Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee.
A and Uly left for PHX after a dinner of Mexer food and a solitary beer each for A and I before the airport then I drove back in the rain without them and listened to Dwight and sang along sadly and then got faded as hell on a little vodka and played video games and was alone. It was good.
Cruising altitude on the way back home, somewhere over the Pacific and I am a messy wreck of a psyche. I saw a man follow around his daughter in the terminal at SEATAC and on the train up from Portland there was a woman with her son, maybe 5, 6, and the way she loved him in those three hours of train travel made me know that he was ruined forever. Fuck all that. Here are some photos from AWP.
Street art, of a type, from the commissioned to the graffito. A large part of me is shifting, internally, on the nature of art and what that means and the awful terror that you get when you see something old, even if its shitty, but a shitty-ish thing that human hands wrought and yet persisted. Today, in the PDX Amtrak station there was a display of shit dug up from a century ago during a recent-ish renovation of the station and it was trash, all of it, broken bottles and ceramic toys and bones and metallic pieces of offal much abused by oxidation and it was the same as a 5th century BCE curved bronze and early Attic scraper that ancient and uselessly dead athletes used to rip the grime of their labor from their skins after their contests that I observed as part of a "collection" in the Portland Art Museum. I felt very afraid and on the border of disassociative most of my time in PDX.
AWP itself was a terror. Filled with what I'd heard was 12K shuffling souls (mine included) in a convention center wholly grotesque and itself on the verge of a cataclysmic geologic event that would usher in its own destruction and NO-ONE seemed to be aware that we were all that Kurtzian invertebrate sliding, slithering along the edge of a straight razor. I believed, as fervently as I ever have anything (love, God, beauty, women, liquor) that irony was a thing not in anyone's wheelhouse who had bothered to attend the conference.
Outside the local church. A and I tried to get in but the doors were locked. I picked a bloom and walked about the streets of Portland.This was where a Mary should have stood, her outstretched arms welcoming. Later, we encountered many homeless and the evidence of their passings. Later still, when A was not with me, the homeless would not bother to ask for alms. Sometimes, this world. This fucking timeline.
There are many words to describe the time, hell, all of my times, in all aspects of my lives, as if I were some DFW chronicler but I prefer to go the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra route and speak in ill informed metaphors. This does not bode well for the writing career, it seems, wherein editors require more exposition, more spoonfeeding to "engage the reader". I am rambling. The bunnies were from the PDX museum of art and they were terrifying, but not nearly as much as the other things I beheld there. A darkened closet of childhood. A night I spent at an aunt's house, my mother's fraternal twin, where there was a ventriloquist dummy in the closet whose room (my cousin's, Wesley's or Alex's, or maybe they shared a room?) in which I was supposed to sleep. Dead people and dead people and dead people and the funerary marble portraits of accusing eyed man and daughter who were immortalized and judging forever as I looked at the man's curly beard and the woman's hand uplifted and gesturing and the Roman epitaph of a man to his wife and myriad portraits of Marian visions with children in a love I'll never know, at least from my end.
Guys, I may be losing it. My sanity feels very fragile. The Sneaker Pimps are not assisting.
Jonah, when instructed by the Lord to go and prophesy against the city of Nineveh said, "Nope on that, Yahweh" and fled from God and went on to be eaten and regurgitated by leviathan and then had an unfortunate interaction with a gourd before relenting and doing as God had said and then, when the Ninevites repented only a day into his prophesy, he was bereft.
30000 feet plus. Here's hoping this gourd of a vehicle doesn't wither and die as the shade of my homecoming.
Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison.
Back to the grind.
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