Things shift, hover, cower, lunge, move on.

posted by jeremy on May 27, 2004

I sit, listening to bad indie-pop & staring at a photo of a dog snarling into the face of an Iraqi prisoner. He is terrified & the soldier with the dog might just be about to smile. Things cower... & things lunge.

It's raining outside & though I'm upset, I'm also content, because even if things hover so horribly, things will eventually shift... Things have a habit of moving on.

Jump back twelve days...

Olympia is a beautiful but trashy beast, I'm thinking as I stand on the patio of my friend Rachel's cabin. The air is brisk & the trees shift slightly in the cold wind. Mt. Rainier stands sentinel in the distance, obscured by haze, barely there. I'm quite possibly completely alone for a half-mile or more in each direction, minus the three cats that alternately play or brawl, crossing & recrossing that delicate line, something bless their carnivorous little hearts.

We had spent the evening previous shooting pool at a run-down dive downtown, talking of what to do with our lives, where to go from here, how to do it. Eight ball in, another beer, too many cigarettes. At the table next to us, a foxy girl explodes, hurling profanity like shrapnel, storms out, wondrous drama. Her boyfriend jumps up, runs after her & we stare, snigger, talk on, dissecting things that have yet to be.

Walking back to Rachel's car, I step over maybe three different piles of puke & one puddle of piss as haggard drunk men with particulary un-ironic mullets stagger left & right & white trash hippies beg for change. Thinking about it, the whole of Washington itself seems decayed, from the highways to the towns to the teeth of the residents. (Not that I can talk so happily of my own.) There is something pleasant about this as well as frighteningly eerie, like walking thru the most beautiful old growth forest ever only to find a bit of rope covered in blood... (Washington: Breeder of serial killers.)

"The whole town's like a somehow sexy 82nd ave..." I tell my friend & a heavy moon hangs over us, smiling.

& now, on Rachel's porch, I light a cigarette, swig my coffee, open my book & this paragraph strikes me, "Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house- the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture- must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed & reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story."

So saith The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy & I stub out my cigarette & listen to her, considering what she has to say... right up until a dog runs from the woods & chases the cats (so quickly from fighting to fleeing!) noisily away...

& I laugh heartily at their sudden terror.

Jump back a bit further...

Deb & I push ourselves up & on. The trail is steep, nearly the steepest in the Gorge, but it beckons. We breathe heavily, winter-weak. Hot sunlite pours thru the pines & sweat seeps from our pores. This is good, I think, & this is great. I shift my pack to a more comfortable position & stare down at the Columbia far below us. The 30, 50, 70 ft cliffs edging the trail remind me to plant my feet with care & we hurry up, on, racing the settling sun as lyrics from a beautiful song echo in my skull...

Now the sun's fading faster, we're ready to go

There's a skirt in the bedroom that's pleasantly low

And the loons on the moor, the fish in the flow

And my friends, my friends still will whisper hello

We all know what we know, it's a hard swath to mow

When you think like a hermit you forget what you know

The firs & the pines give way to meadow & we stop to eat & drink & smoke & breathe. A herd of deer emerge from the woods to greet us & we answer them as best we can... with silence. They nibble cautiously at flowers as we watch in awe, their eager-limbed grace... & the sky, the sky is so fucking resoundingly blue! & sunlit ridges encircle us like the edges of soft green knives... & for a moment, heaven seems found, not lost.

But we never make it. The top or even a good place to stop, eludes, nearly destroys us. We collapse on the path, throw packs aside, start a small fire & sip at cheap whiskey. A trillion stars burn a trillion holes in the dark & we don't talk, just stare into the fire, both those above & the one below & eventually, utterly exhausted, we crawl into our fleece & nylon nest & sleep fitfully on the steep rocky trail.

I awake hours before Deb. I rise, stretch, boil coffee on a clever stove & sit reading Howard Zinn. He tells me America is dying even as it gives birth to something strange & new, something maybe more evil than anything we've ever known... or maybe a child imbued with hope & sanity & wisdom. He tells me It is up to us. We are the midwives, the mentors of whatever it is that is struggling to get itself born. We must pay attention, we must be concerned, valiant & even afraid, lest we wake one day to find everything gone, crushed beneath the heels of monsters.

Deb makes noises, suddenly alive, blistered feet & all. She fires up the clever stove & makes herself tea. I smoke a cigarette while munching on a Tiger Milk bar. We pack everything back into packs & debate our options. Up to What? Or down to the Known? Our painful muscles decide: Descent is all that we can afford.

& so we begin trundling slowly, down the ridge, to the car, to the highway...

To the verdant city that is Home.

Jump foward fifteen days...

& rain pours down, floods the streets, makes things grow. A wet cat jumps thru my window, shakes himself free of residual H2O, meows at me, lets me know something, tho what, exactly, I do not know. I turn back to the monitor & continue reading of American death, American torture, American rape. I stare at images that confound & anger, images of smiling American soldiers hurting those that they say we came to save. I stare at hate & feel hate, at pain & feel pain, at humiliation & feel humiliation. I lean back in my hard chair & consider how many stories there are in the world, colliding, interacting, competing for supremacy...

& then I wonder just how many happy endings there are.

Now...

& the rain has stopped & the cats are asleep & a friend is coming over & we're going to a party, maybe to have fun, maybe to not. I look back at what I've just written & I know that there is no coherency, no single thread. I wrote it just to write something, I'll admit. I wrote it just to clear out some space in my skull...

I wrote it just because it's all these little stories that make up our lives.