Everything I Tell You is Hearsay

Till you go to the doctor and have bloodwork done. But that is a matter for another post…

What I refer to here, rather is the situation in which I find myself, some 130 miles south of where I have spent the bulk of my life, young and recently aging. I have spoken more than once of the privilege  of being a Portland native. I took pride in having spent my life there, of knowing what it was like before the descent of Hipster Blight. One thing I heard consistently, from transplants, was how excellent the food was, and how spoiled I had been by my lifelong access to it.

While I could agree that indeed, most of the restaurants in town had at least one decent thing on the menu, and from time to time my mind and mouth would be blown away by something I encountered, I didn’t imagine that to be all that unusual.

And then, I moved to Eugene.

I thought, originally, how different could the culinary options be, really? It’s a liberal, prosperous college town flooded with vegans and Portland ex-pats. Surely the 2 1/2 hour drive wouldn’t have thwarted a southern migration of decent eateries?

How wrong I was. 

I have been consistently disappointed with the fare I’ve come across in town. Turtles, which is very close to both work and home, and has the advantage of being relatively inexpensive has disappointed me repeatedly. I keep hoping I’ll find something tolerable on the menu since it is so convenient, but they have managed to fail at items I consider nearly unfuckupable; chicken strips? Seriously? How can you screw up chicken strips?? Chicken+breading+deep fry=delicious! Also of note, the grilled cheese sandwich. This is my go-to default can’t-go-wrong option when I’m unsure about a menu. But somehow theirs goes wrong; oh how wrong it goes. Worse than either of these are the nachos. As a lover of all things Nach (including, but not by any means limited to: tot-chos) I am personally offended at the hideous use of alfredo sauce in the dish under any circumstances. By all means apply liquid cheese, but for the love of all that is decent, not alfredo.

The Sixth Street Grill had won me over at first, with its small plate offerings which are generally tasty and reasonably priced, but they betrayed me profoundly by removing the best offering from their menu after I had only been able to have it twice. The Olympus was a grilled turkey sandwich with artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, and kalamata olives on a toasted ciabatta with a jalapeno cream cheese spread. It was fucking fantastic. Now it’s gone, and all I can do is lament its loss and fail to find anything in the place that compares favorably.

The Beer Stein actually has totally decent food, and coupled with that, they offer a fantastic beer selection. They also always have a mead offering, which makes me pretty happy. The last time I was there I had the Father Guido Sarducci which is thinly sliced turkey, honey ham, pepperoni, red onion, lettuce, tomato, pepperoncini, olive tapenade and provolone on a toasted hoagie roll. It tasted pretty amazing. However the boyfriend has vetoed any further consumption of the sandwich based on the “vile, repulsive, and persistent” nature of my breath once said sandwich was had.

The only place in town that has fed me something I consider equal to my spoiled rotten Portland expectations is a little place right around the corner from my new office called the Agate Alley Laboratory. The place is just adorable as all get out with it’s laboratory chic schtick. The chemical formulas for Chocolate, Cinnamon, and several other goodies are stenciled on the wall. The periodic table is emblazoned against the side wall of the bar. Beakers and flasks everywhere. Aside from that, though, the offerings are amazing. My Moscow Mule was made with genuine ginger ale and a heavy handed pour. The food is locally sourced, lovingly crafted, deliciously realized. So. Fucking. Good.

So, I was happy to find it, even if it is a bit above range for more than an every so often treat, it’s reassuringly extant at any rate.

Nothing, however, will make me stop missing the taquitos at Pepinos. Covered in the salsa that made me realize I had completely reversed my position on cilantro. Or the Muu Muu burger, crammed onto a crusty roll right along with the fries and that magic crack-sauce. Or the Salted Carmel Ice cream from Fifty-Fifty which I am not kidding you I have fervid passionate dreams about.  And by no means the Squashed from Tin Shed; butternut squash ravioli drenched in creamy mushroom sauce and covered in parmesan. Oh, god. I’m drooling just thinking about it.

Eugene has a great deal to recommend it. It is beautiful and friendly and a lovely place to live. I am genuinely much happier than I have ever been before. Yet I long for Portland in this one unexpected inexorable way. When I come to town I think first of who I will see, but only moments before I think about where I will eat.

