The Sudden Exit from Sun

I was walking down 48th, which is a gravel road, when the rain came down hard. I had to stop and close my eyes and just listen to the rain hit the leaves in the trees above me and just the hiss as it surrounded me in a mist. Some girl that was a block ahead of me started running to get somewhere out of the rain, for it was coming down hard; I was already soaked. I had every intention of going home, but now I was intrigue with the idea of just walking away – going underground.
I started walking towards home at a nice leisurely pace. There is something about rain that really brings out the melancholy in me, but not necessarily a depressed tone, but a sense of serenity. The ozone smell made me smile and I turned on Rural towards my house, and the rain let off a little bit, but it still came down in a drizzle. Steam was wafting up from the street and the cars, and the sun started peaking out, which started warming things up. The sun always dampens my mood.
I snuck through the backdoor and found my room in total chaos. I had been living like a total slob, and a counselor I once had told me that your room reflects your emotional well being and my room stated that I, my friends, am a fucking mess. Help me. I picked my way through my room to the closet and dug through sweaters and shoes to find a sleeping bag. I found it, and I remembered some girl I had shared it with several years ago and that was the last time I had ever used it, so I smelled the bag to see if I remember anything at all, and I smelled a forgotten love.
I filled a backpack with clothes and my toiletries and headed out the door again and walked up Rural Street to 52nd avenue to the bus stop. The clouds were way to the Northeast now, and the sun was basically in control of the entire sky, which pissed me off because I always prefer rain over sun.
I wasn’t always that way. Ten years ago I started working at a hardware store and they put me in charge of the plumbing department, and I loved my job, but on days when the sun came up, especially Sundays, the worst people on earth came in: Homeowners. These fucks would come in with these grandiose ideas of how they were going to save money by doing the remodel, repair or project themselves.
What usually happen? They come in and ask me what I would do if I was stupid enough to attempt to move a shower basin five feet to the right. I would tell them exactly what they should do, and they wouldn’t like my advise because it was usually too hard or too expensive, so they would come up with their own plan against my better judgment, but I would help them anyway picking up the tools and materials they need to fuck up their house, and I send them away saying I’ll be there all day if they need to come back.
They always come back, and they’re covered in water and sometimes mud, and they are pissed. Most of them will ask why I didn’t try to stop them. Others will think I gave them the advice they gave themselves, so they yell at me that it was my poor advice that flooded their basement, pissed their wife off because they don’t have a shower till Tuesday, or some other reason they shouldn’t have taken this job in the first place and made the call to a plumber in the first place.
They tell me what happened and I give them some ideas and advice on how to proceed, and they usually don’t take, and they come up with a new plan all on their own, and I watch them leave knowing in three hours, I will see them again.
I got to the point that when I woke up and saw the sun coming up, I would literally get depressed as I looked for my uniform shirt, but if I woke up and the world was dark and I hear the drops hitting my window, I would almost cheer.
The bus came and I got on and sat in the bench seats that faced the back door so I can look at my reflection. I don’t know if I’ll think I’m handsome or ugly today as I sat down and scanned the bus for people I knew, interesting people to look at or hot girls, and I see none so I stare at myself as the bus rocked down 52nd going South.
I decide I’m ugly today.
I get off at the Clackamas Towne Center and wait for this other bus. I notice that I’m at the bus stop and somehow I had unconsciously com e up with some plan to escape and I am following it through blindly. I know exactly what my subconscious is doing, but I’m not conscious of it. I almost seem floating or empty as I wait. I try to push the thoughts out of my head as they enter. I don’t want to think about her. I don’t want to think about my job, or my friends, or my family or any fucking people. I don’t want to think about who I’m letting down or what I’m screwing up by leaving.
The bus comes and I go sit exactly where I sat on the first bus. Still ugly, but I keep the stare and I almost mad dog myself in the reflection. There are only a few people on the bus, so I don’t worry how weird that may look.
By the time we got on highway 224, I was the only one on the bus, but the bus driver still called every stop. There is nothing on 224 but farms and forest. I started feeling better being farther and farther away from Portland, but the thoughts entering my head were getting harder and harder to fight off. Some of them were winning and I was regretting being this far out already, but I stayed strong.
About five miles away from Estacada I pulled the stop line and waited for the bus to find the next stop, and I hoped there was still some forest there. The bus nosed up to some street that was heading into the trees, and I got off and wondered since there was no one left on the bus, if he’d still call all the stops.
I walked up the road a ways to get away from 224, and I felt tired. I felt the Tired. I wanted to curl up and just go to sleep right there, and I felt like it was because I had wasted so much of my Time. I felt the emptiness I felt earlier fill with Dread and Fear, and I had to fight each step up that lonely road.
I got to a bend in the road and right in front of me was a stand of Douglas Firs and behind them was a forest of Alder. I felt the weight of the backpack and the sudden drop in temperature. I shivered a bit, but I had my jacket on. A drop of rain hit me right in the nose, and I felt the emptiness win over the dread and fear, so I just walked into the forest as the sky opened up a torrential downpour. Thunder rocked the sky and I saw lightning to the South.
I walked for what seemed hours until it got pitch black. Rain was still coming down hard and steady, and I was drenched and cold and started feeling sore from stepping over branches and getting whipped by them, and all I could hear was my movement through the dense forest and hissing of the rain.
I felt around for a soft spot and found a bed of wet moss that was a rain sponge, but it felt softer than anything, so I lay down and closed my eyes and to my surprise I fell right to sleep.
I dreamed I was standing in the forest and the rain had stopped and I was in the middle of a small clearing which was enclosed by Oak trees older then time. I stood there almost expecting someone to come meet me there. I was watching a particular gap between two Oak trees very intently, and this was one of those dreams that I hate because I’m looking at me and I don’t look like the real me. In this dream I was an uglier version.
A stag prances into the clearing and comes right up to me. I put my hand out and the deer smells my hand and he looks at me and our eyes lock. He doesn’t blink for a long time and my eyes are watering from trying to keep mine from blinking but I lose.
He says, “Are you ready to come home?”

