TGIF

     Spring is here and while it's great to see the dull canvas of the world enlivened by daffodils and cherry blossoms, my daily routine has become fairly miserable. I don't get out much, and when I do I feel like I'm sloshing through a shallow sea of filth. The faces of people on the street or in the grocery store seem grotesque and menacing. The city -society in general- feels like it is collapsing in on itself. Everything is expensive, meals are disappointing, My default state of mind is a slurry of anxiety and paranoia and discomfort.

    February was especially brutal. On top of all the other issues I'm battling, including a toxic workplace and my bum foot acting up, I had to get a rotten tooth pulled. The next day I had my cat put to sleep. He was only eight but was suffering from stage 4 kidney disease, which they caught too late to treat. The apartment feels so empty now, the only sound comes from the animal upstairs thundering back and forth in the middle of the night. I'm drinking nearly every night, and shoveling as much junk food into my gullet as I can. As a result, I've put on weight, which helps keep me mired in a pit of self-loathing. I can't seem to stop telling myself I am fat and balding and ugly and will obviously never be loved or touched by a woman ever again. It does no good to think this way, I know; it only serves to prove what a weak fuck-up I am. But it's so hard to fight that current, and I'm so tired, and I don't even have a kitty to greet me when I come home.

    I have been trying to get out more when I can summon the energy. Last weekend the sun resurfaced for a few days, and I went to some poetry readings and a dance recital, which were all stimulating. A cute woman in line at the grocery store told me I looked great and that she loved my outfit. Best of all, I spent the day with a friend driving to the Maryhill Museum, taking in the beauty of the gorge on the way. These things have all been nurturing, as have the books I've been devouring and the music I've been destroying my hearing with. And I'm looking forward to a day trip to Seattle followed by a longer vacation at the end of May. But I go home every night drained and disheartened and unable to paint or write or even draw much. I can no longer fight the current of entropy. I want to just let my bloated body go limp as a rotting sea cow and allow the whirlpool to suck me down, down into its depths.

Valentine

It's February 16th and in the employee break room a single heart-shaped cookie sits face-down on the lid of a plastic carton. A chunk of the cookie has been snapped off. Pink sprinkles are everywhere. A lonely, broken heart...the most pathetically obvious metaphor imaginable. Yet there it is. It was here yesterday as well. It infuriates me. Why is it that people find themselves unable to take that last piece, that last morsel, that last slice? Is it due to guilt, or an unwillingness to clean the dishes (or, in this case, throw a disposable container into the rubbish bin, which is two feet away) or perhaps both? If we can't even be bothered to dispose of a single fucking cookie, what hope is there to tackle any of the world's catastrophes and crises? My rage dissipates as quickly as a sugar high, and I dump both container and cookie into the bin and head downstairs to clock in to another day of trying not to lose patience with my fellow humans.

Safer

When I get to work in the morning, everyone on the night shift looks rattled. They brief me on the events of the night before, then clock out and stumble home. I tell myself not to watch the footage, but of course I do. What is that part of us that needs to see a thing to make it real? And why would I even want to make it real? Best to leave it a myth, a dream, a jumble of words without an accompanying illustration.

But I watch despite myself, and despite the less-than-cutting-edge nature of the technology at hand. There are cameras on every side of the building, but the ones out front are mounted high up on the roof, and their focus is less than sharp, especially at night. They don't always record properly, and there are often glitches and dead spots in the footage.

In any case, a little before eleven, a man can be seen on camera standing by the retaining wall in front of the building. The picture flickers and suddenly he's lying on his back on  the sidewalk. A huge dark splotch spreads beside him. You can't actually see it spread because it does so very slowly, but if you look away then look back, you'll notice it's grown. There are other streaks of darkness across the ground which we later find out are urine. The man had stopped to take a leak against the wall, but now he's lying on his back. One of his legs twitches, just once.