“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.”

– Haruki Murakami

I had no notion of it at the time, but when I was a child my parents were in the habit of making up words. It is true that every family has it’s own vocabulary, but most of the time it will not jump the confines of words that actually exist. No such constraints seemed to occur to us, and occasionally as an adult, I will find myself trotting out some expression of the created sort and receive anything from mild confusion to utter consternation in return.

The most famous and important (in the humble opinion of this author) example of this is:

Hodie: While it was generally used in a much broader context to mean anyone meddlesome or vexing but still pretty cute, I have over time co-opted this appellation to particular use as the main Nom-de-Plume for my child. However, it can and is still applied in the wider framework mentioned before. Should I spy a particularly charming little mischief, I will remark

“Oh, lookit the little hodie.”

but other examples of the concocted language of my life abound. Also in the pantheon we find:

Phlegmbot: This one requires no translation, but is a colorful example of the created lexicon.

“You ate the last of the Doritos? God, but you are a phlegmbot.”

Yucky Grawdoo: Signifying anything odious or vile; particularly if in reference to something moist, damp, or viscous.

“This bathroom is not clean; there is yucky grawdoo all between the tiles.”

Having had a hodie of my own, it turns out this manipulation of language continues, spurred by the inevitable mispronunciation or misapprehension of words already existing:

Attackative: To imply an aggressive or unnecessarily harsh response:

“I am sorry that I ate all of the Doritos, but why do you have to be so attackative?”

Niblings: The children of one’s siblings, irrespective of their gender:

“All of the niblings will be in the pool, and one of them will probably poop in it.”

Duplica: A replica or duplicate of something else:

“My iPod got stolen by some pigdog* so I had to get a duplica.”

Packack: Something in which to tote and carry one’s belongings:

“Didn’t you make sure you put your sunscreen in your packack?”

Dudes: Sunglasses

“I am jealous of your styley-fresh Ray-Ban dudes.”

Mazagine & Nakmin: Magazine and napkin:

“I saw this super hot babe in the mazagine and then I needed a nakmin to clean up the yucky grawdoo.”

It is of course, my fondest wish, to spread these linguistic gems as far and wide as I can. You know, V.D.

Vernacular Dispersion.

*The provenance of Pigdog is unclear, somehow I doubt we made that up.

My mother has been in the process of uncovering some treasures in her possession and sending them along to people who might best enjoy them. To that end, this…

K and the Flyrod

He knows far more about these things than I do. In fact, it would be fair to say he knows entirely more than I do, since I know nothing, and he’s a professional fishing guide. and wild trout advocate whereas I am irrationally, utterly, and totally terrified of fish.

I REALIZE this is irrational and so I did the most sensible thing I could; I went and got a fish tattooed on my hip to remind me this is a stupd phobia. Also because my mother’s nickname for me is Barracuda. This fact notwithstanding, I am usually a very nice person. Even my mother agrees.

Okay, I have to take it back. I do know one thing about fish: THEY WANT TO EAT YOU. They CAN’T, but they totally WOULD if they COULD.

I mean for chrissakes look at that monster

I delivered this information, with all the earnestness I could muster, and I somehow knew, as a fish expert, he would not try and deny this fact. I knew I ran the risk that he might roll his eyes and tell me that is both stupid and also to shut up*.  Even if he did, he couldn’t in good conscience try and tell me they don’t want to eat you because he also knows the one thing I know about fish, which is that they do. Want to eat you.

They just can’t.

Okay, now that I have THAT off my chest. I will go on to say that I admire his dedication to the bloodthirsty little buggers.. I mean beautiful wild creatures. And that I feel fundamentally that wild fish habitat should be protected and that generally we all thrive when we are wise stewards of the land and careful with regard to the watershed. I like going in the river and in a boat. I can and have held a fishing pole and caught a (as is just-the-one) fish in my life, and then bashed it’s brains out on a rock. Then I cried. Not so much that the fish was now dead, as that it had been alive in my hand in the first place and that freaked me the fuck out. As long as I don’t have to touch fish while they are alive and possibly still able to turn on me, I’ll be just fine.

So, I thought, he might enjoy a flyrod in a way that I simply cannot. He tells me it’s actually a pretty decent rod, though it’ll take a slower cast than he’s accustomed to. So, neat!

