Sayonara, 20s

This is what I looked like.

Red Wine Blues and Rubber Duckys

[Location: Delta, CA during Wes and Jenna Highfield's Wedding, perched on a bar while loud drunken discourse swirled around me and a bridesmaid threw up on Wes' cream-colored rental vest, September 18, 2010; also somewhere between Redding and Portland, OR September 20, 2010]

The blind's blades broke like bankrupt bureaucrats. The visage of venetians parted for vomit in the violent night, with train's cogs humming, with pain's moans moaning. But to the urgent bar back, bellows heckled, chuckled, hucks and sour beers hung in harangues of a groove-jam din. The mess we're in, huckleberry, greenhorn, wiggles, digs... and every flutter bleeds in a burlesque ballroom bed. The ringing of the bells in our heads will echo, fleck, wreck our sunrise with choo-choo stirrings of sleep in the Lakehead Delta dust.

...And I wake from that train track reverie into the snaking vestibules of the Coast Starlight, writhing north in this familiar trek back home to Portland. The space-black Monday gives way in shifts, slides in a hiccuping projector as my eyelids shutter-stutter, half-an-hour at a time. The sun comes first in faint promises of pink, illuminating a low, low fog in the valleys beyond the pass between California and the future.

I'm seated next to a crocheting grandmother whose charm lies in her willingness to share everything she's brought along for the trip. Cupcakes, cookies, crackers, Boston Baked Beans, assorted other candies. I decline these with several variations of "aw, no thanks," but accept her offer to pay for coffee if I go get it for the both of us. But this is all after I wake up. When we first sit down, I ignore her as I do anyone else attempting to commiserate via railway ramblings.

"If you get cold, feel free to drape this blanket here over your legs!" she says shortly after we take our seats in the dark coach car. "It's much too big for little old me."

I'm too tired to respond, and as of yet unaware of her relative sanity. But in the morning, with the young hick country kids howling in the lounge car, strumming horrendous renditions of Slayer songs and "Dueling Banjos" - as well as jockeying in decibel position the loftiest tolerances for whiskey in bogus Larry the Cable Guy impressions - we begin to chat. The "where ya headed? "Looks like rain!" "You ever been through this country before? There's a great Chinese restaurant here...at least it used to be here..." It's the typical discourse for a long-haul like this, and a position I dread being put in prior to boarding but secretly enjoy while I'm mired within it.

"I can churn out about 50 of these hats in a week's time," she boasts, fidgeting with burgundy and white yarns. She's crocheting hats for homeless youngsters, a program set up through her church, the warmth they'll provide destined for an impoverished nation of cold domes she can't quite now recall. "One of the one's by Mexico, I think."

"They're beautiful," I say and secretly mean it.

"Well, here then! Pick one!" she offers, fishing a finished beanie from her stressed snack bag. She'd apparently started and finished one while I dreamed. This one's greens and yellows, mellow hues for me, the mellow man trying to forget everything nice about the world. This gift serves no dual purpose, no bribe, no hidden meaning at all. It's just a hat made by a wonderful grandmother, destined, now, for me, an impoverished mellow man.

I never once looked her in the eyes. Told her I was a writer as she old-lady swooned and asked me my name so she could brag if I ever had anything published outside of magazines or newspapers.

"It's all a drop in the bucket," I tell her and dread to hear my own negativity.

I'm such a fucking defeatist. I'm such an asshole.

"You're gonna be just fine," she smiles, happy lines webbing the corners of where I should be seeing her eyes but cannot. "I've got a feeling about these things."

Someday, I want to accept a gift, a compliment, anything, and not wonder what I did to deserve it. Someday I want to give someone something and expect nothing in return.

Trains, Trinidad, Try Not to Try

Though I tip-toed, tender into Trinidad, my books of atheism sprinkling the beach with denouncements of a deity, I mocked the majesty of el mar, sunk the Lost Coast black glass and swept the sand swoosh willy-nilly 'neath my sunburned toes.

And the seal pup baked in the sand, deaf to the barks of its worried mothers up the coast, who yelped in absolvent what-to-do? screeches for the shortcuts of solving the tides, of timing the rise of the foamy shore and the receding, cursed by the moods of a moon they barely know exists, as their pups grill steamy on the beach for the odorous whimsy of Newfoundlands, the bloodlust of giant sea eagles and the endless curiosity of passing children caked in sunscreen, clutching cameras, snapping photos.

Every new visitor sought your viscera, knowing the now-routine beaching of your kind, and the marine laboratory up the dune would soon cordon off your corpse with yellow tape, with orange-capped cones, with cuidado signs to study you and know why you were resigned to some cosmic abandonment.

And I thought you a shiny, sea-salty rock upon first glance, glistened by the mists of mortified el mar, deigned to act as perch for dumpy tourists' haunches and upon whose mounds would be carved the initials of fairweather lovers and the finite dates of a delusional destiny.

But the stink of your death had not yet plumed. We all guffawed.

You were hours earlier barking in the surf, looking for pups of your own, or arfing for the partner to bequeath them unto you.

