat level as laughable. Fine by me, I just didn’t wanna disturb your grazing. I watch from the patio as the deer shuffles through the trees and shrubs, slowly following the gentle grade behind more houses and out of sight. The next time I’m coming down the stairs, this time carrying a box of laundry, I scare the holy bejeezus out of a garter snake by almost stepping on it.

Olympia’s a strange place to me– I love it but I’ll never understand how it can exist. Half college town, half Pacific Northwest industry town, indie-rock capital of the world, Washington State capital. Small town with a cosmopolitan heart? The farmer’s market has better facilities than any around San Francisco, complete with a stage and aging jazz quartet, but they still mostly sell apples. A ten minute stroll from Aaron’s house through a mix of winding suburban streets and dusty country lanes will lead you to a bakery (The San Francisco Street Bakery) that sells tofu spreads and imported cheeses. After you’ve clogged some arteries gorging on potato skins, burgers and grease at the Rib-Eye Diner you can walk down to one of the other few 24 hour places in town, Desire Video where they sell the usual sex videos and toys. You know, next to the RV lot and across the street from the Co-Op.

There’s an annual downtown art-walk, there’s performance spaces, there’s a hip record store and an attached vintage clothing shop, there’s punk-houses and basement recording studios. There’s also the port where military vehicles and personnel embark on the journey to Iraq, the towering steel loading cranes standing in stark contrast to the evergreen Douglas Fir trees and the waters of Puget Sound. Walking down 4th you’ll pass representatives of middle-America standing in front of their bars, a little more round than they should be, a little more loud and a little less aware of how to dress; then you’ll pass anemic looking indie-rockers with their tight jeans and cute cotton dresses, dyed hair and dazed faces. There’s a breakfast/brunch cafe that’s closed on Sundays, Japanese and Thai and Vietnamese restaurants, used bookstores and fabric stores where you can take knitting classes. Yoga. Also a lot of empty lots, old abandoned warehouses and drunk transients asking for change. The abortion clinic welcomes a once a week protest that’s so routine now you can, the clinic has begun raising money by having donors sponsor the pro-lifers who wave pictures of fetuses at people.

Strange, but again I do love it. It’s relaxing and comforting, removed from the hustle and bustle but with everything you could ever expect or hope for in a city to some degree. Less then forty-five thousand residents and I can still be a non-driving, vegetarian, meandering quasi art-fag pseudo-liberal just like here in SF, except that I would never be able to score a job. Most of the work in Olympia is government office work– there’s a new monolithic structure dedicated entirely to processing child-support checks for the state. This is not something I could sneak into. There’s little shops here and there but retail has never been something I excel at, really. It’s not a very rich town, all in all, and work is hard to come by. Maybe that’s why Olympia hasn’t become bloated with graduates from The Evergreen State College. Four years of la-la land earns them a design it as you go degree in light and sound or basket weaving but once you’re done there’s no where to put these valuable life-skills to work, not around here.

All around Olympia change is coming– malls sprawling along the border with Lacey and subdivisions crawling through Tumwater. A housing boom is employing construction workers but with every wall erected a little bit of what the place was dies. Having listened to my parents talk about the areas around Sacramento changing from the open fields and orchards of their childhood to the suburban blight it is today I guess I know how it’ll turn out in the end. Can’t wait to visit one day and see the new Walmart. Kinda doubt there’ll be any deer milling about the parking lot, tho.

Fuck, change is now. After we’d driven down to Portland and checked into our hotel Aaron got a phone call from his landlady. He occupies the sealed off downstairs of a house and while we were waking up around eight in the morning her half was being robbed. They got in by using a spare key hidden in a deck chair– they’d been casing the place which may explain why his iPod and her satellite radio player were stolen from their cars a couple weeks prior. The next morning Beth got a text message– they came back and stole her car in the middle of the night.

Portland is a proper city with tall buildings and five hundred thousand more residents. Change has already come to what the only person we spoke to on the street called, “Little San Francisco”. Every block of downtown is undergoing extreme renovation and half the streets have been dug up. You can get vegan doughnuts twenty-four hours a day now but it looks like soon you’ll have to work a little harder and a little more frequently in order to be able to afford to live there. Ten years ago I was first in town fresh off a train from the midwest. The neighborhood surrounding both the Amtrack and Greyhound stations was a collection of old warehouses, empty streets, crumbling sidewalks, drunks, junkies and pushers. If I hadn’t been stricken with a terrible headache I might have enjoyed wandering around a great deal more– we found a quiet little deli run by an older Asian woman where you could get a sandwich on one of three breads and it came with a small bag of potato chips, a place where the guys working at the whatever factory down the street would eat everyday. Now they’ve called this the Pearl District and it’s unrecognizable. Design Within Reach. Imported furniture. Expensive fusion restaurants. People wearing Gucci. Paninis. A park with a fountain and kids playing. Every warehouse has been converted or bulldozed to be replaced. Nothing in SF compares– you’d have to take the Marina and shove it into SOMA as best as you could. This time around I was feeling sick and, killing time waiting on a plane, was wandering through here baking as the temperature chased 90. Where can I sit for a couple of hours and read for the price of a cup of coffee? I asked a woman smoking in front of her job which sells expensive woolen car seats where to go. She had me leave the neighborhood and cross the freeway: not because she was a lesbian or because I looked too scummy for the district but because she understood. Kinda. I ended up at a place that was Starbucks without the franchise. Oh well, what’re you gonna do? It’s Portland.