*For the record, he never did tell me to shut up.

What would you be?”

A stranger recently posed this one.  Anyone who knows me would know better. They wouldnt even consider asking, because they know I am scared of fish, and thus, imagining myself as a sea creature would be pretty much the worst sort of torture. And also, that hypotheticals of this type are annoying in the extreme and no one I consent to hang out with would ask such a stupid question.

However, when I refused to answer it for the person who did not know better, he did have a follow up question that set me thinking about something that was worth considering. He asked if I didn’t like hypothetical questions, did that mean I was unimaginative. And I realized, that yes, indeed, it sort of does.

 I think about things, in obsessive detail, but rarely make things up in my head. I am reflective, rather then generative, in most cases. I feel I am a good critic, in that it is a pleasure for me to asborb and weigh the work of another; to turn it over in my head and try to see it from all angles, inside and out. I like to play with language and thoughts, but mostly as an atrifact of something I have already taken in from elsewhere. The only “art” I even come close to feeling any chance of making decent is photography, but even that, deals often in concrete and I draw inspiration from observing what is not by conjuring what does not yet exist.

I do not however, as his question implied, say this in the vein of admitting this as a shortcoming. I think it is simply a matter of fact that some people are better at creating their own reality and then expressing it to others through various mediums, and others are better at interpreting the realities they encounter and functionalizing them. I happen to be of the latter stripe, but know damn well both are needed for a fully realized and satisfying creative endeavor to thrive.

I do not suffer from my failure of imagination; it just leaves me with the space to better appreciate what can be born of someone else’s.

Imagination III By realityDream from DeviantArt.com

“And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players, buy of their gifts also. For they too are the gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.” ~The Prophet Kahlil Gibran

For in the everyday commerce of our lives, let us not forget the pleasures that sustain us. Not so much an admonition, this is instead the reminder that sweetness and indulgence too have their place in a well-ordered soul. The aesetics took their task too far; by denying all pleasure they forget we are enabled us feel joy and ecstacy in that we may have a hint of the divine. We must conduct our business, indeed, but so too must we nurture the vessel by which the work is done.

This is not a blanket endorsement for debachery, but instead the reminder that the simplest pleasures are worth your most precious commodity, be that time or effort, or indeed coin. That to engage in the material support of your own pleasure is the most satisfying use of the sweat of your brow. To truly earn your delights a great gift.

Fall asleep on the couch when you are strung out on cough syrup while watching a show about elephants in your half doze and then hope the next show is Nova where they talk about geothermal phenomenon, specifically sulfur springs, and then next some Jane Austen meanwhile kinda waking up four or five or seven or nine times.

It works.

There are those songs, you know.

Those songs which contain words and phrases that spell out the aching particulars of however you experience life and beauty and pain and truth.

We all have this soundtrack.; the songs that bring us immediately to a place or time or feeling. Without preamble or fanfare, we are fully and utterly lost to that moment, that emotion. And sometimes, they make no sense or they make a sense that only your insides can interpret. They are often profoundly unglamorous and leave us raw and exposed, but in the best possible way.

And today with my speakers up louder than I can usually have them at work, I heard again the line from a song that most says LOVE to me while I listen. It is contained in a song about stumbling upon love while not yet free to have it. It is not a scenario I have ever found myself in, yet it cries out with the most beautiful poignancy what I most feel… and want to feel from someone else, about love.

There have been others: they tell a story about the way my concept of love has changed

Ghost by The Indigo Girls “Of all my demon spirits I need you the most”

I always felt like this song was about being in love with the idea of someone, rather than their actual person. About idealizing someone past the point of all reason so that you could have no real hope of loving them in actuality. This is something I know well how to do. This was my idea of love when I was a sophomore in high school. It still tugs at me though…

Do What You Have to Do by Sarah McLachlan “And I have the sense to recognize that I don’t know how to let you go”

Some part of me is convinced that love has to hurt. That it isn’t real if you don’t ache for the lack of the other. Probably too large a part of me indeed. The quality of love I most readily recognize is the sort that causes me to lose myself so completely in the feeling that I become someone else as a result. the person I was before ceases to exist and so, in a very real sense I struggle with the notion of losing anyone I come to truly love, for it would result in becoming Not Me, at least Not the Me I’d been ever since falling in love had made me Someone New. Plus also, I just don’t like to let go.