A cop car pulls up. An ambulance follows, though it doesn't linger. Eventually more vehicles arrive and before you know it officers are everywhere. There's a flurry of camera flashes, and the body that so recently walked around and ate and drank and relieved itself in public is now just lying completely still, and continues to do so for hours until another ambulance, or possibly the same one, pulls up and a gurney is wheeled out and the body is placed on it and covered up and driven, without much urgency, away.

As far as graphic depictions of violence go, it's pretty tame. And watching it played back on a screen rather than see it in person, in real time, shields me from some of the shock. The sidewalk is quickly cleaned off, but there's still a dark stain that lingers for hours. I go out and look at it. It's not red or even brown, just sort of gray. It could have been left there by anything. 

The stain is gone by lunchtime, power-washed away by our custodial staff. You would never know that someone had died right here, but of course someone has died pretty much everywhere you can think of, on every street corner, in every building, in every room. Perhaps not stabbed to death though, which is what apparently occurred to that man during that gap in the footage. Life is riddled with these gaps. Sometimes it feels that life is mostly just gaps, with the actual moments of reality scattered like stepping stones across the void. As he stepped from one of these stones last night, after looking around and taking one last piss on our beautiful planet, a man was stabbed to death, and thus went toppling into the abyss. During my break I go out and look down at the perfectly blank slab of sidewalk no longer darkened by even the vestige of a stain.

Just before I'd gotten to work, one of the night guards was doing his patrol inside the building when he heard someone screaming and crying outside. He went out to find a half-naked woman sitting on the wall, pouring Dr. Pepper into her eyes. She sobbed that her boyfriend had just sprayed her with mace. The guard ran to get her a bottle of water and tried to help flush her eyes out. She asked him to call an ambulance. As he stood there waiting by the curb with her, passerby kept asked her if she was okay, assuming the guard was harassing her. When the authorities arrived, she put on the rest of her clothes and rode off with the paramedics while the guard filed a report with the cops. The main officer was the same one who had first responded to the stabbing earlier in the evening. The guard said the guy looked barely old enough to shave.

I'm surprised to see that the local news immediately runs a brief story about the killing. And they say that journalism is dead. Of course, it’s only a few lines, texted in by probably the only reporter left in the city and copied and pasted by every news outlet. 

Our director sends out an email with mental health resources compiled by HR, along with reminders about safety protocol.  "Use the buddy system as much as possible when leaving work after dark," is one suggestion. "Birdies (personal safety alarms) are available for check out from the control room" reads another. Only one employee takes us up on the Birdie offer, a petite, perky young woman who seems a little sheepish about asking to borrow one of the devices. "Yellow or white?" I ask her, holding them both up. They're nondescript blobs of plastic with a ring on one end attached to a carabiner. She says she likes the yellow but the white one matches her purse, and will therefore be better camouflaged. "How does this work, do you just pull the ring?" she asks. I say I guess so; I've never actually seen one activated. "Should I try it?" she asks, a mischievous gleam in her eye. I tell her to go for it. She yanks the ring and the little thing starts screaming and flashing. Maybe the idea is to annoy the attacker to within an inch of his life. She snaps the ring back in and smiles and thanks me and trots off, no doubt feeling safer already.

The Magnificat

     When I arrive at work I am greeted by a large black turd waiting at the foot of the steps. I step over it and go inside, where the night crew are laughing about it. It's all they can talk about. One of them has named it Bob. As a metaphor it's irritatingly obvious. Construction has begun and there are a lot of changes in personnel. Things at the museum are becoming increasingly grim.

     An enormous banner on the side of the building seems to promise an entire show devoted to the art of Botticelli, best known for one of the most parodied paintings of all time, The Birth of Venus. In reality, there is just a single example of his work inside, hanging by itself in one of the few galleries still open to the public during renovation. The people who make these decisions never have to explain these kinds of things to confused visitors or see the looks of disappointment on their faces.

     Madonna of the Magnificat is a small, round painting of the Blessed Virgin with her immaculately conceived son perched on her lap. Before her sits an open book in which she is writing the Magnificat, a New Testament canticle named for its first line, "My soul hath magnified the Lord." I can't help but picture this Lord as a bug being looked at through a magnifying glass. Love or kindness appear nowhere in the hymn; this is a plea for mercy to a fickle deity. Even Mary, blessed though she may be, finds herself groveling and thanking the father of her child for not smiting her.

