SE 23rd and Madison (August 1993)

It’s 1130pm, just got back from eating noodles at the Bagdad Theater, after working at the Movie House.  I rode up there in the night air, warm and sweet this August, the moon roving across town with me.   Sitting at the table, thinking about you, your friend, Sean Croghan, came over to say hi.  I’d never seen him before the other night, raging up on stage with his band, and then I see him twice today.  There you were, your presence barely one degree removed, intimations of something far more deeply interfused.  They live underground, like cicadas, while I work towards a gainful future.  When conditions are just right they emerge, if only briefly.  

It’s the kind of night you lie in bed sweating, makes being inside all the harder.  Summer forces those choices between what needs doing and what the enjoying.  All  I want is to be in the sun and ride around Portland, but there’s all this planning and work to do for next year, so soon to sleep, and maybe dream.  The window’s open—winds lightly blow, rustle the thin curtains like gauzy billows.  Cars zoom by, gaining speed as they dash up and down hill.  The rocky scrape of a lone skate boarder’s wheels across the dry, black pavement.  He races hard and off the curbs of SE 23^rd and Madison, again and again.  When I look out he’s flying, arms outstretched, then falls, as if with intention.  We should all know how to take a fall like that.  Nancy Row, who lives in the corner apartment, leans out her window, says “Do that somewhere else, please.”  Who wouldn’t want to fly?  Even if you had to go somewhere else to do it.  There’d be a whole lot less desperation were there any guarantee of more nights like this.

The swelter of these last three days, their two nights, like the cresting of waves.  They slowly pull away from shore, a deep breath, and then surge back in a series of heaves.  Nothing resists.  Why even think about writing?  I feel guilty doing it, like some voyeur of my own life, guilty for not getting more of it down.  It was so hot yesterday I gave up and got drunk instead.  There wasn’t much else to do, under the circumstances.  I sat at the Barley Mill Pub with some number of pints.  The clouds were still, silent, as if permanently fixed, desiccated wisps without aim or desire.  Back home I held conversations with numerous message machines and tried to sleep, but August would not yield.  In my underwear I went into the living room and sat.  About 230am the guy across the street started playing Pink Floyd and moving his furniture.  I forgave the momentary lapse of reason—after all, we were in this together, these high and just proceedings.  When I got melancholy, I went back to bed.  

The next day I worked at the Movie House again and, afterwards, ran into Brian Wells, so strung out on his romantic disposition I felt jealous of its intensity, like Blake’s Aged Ignorance clipping the wings of cherubim.  I wanted to fly, too, but doubted, wondered about its worth, this disease, fit or fever, some sort of seasonal disorder.  You see it in those muttering to themselves about obscure theoretical texts, the eternal recurrence of historical events, endless sequences of numbers, hands moving across imaginary blackboards.  What I assume you shall assume—scattered freely, threatens to overwhelm and swallow whole.  It weakens the constitution, whatever holds us together, a clear, swift torrent—the only problem not to stand out of its way, for variety, experience, material.  We don’t have to suffer, but it helps.  Keeps the narrative eventful.  Everything weaved together out of necessity.  There is nothing else—this is all.