Were those sunset woofs of worried mothers I heard up the coast all for you? Or is the whole world now sentenced to bark at the midnight mischief of the moon, flecked and filleted by no more caustic moans but for the collective malice of an absentee maker?

When fogs roll in, our dear, slick, dead, desecrated, sloppy brother, again, to sleepy Trinidad, you float away and feed forever in my fables of the ruse. I wake to hear you barking again.

Independence PDX

I tried to write a story once about the end of the world, of the disintegration of every breathing atom, of the unambiguous forever-spiral to the after. With every keystroke, and with every impression of the pencil on the page (half written, half typed to convey the essence of futility – failure – being the forging of the present on the past), I hoped it would happen.

I wrote, “And the sleeping mountains shaved their arboreous skins and melted their trails with awakened molten death, slow-cooked the swing sets, deep-fried the daffodils, skewered sleeping squirrels and dusted the sky with their cry,” and looked outside to the doomy precipice of Tabor and wished to see a swirling smoke give way to a landslide of magma on my room, like a thirsty baby wishing for the salvation of the slick nipple.

I typed, “All my blueberries turned to balls of heroin and I ate them to suffer the end of the world in a stupor, and the oranges turned to maces and punctured the throats of the greedy, and the moon cried tears of missiles and sent them to Jerusalem to settle the score of the war of illusions, and Mars bled red and cloaked Manhattan with an ocean of crimson and the sun winked a final coo to blot out the apples of our eyes,” and looked for fruit in my kitchen to see if it were true, and looked at my pupils in the mirror to see if their glow endured, and grumbled at their dilation.

I wrote, “The ground opened up fissures in the roadway, swallowing cars and licking the loamy Earth with whipping roots, like tentacles, snatching the scooters and bikes and eating the life of this world, re-devouring in fast forward the undeserved farmers of its dignity, of its ever-loving core,” and saw on the road a tar-scarred crack by the crosswalk and urged it to expand, to ingest the rumbling station wagon whose muffler burped along the street, coughing black through its tailpipe.

I typed, “Everyone was crying and screaming and drooling and dying, looking around for something to help, praying in the woods, looting for a last fix, setting things on fire, fucking, running, bleeding, eating, clogging the freeway to find the safe place not knowing they’d helped institute the demise of all safe places, petting their dogs, denying, raging, fearing, accepting, sleeping, finally, to death,” and lurked a family trotting in tandem down Division, linking arms by small lengths of twine, skipping, smiling, and I secretly wished their smiles were mine.

I orated, in secret inner-dialogue, “What good be the march of a man who so violates his womb the world? Who deserves the roundness of this orb upon which he both pines and pisses, to glaze his excrement to the lips of rivers, to spackle his spit on roses in the wild, to pave the deserts and build villages no one will live in? And when, oh, when will the Earth’s ruptures implore the furious ocean to spank our false cathedrals, topple every credit score, wash away our starlets’ makeup, make slanderous and vain every billboard on the freeway, and flood that freeway with starfish and dolphins gooped in oil, flopping and asphyxiated by the Brits? The Brits from whom a minority of us here descend in starving, panicked America, and from whom we now receive the ultimate fuck you. The payback for thinking we might be weaned from their loving breast, for dreaming in our infantilism of outlasting centuries of monarchies and the wisdoms culled from centuries of failure. Here, now, we endure the penultimate folly, finally recognizing the familiar reflections in the flashes of the pan.

America, whose beaches’ sands grow tired of our bitter spills, whose fingers point the blame in every direction except back at itself, whose sons and daughters have smelled death and known rebellion just by being born and who contrive to live the lie bequeathed them, whose opportunistic bents ingrained from birth prove both boring and lethal…

…to everything but us…

I opened the newspaper and saw pelicans trapped in a stinking oily hell, and guffawed at video streams of gushing black clouds erupting from the broken drills, and imagined the slow death of the Earth as being perhaps better than the quick. When we look in the mirror, we see our ineffable faults and keep them secret, and deign ourselves to dream that we can overcome. And lie to ourselves in every way, everywhere, always. And we kill all that is not us, in whispered sentimentality, by forgetting to give warning that we know not what we do.

I tried to write a story about the end of the world, and realized it’s already here.

Jupiter by Candlelight

I am the untouchable novice, wiggling, squirming, burrowing between the membranes and marrow and cells to the tissue-paper truth.

I am too small to see, too innocuous to ignore.

I riddle the ruse and strangle the sage, leaving loopy, rubber casts wherever the steady hides its hearth.

He was the ransacked flesh, sloppy, moppy, forgetting all the marble-columned pillars supporting leaky roofs.

He was too big to be, too gutless to abhor.

He fiddled with facts and lusted on love, coaxing coarse concrete bunkers whenever sun shone on his heart.

She was the unknowable fate, cruising, bruising, drooling through the chicken-wire barricade to reach the ripened eggs.

She was too false to flee from, too reckless to be real.

She sidestepped the savory and usurped the unique, draining every last rivulet from whichever lazy vessel she observed.

They were the oldest story ever told.