Back in Portland, felt like I'd never make it, apparently I did.

posted by jeremy on September 11, 2005

The previous blog was written after being awake for more than 40 hours, while drunk on looted wine and fairly spiffed on black market amphetamines. I got one sentence down before passing out with my head on the keyboard then I was woken by my brother telling me to get a move on, I was late for my flight out of San Diego... & so I finished it quick-quick-retardo... (& now I'm wondering, what the fuck is the thing about the polar bears?)

.

The flight itself was beautiful, pushing up thru the kiss of overcast skies, punching into sunlite. It helped my tired heart, I tell you this. Looking down at the Earth & realizing just how infinitesimal the lives of us are & realizing that there is a great freedom in that, a liberty from concern, from useless sadness. I needed that vantage.

Our lives are vast & wonderful, difficult, unimportant, so undeniably consuming. Riding 60,000 feet above everything, I drank in all the paradox of things & felt satisfied, so satisfied.

Riding the MAX into the city, I couldnt stop smiling...

I felt... feel... so unafraid.

What I saw in New Orleans, as I went about surviving, I think it tweaked, maybe upgraded, my mental software. There was an abyss there & my friends & I, we stared into it & it gazed right back at us with its monstrous luminous eyes, its great big mud-stink teeth. Fuck. The thing about tragedy, about disaster is that it interacts with the very fabric of your existence, right down to levels you never knew you had. It was one of those Big Things that happens only once or twice or never in ones lifetime & the recognition of its scope was absolutely mandatory. We saw that stability, continuity... the permanence of things... are only illusions... & I know that this sounds so penny-wisdom trite & I myself thought I knew this very fact already... way back before Katrina pounced.

But I didnt have so much as a single fucking dime of a concept as to what can actually happen in this world. I certainly didnt realize that even cities, even cities as old and tough as New Orleans, can die. The web of interactions, the minituae of culture, the subtle economy of a certain place, it can all perish, be reduced to zero....

Good fucking Christ, even cities can die & if even cities can die then we dont stand a icecube's chance in hell...

& that, that is just perfectly fine. That is where the meaning of beauty steps in. I'm really just now starting to really learn that transience defines the worth of nearly everything... Motes, glimmers on the toxic flood, the brown eyes of a beautiful girl in passing, gunshots in the distance on a clear night as the stars burn so bright above a dark & abandoned city, all those moments we forget but are never forgotten. It happened. It has always happened.

Here we are, still alive...

Revel.

Today I am happy in my mortality. Im happy to be back amongst old friends, even as I miss and worry about my new ones. I feel a certain strength, a tenacity for abiding that I don't think I ever possessed before. I sit writing this on a sunny day in Portland while listening to The Postal Service & drinking a cold cold beer...

& I tell you, I am glad glad goddam glad to be here.