Steam Engine by My Morning Jacket “Your skin looks good in moonlight, goddamn those shaky knees”

This song was just eerily appropriate for the love I was falling in at the time I first heard the song. I had never had someone so enamored of me as was the boy who was the object of my affection at the time. I had never had anyone speak with such fervor about how beautiful he thought I was; about the effect I had on him with the mere fact of my presence. This was the lesson of being adored as an aspect of love. It was a good lesson.

Crash by Dave Matthews Band “Hike up your skirt a little more, and show your world to me”

Far from being smutty, I find this line to be singularly romantic. It acknowledges the fundamental vulnerabilty inherent in revealing oneself this way. The faith, entire and unblemished, that accompanies such a gesture. It is an intoxicating moment, to feel that trust for someone else, and to feel it expressed toward you as well.

And now…

Challengers by The New Pornographers “Whatever the mess you are, you’re mine”

This, oh this, is what I have come to believe is really what love is about. Not that we do not see, or that we are made perfect by our love, but rather that we are seen, and known, and absolved, and loved nevertheless. I think I like this notion best. It feels truer, and wiser and more likely, when compared to the illusions and self-sacrifice of the past.

And I wonder, as I always do, about the quality of love that others feel. How it is sounded out across their lives. What resonates inside of them and carries them forward on waves of song…

It is the first Tuesday in November, and thus, election day. I myself managed to somehow fail to be registered to vote. Apparently when I moved, I didn’t submit a new registration with my change of address. When the well-meaning and earnest young people approached me on the train asking if I’d like to sign a petition, I blithely obliged them unaware my signature would be cast aside, invalid on accident.

When my ballot didn’t arrive along with that of my hosuemate a little light when on in my head, but then I failed to move fast enough to remedy the problem. Disenfranchised via scatterbrain.

This is, however only the 4th election in which I even had an interest in participating. I will shamefacely admit, I have only voted 3 times in my adult life. it wasn’t something my parents did, it always seemed sort of pointless, and I didn’t want to just vote without knowing what the issues were, and being politically well-informed is both moderately challening and intermittently depressing. I didn’t really want to make the effort, nor to cast an uninformed opinion into the sea of careless ballots.

But then. I joined the debate team in college, and I had no choice but to be politically informed. You can’t win a round without a pretty firm grasp on current events, and you can’t help but form opinions once you are exposed to the information. I became a rather rabid NPR listener, and eventually, felt excited about voting. However, this was recently enough that it’s still only been about 4 election cycles since I decided it was worth all the bother. 

And though I realize vote by mail is less expensive, increases turn-out, and is in every way logistically preferable, I am kinda sad I never got to try out the booth…

For those of you that DID your civic duty, my thanks.

in the continuing series: My Five Favorites

Magnolia is one of my very favorite movies ever. i unwisely lent my copy to some reprobate neighbor of mine about 5 years ago. Boo. Need to find it on DVD. My birthday’s comin!

It isn’t just because it helps me remember a more innocent time when watching tom cruise’s palpable intensity only moved me rather than creeping me out. nor only because jason robards delivers such a touching performance and i always wished he was my grampa ever since seeing “Max Dugan Returns” as a small child. the entire cast of this film moves together in a nuanced and tender way that exposes such loveliness and tragedy all at once.

i somehow forgot how many little tics i picked up from this movie. the scene where the little boy raps to Officer Jim about the identity of the murderer is classic:

i’ll help you solve the case, gotta get paid though, gotta get paid

i say this constantly. and of course, we all know i subscribe to the Seduce and Destroy credo

RESPECT THE COCK! AND TAME THE CUNT!

likewise, when Frank TJ Mackey gets cornered in a lie by the reporter and clams up on her, she asks him what he’s doing, his reply:

i’m quietly judging you

classic scorching derision!!

and not only this, but Magnolia contains what is, for me, the singlemost moving and beautiful scene in any film i have ever watched; each cast member sings a line or two from Aimee Mann’s hauntingly lovely song “Wise Up” and it does not matter if they can, or if they are even conscious but only that they are all bound together in this moment of vulnerability and wonder.