Let No Birds In. . .

I was sitting on my back porch trying really hard to see the meteor shower, but unfortunately I live too close to the city, but because I was out there in the dark I started thinking. Yes, my friends. Thinking. For the last month I have had way too much time to be introspective about my past and how it has lead me to this point now.

I have spent the last 16 plus years trying to put a handle on 6 years. You might laugh or not believe me, but those 6 years still haunt me. I still wake up screaming. I still jump when I hear a loud sound. People who move too fast with their hands make me nervous. I got the Fear bad.

This has also put a damper on being able to be intimate with another person for very long. I have complete fear to let someone that close have the ability to get to know me. I do have a couple of long time friends, and I do have one that has stuck by me through thick and thin; crazy or sane, but I trust him because he has seen what I have seen, done what I have done, and is doing what I am doing.

I lost another friend to suicide a couple of weeks ago, and that really messed with my trust issues. Then to top off the complete emotional challenge that is greiving, his mom asked how I stayed alive when her son didn't. I cannot answer that question, and I don't think I ever will. It seems like I have luck or bad luck on my side, depending on how you look at it.

Most of the people I have been hanging out with are newer friends. Some are only weeks old and most in the last five or less years. All I have ever wanted is just friends. Close and dear friends that live life and grow old together, but it seems like the people in my life go through me like air through a ghost.

Larry McMurty has a book called All My Friends are Going to be Strangers.

I have always wanted a wife. I like the idea of some woman legally bound to me for life as my best friend. My parents are doing it which makes it seem possible, but now that I'm knocking on 34 years old's door, I am starting to doubt my chances.

Now I'm sniffing around women that are taken or have no business getting involved in a guy like me and it almost seems like trying to begin a relationship is a futile exercise.

And who would want a depressed alcoholic who suffers from PTSD and terrible mood swings and lacks the ability for a healthy intimate relationship? I guess I've gotten pretty lucky this far, but I can't seem to think all that positivly.

I never thought I would start hearing myself grow old. Dead people don't age.

The Year Closes

2009 comes to a close, and I think people's expectations have not been met. The new government has not delivered on all the campaign promises, music and art has remained boring and margilized, and people keep on expecting something or someone to make their lives better.

I have no idea what it will take to get people to make some of the changes needed to develop a better community. Enough of just you, how are you going to make it about 'us'?

Let's try this again, for fun.

What a long hot long summer. I have gone through a lot since my last post. Dumped, new girlfriend, moved, stepped down from manager at my job, went back to school; and now it's finally fall in time and weather. I'm at my parents house and hearing the rain hit all the bamboo and evergreen leaves and that sense of melancholy has washed over me as it does every fall. Next Saturday I turn 33 years old and it is during this time that I reflect on my life. Melancholy doesn't necessarily mean depressed, it just means that I tend to reflect internally about how my life has gotten to this point.

I am old. I know that if you're older then me you'll tell me that I'm not, or if you're my age or a few years younger you'll tell me the same thing, but in all reality I am old. I have done a lot, but also have shied away from doing a lot due to fear. I'm tired. I go to a school where most of the students in my classes are more then ten years my junior. My girlfriend is 13 years younger then me. I hang out with kids ten years or so younger then me. My co-workers are all in their twenties. I am old.