     The infant's chubby little paw rests on his mother's arm as she writes. The idea is that he's guiding her hand, but coupled with the way he's gazing up at her -with the look of a child trying to see how much he can get away with- it seems to me like he's trying to restrain her. His hand resembles a doll's hand that has been sewn to his wrist. His left hand clutches a pomegranate. His head has been deformed in the way that artists sometimes do to their subjects to compensate for the distortion that occurs when a picture is hung high on the wall.

     The other figures in the painting are normally proportioned, however. Mary's face is flawlessly executed, and seems appropriately radiant. Three angels stand to her right, their flesh rendered so delicately that all the other paintings in our collection look clumsy in comparison. One angel looks down at the book. Another stares into space, distracted or bored. The third holds the inkwell and looks directly at Mary in a way that seems impudently bold. Mary in turn concentrates on her work, her lips parted, her nib poised on the rim of the inkwell. It's impossible to tell if she's about to dip it, or if she already has. I'm not sure why this detail seems important to me, or why it strikes me as being so sensuous.

    Rays of light emanate from the heads of all except the Christ child, and bits of gold float through the air like flakes of glowing ash from a bonfire. In the distance lies a perfunctory landscape, nondescript enough to not distract from the otherworldly creatures in the foreground.

     The frame bursts with carved fruits and blossoms the size of gilt walnuts, providing a chunky contrast to the delicate, jewel-like scene it encircles. It's like peering at a sublime world through a kitschy porthole. All in all, it's an exquisite little piece, and when things get too stressful during these difficult days I go upstairs to lap up some of the succor it offers before creeping back down to the garbage-strewn, shit-stained world.

Welcome Home

  A block away from the museum, on Jefferson, an Amazon pick-up storefront opens, on the first floor of a huge high rise built to replace one of the old brick apartment buildings. The storefront was once the entrance to The Mural Room, a jazz/strip club, which did indeed feature murals of jazz legends. Rectangular planters squat on the sidewalk in front of the building, though the plants are always being yanked out of them.

The store is a glorified pick-up locker, with a human working the counter. I try to keep my Amazon patronage to a minimum, but there are always people coming and going, often double-parking on the busy bus route or bike lane. Like so many other places, it closed during the pandemic, then reopened with reduced hours. One day, with no warning, they tape a printed notice on the door saying they have permanently closed. They remove the lockers along the wall to reveal the back room, on the wall of which are the words CUSTOMER OBSESSION. A few days later they board it all up, though the Amazon sign remains lit, a beacon luring confused customers to tug on the door handle that sticks out through a gap in the boards.

Garbage begins to accumulate on the sidewalk between the planters. I often see people sleeping between them, curled up in sleeping bags or else just in their clothes.

As I walk past on the way home from work one day, a stylishly dressed bald man says, to no one in particular, "Everything's boarded up. About time. This is China's century." The sheets of plywood covering the empty storefront where the Mural room once stood have themselves been covered by a new mural. Very neat, legible graffiti reads "Do I use blues? LOL No" and "Help, kidnapped by weird chicken woman, call 911 HURRY," plus a number of other cryptic passages. The centerpiece is a huge cartoon of an earthworm sitting on a green sofa, watching one of the planters as if it was a  TV. "Welcome home!" the worm cries cheerily. The piece is signed A Wormboy Scrapcan production. The name wormboy has recently sprung up in block letters all over downtown.

Graffiti artists come and go. Most of them just scrawl their tag, but every once in a while you get someone a little more creative. For a year or two, our neighborhood was covered in the name LOKI. For some reason, it irritated me more than other handles. I don't know why. The tags are still around, on walls and telephone poles, though I haven't seen a new one in years. One day as I got in the elevator in our building, I saw the word LOKI scratched in the black paint on the elevator gate. I felt violated; did LOKI live in my building, or did they have a friend here, or had they just slipped in? Someone eventually scratched it out but you can still see it. In the meantime, I say welcome home to Wormboy. Long may he squirm.