Audrey Knows.

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Tongue-tied with a sudden sharp ache in my chest as my faltering heart becomes overrun with an adrenal sneak-attack. The prospect, the very idea, of attempting communication– the simple art of opening my mouth and flooding the local atmosphere with my wit and humour– sends shock-waves through by body, one powerful surging tide of anxiety laying waste to vital organs and clumsy limbs alike. Just a little self-contained Nagasaki, babies bursting into flames created by the friction caused when I come into contact with the outside world.

An extreme example: another collision with a mystery wandering around the neighborhood where I find myself employed. For all intents and purposes she remains a fictional character, an empty husk in a demure coat flitting from vague instances of imagination to the busy streets of anonymous obstacles clogging my day like a drowned rat clogs a toilet when you try and flush the little bastard. However, as these non-interactions become more frequent the little monkey living in the back of my brain where the lizard became the man has begun to take a pair of pliers to various nodes and nodules responsible for a variety of impulses best left alone. Yet as the growing desire or compulsion to attempt some form of communication beyond awkward eye contact and reflexive looking away there also grows the more overwhelming physiological impact of a possible exchange.

But as I said this is an extreme example. Typically social interactions are fraught with nausea, faintness, a burning desire to leave and my hands and mouth cross-dressing. It’s a very rare occasion when I find myself at a party and a nearly extinct one where I leave feeling that the evening wasn’t yet another challenge to my right of existence. Against any available wall-space or tucked into some convenient corner a mental checklist is checked more thoroughly than any examination by Santa Claus or the CIA. I don’t know how to behave, how to approach anyone, how to effortlessly and naturally become part of a conversation, how to think, how to dress, how to talk and even if I did what the fuck am I gonna talk about? There’s a million and one rules of engagement in any social gathering and I will violate each and everyone until I’ve shamed the poor sods who invited me into leaving to make sure I get home okay.

Not that I need to go to parties and attempt to fit in, make nice, meet people or enjoy myself. This is an avoidable pitfall and nine times out of ten I’m smart enough or balanced enough to decline any well-intentioned invitation to leave the safety of my little hovel. Unfortunately, while life is full of parties, it’s also full of various obligations which require even more stringent application of communication skills and an ability to stand in the correct line with the correct paperwork and the correct questions and answers. I’ll be taking to the friendly skies soon and my excitement about this impending vacation is tempered by an acute fear of dealing with the airport, getting stressed out and anxious, then boarding a death-trap which will use the force of gravity against my stomach and fill my head with visions of corrupted fuselage breaking apart. I’ve been told there will have to be an exchange with the plastic smiles lurking behind the check-in counter instead of the animosity expressed by the automated tellers. I think the last time I checked-in through the counter one of my bags was x-rayed and my other bag and I were both stopped by security and humiliated publicly.

This would be more of a brick-wall in my life if my job was better paying and I found reason to, I dunno, check out pyramids somewhere. Trouble commences whenever I need to ask someone at a store where something might be– I know that it won’t exist until I ask some over-worked and under-paid future assistant manager for life who will drop everything they’re doing to take me right back to where I was looking and politely point out the neon lights and bells and whistles surrounding the product of choice. Hell, ask the guy down at one of my liquor stores how well I deal with paying the correct amount. Then there are times in your life where you have to enter some strange place with bad carpeting and worse lighting where employees have compulsory attire and perfect, white teeth. A faint memory of intentions long drugged, murdered and dismembered slowly began to haunt me after reading an article detailing the recent protests which briefly interrupted the shareholders’ meeting for Berkshire Hathaway. (more…)

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Thirty years of working just to put food on the plate. Once you went to Paris but the place wasn’t that great.

Before the European adventure became a right of passage for recent college graduates visiting Paris seemed to be strictly a behavior of the ultra-rich, idealistic artistes and Joe-Schmo working-man after securing a good percentage on a mortgage and a decade straight of enduring helpful suggestions from the wife about how to blaze through the meager savings desperately accrued through hard labor and drinking the cheaper beer. Most never made it across the Atlantic and it’s a wonder that Hawaii hasn’t become the island version of Las Vegas. (more…)

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