I spend a lot of time feeling like I missed it. I don't know what 'it' is, but I spend a lot of times trying to figure out when and where 'it' happened and how I must have missed it. I'm back in school hoping that I find a new 'it' and that everything will be fine, but there's a little part of me that makes me think that I missed the one 'it' and now I just get to almost exist for the rest of my life. Sound depressing? It's not, for I know that it's just me going through transition.

Finally, I now believe in God again. I don't know why it happened, but I know what happened, but I really don't know why this one event lead me to believe that I now have faith in God. I am a reluctant believer, that is to say, I don't want to believe, but I do. Am I supposed to walk into church with my tail between my legs and look up at the Jesus high on the wall shrug my shoulders sit down and start singing hymns? I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. I spent the last ten or so years denouncing the fucker. Now I pray.

I'll try to keep up on this here blog again. No one reads it anyway.

Earth Day

Happy Earth Day everybody! Seriously. I watched the President give a speech at a Maytag factory in Iowa today and he said something very important about our dependence on oil. "So we shift from shock to indifference time and again, year after year." I think that this is the fundamental problem with Americans today: indifference. Obama bravely said that he refused to believe that Americans want to stay the same, that, "So the implication in this argument is that we've somehow lost something important -- that perhaps because of the very prosperity we've built over the course of generations, that we've given up that fighting American spirit, that sense of optimism, that willingness to tackle tough challenges, that determination to see those challenges to the end, the notion that we've gotten soft somehow. I reject that argument." I think that that American spirit died a long time ago. If I/We are comfortable and can drive an SUV and buy the new CDs and buy the new computers and throw everything away, then why would we try to live any differently? He forgets his American history. The American spirit was train barons, land owners who monopolized beef, mining companies that used children, steel mills that had 10 hour work days, Giant oil companies that had to be split up under anti-monopoly laws. That is how the America today became America. 

Does that mean that I think that we should loosen up labor laws or get rid of anti-monopoly laws? No. I just want to drive home the point that no matter how much Obama tries to change the American culture, that it is really really up to us: the Americans. The right will try to say that there is no climate change, or that it is not man made. They'll say that Obama is socializing companies or that he is following in Hitler and Mussolini's foot prints, and the people that they reach, their demographic, believe it. They would rather be "right" then change the wold to be a better place.

Asking the American people to come out of indifference and make a change is asking a lot Mr. President. Not while Wal-Mart has such low low prices.

sunshine

It's been nice to see the sun again. I forget how nice this city is when the sun is out and it is a little warm. I couldn't even get in a bad mood at work, and I work at a gelato shop. I'm looking forward to a warm summer.

Economy

It is so easy to blame our problems on the rich and the powerful. It's easy to rely on class and race as the reason that the world is splitting apart. The G-20 summit is in England right now deciding how to save the world economy. The 24 hour news cycles are blasting us with how bad it is and who might be to blame. Barack Obama is budgeting and taxing and making other bold decisions to stabilize the economy. Nothing seems to be working. What would?

The Right is saying that they didn't do this and that Obama and the Left are trying to socialize the finance and industrial sectors. The Left is saying that they are doing all of this because of what Bush did. No one is right.

You are to blame. You are sitting there and expecting the goverment to fix a problem you caused. I hate to be mean but you want to much stuff. You live way beyond your means. You aren't making any more money then your parents, less in some cases, and you are spending more. There is a lot of Truth when Obama asks you to help him change the culture in Washington and Wall Street. You fall for the traps that Washington and Wall Street spring on you.

Economics is a confusing and complicated science. It's more then just you buy and sell stuff that people need or want. Ecoonomics are similar to Politcal Science: it learns as it happens. That's right! The Economy is learning and growing by making mistakes. Your money and worth is based on what works and doesn't work. Oil and energy works well, and if you invest in those things you make money. You make money, others make money. You invest in morgages that will not get repaid, you don't make money, and other people don't make money off of you.

You want the solution now. The stock market has to climb 700 in one day, or nothing is working. Here is what I'd like to say on this blog that no one reads: we need to change the economy. We need to find a new system. I'm not saying Socialism is the right answer, nor am I saying that stricter regulations are an answer, but I think that how you decide to make money and spend money would change the system. Think about that.

Think about how you make your money. Who is affected? Who is being hurt? Who is gaining? What about how you spend your money. Same questions, Who is affected? Who is being is hurt and who is gaining? Do we spend more money, or do we become more self sufficent? Growing food, making clothes, shopping second hand and being less excited by name brand and fads.