Orbit

 

I'm floating through myself, entering through the bony socket to drift through the chambers of this sunken vessel. Schools of silvery fish dart past,spooked by an oily shadow. Here and there a form huddles in a murky corner. I brush my hand across a rotted tablecloth, open a drawer and finger the encrusted silverware. The bulbs are black and the lampshades are slick with pale polyps. I pull a book from the shelf and open it but the sodden pages melt at my touch, the words wriggling away like fry into the darkness. 

 

 

 

 (for Charles Simic, 1938-2023)

Trigger

       As the door of the train opens, I hear a burst of raucous laughter from inside, and a figure hurries out and hustles away. I lug my bags in and set them down between my feet as I cling to the rail at the top of the steps. I'm tired and frazzled; between the high cost of everything, the numerous gaps on the shelves, and my attempts to avoid the other stressed-out shoppers as they careen along the aisles, the experience of shopping has gone from merely irritating to hellish. But I'm only riding until the next stop, then after a steep trek up the hill I'll be home.

    As the train starts moving, I feel someone bump up against me from behind. I turn to see a tall, bald man with a long gray goatee standing an inch away from me. He sports a huge grin and reeks of booze. A bunch of young men are sitting nearby, watching. They are clean cut, unmemorable, nearly identical. They look like they could be in an ad for a community college, or an Applebees commercial. I move away from the man, careful not to knock over my bags. He moves with me and keeps pressing up against me. The young men laugh.

    "A little personal space, buddy," I say in what I hope is a lighthearted tone of voice.

    "Can I have a hug?" he says.

    "Not from me," I say.

    "I could really use a fucking hug," he pleads, eliciting an eruption of laughter.

    "Give the poor guy a hug," one of the young men yells.

      "Man asked for a hug," another says.

    "Boy, it's really crowded on this train," says yet another. "Look at this, there aren't any empty seats." They rise as one and crowd behind me, all of them pressing against me, chattering and screeching. I try to keep an eye on my shoulder bag as well as my groceries. The Goose Hollow stop is just ahead but it feels like it's a mile away.

    "I can't believe you won't give me a hug," the older man wheedles. Despite his intoxication, his icy blue eyes are piercing. He smiles like a shark.

    “That’s some cold-ass shit, man,” one of the pack says.

    "What does Jesus think about you not giving this man a hug?" another hisses, as the train slows down and comes to a halt. The door opens and I grab the handles of my bags and hobble down the stairs.

    "Think I'll get off here too," the tall man chirps. He jumps off behind me and, placing his palm lightly on my back, once again asks me for a hug, his voice almost a whisper. As I walk away he hops back on the train just before the doors close, to wild cheering.

    As the train slips away, I brush my back to make sure he hasn’t stuck anything there and pat my pockets. I picture shoving the man against the side of the moving train, which proceeds to tear the flesh from the side of his face. Or maybe his shirt gets caught in the door and he gets pulled alongside as it speeds away, his body bashed to pulp until there's nothing left but a wad of bloody rags on the tracks. I can picture the panicked look in his eyes as he realizes what’s happening, as well as the looks of horror on the young men as they witness an image that will haunt them the rest of their lives. I can hear the screams.

    Calming down, I think instead of all the withering comebacks that would have stunned them into silence. I flash on all the times I've been picked on, starting in middle school. I remember all the times I had rocks and acorns thrown at me, remember all the names yelled at me from passing cars. I marvel at how swiftly that familiar mix of terror and fury has bobbed up, as if it had been lurking just beneath the surface the whole time. 

    I like to think I'm a kind, tolerant person who tries to show empathy and compassion in my dealings with others. We are all hurtling together towards calamity, screaming in fear and blinded by our suffering. But as I make my way up the hill in the rain, I wonder: if I would have been carrying a gun back there, would I have pulled the trigger? 

    No. Of course not. 

    Of course not.