anti:freeze

I am fascinated by traces of revision, when old and new stand side by side, like old jars dug out of their contexts by archaeologists. Maybe it's the art historian inside me. So many paintings contain evidence of their creation. Radiographs might reveal a figure that once loomed in the foreground, but has since been painted over. Or the drawing before paint was applied. Or a different painting alltogether, before the artist found her subject - or before she was granted a commission.

Here in this parking lot, I notice the lines were redrawn, moved slightly to the right. "43 Reserved" became "Reserved 43." Reserved apparently more important now than the parking space number. What does that say about our conception of space?

I could see through the train to the other side of the tracks.

I was thinking, I can jump right on, see where it takes me. But then I noticed the spikes sticking up from the floor of the car.

When I think about Ashley, I think about him buried beneath the snow, and none of the tracks leading up to him are mine. In my dreams I follow the tracks left before me, stepping into the footprints and wondering what it was like to really know him, to feel welcome here, to have the right to visit. I lie down and sink into the snow, wonder how far I have to dig to find him, how many layers must be scraped away before time changes direction. My breath caresses him across the ether, and there痴 a charge in the air. Static on the verge of spark.

Once, before we met, I saw Ashley in the hallway at high school, and I thought he was another half-brother, since so many kept appearing that year, the products of my dad’s failed marriages and affairs. He looked like a male version of me – same thin, muddy-blond hair, ends curling up on the shoulders, gray-blue eyes, baggy jeans and black Chuck Taylor All-Stars, laces worn down to the threads and duct tape across the toes to hold them together where the rubber tips were torn. His skateboard balanced against his left hip, wheels facing out, with a scratched-out and barely visible British flag decal on its underside. When he looked at me, I felt a charge through my whole center, heat shooting down my spine and into my legs. He must have felt the same way, because we both backed away, staring.

I tried to imagine his cheeks dusted with mortician’s make-up, his hands folded across his stomach, the way bodies are always laid out for the wake. If I had been there, I would have held my hand just above him, to see if the charge was still there. I would have kissed him on the mouth, and blown a little breath into the tiny spaces where the sutures weren’t stitched. Maybe I would have slipped a jar of honey in the casket, or sprinkled pollen on the grave after he was lowered into the hole. But I don’t know what he looked like at the end, whether his hair still curled up on his shoulders, if he still had a round belly and strong biceps. I don’t know if he had hepatitis or AIDS, if his skin was jaundiced, if he was covered in tracks or sores or if his eyes had lost their color. I don’t know if he was skinny from sickness. I can’t even remember whether his eyeteeth were crooked, those same teeth I licked a hundred times. I can’t remember the exact color of his hair and eyes – I could compare them to mine, but mine have changed with age. The only things I remember for sure are: his weight as he lay on top of me, lighter than he looked, warm and gentle, and the taste of his mouth, which was like tap water.

At the Cup and Saucer Cafe, on Hawthorne . . .

Here, the cook's window doesn't look like a window. It looks like a painting, a trompe l'oiel of our dinner as it's grilled, of the labor behind the roasted red peppers and grilled onions and home fries. There are so many paintings here, hung on the walls with little price tags on cream-colored business cards.

I was there on May Day, after listening to labor union speeches downtown. The Cup and Saucer is that kind of place.

As customers drifted in from the sunny sidewalk, blinking at the specials menu, they took a moment to look at the bright pictures that hung everywhere. Museum posture. Step back. Nod. Discern meaning. Decide if it's worth $300. Decide on ginger buckwheat pancakes and a side of bacon.

No one noticed the art inside the little window.

It was May Day, and still no one noticed.

And here, a rare subject of my lomo.

Remember: the U-Haul backing slowly down the alley beside our old brick apartment building, my husband at the wheel, and me, breathing deep, trying to memorize the scent of the Iowa air, on the last day I ever smelled it. Pollen, sticky: scent of sunlight, like skin after camping, hint of sweat mixed with herbs, mixed with hot calluses and baby-fine hair, singed. Cut grass and melting tar on a hot Iowa afternoon – and beneath that, a note of old stone, the kind that crumbles apart on porch steps, the kind you only find in the Midwest. My husband turned the truck onto Dubuque Street, and it wasn’t long before we hit Interstate 80, headlights pointed west. Remember: raising my arms and cheering at the Nebraska border – we were officially ahead of schedule, outside the Iowa state line and never going back. The roads on my Triple-A travel guide marked red to chart our progress, like blue veins infused with fresh oxygen; new life. And when we hit Eastern Oregon, and the truck teetered dangerously at the edges of high roads, I listened to the motor as it strained.

This one goes out to mom, pictured here holding my sister. She's standing in the kitchen of our old house, the one I never lived in, except inside the womb. But I swear, just looking at the picture, I can remember it. I remember the scent of burnt countertops, russet potatoes, cultured butter, and rusty water. Unwashed dish towels. The soft give of the vinyl tablecloth when a dinner plate was set down on it. It's fitting, in a way, that the few photos I have of Mom are from this time, before I was born. It's like looking at pictures of your best friends or lovers when they were children - a time you can never know, never access, and never touch or smell. But all the same, it feels familiar. And you wish you could go back, know them before they knew you. It's the saddest thing about parents to me - that we can't know them as anything else, not really.

Things are hard for my mother today. It's the anniversary of her mother's death. It's the anniversary of the first time Dad left her. And last week, she filed papers for divorce, after he left again to be with his highschool sweetheart (and after she - good for her! - kicked him out when he tried to come back).

None of this existed when I moved to Portland. The Pearl was one muddy construction pit after another, surrounded by eight-foot storm fences with realty signs bolted to the corners. Signs promising granite counters and nickel hardware, 500 square feet for $250,000. They had portraits of the future neighborhood, printed to look like watercolor, the kind where each stroke disappears into the paper, ending in a faint pastel. Pastel grass, pastel brick, pastel umbrella above the head of a tiny pedestrian.

I used to go there when I needed peace. I walked along the clean sidewalks, whistling. I brushed my fingertips on the exterior walls of empty lofts and pretended the whole city was like this - abandoned or brand new, depending on my mood. Either way, the point was silence. Then I would turn around and walk the opposite direction, scraping my left hand on the lofts.

I've always been like that. I have to touch things with both hands.

this photo was taken a few weeks ago, without looking through the viewfinder. Lomo, of course.

Yesterday, my friend told me he wanted to give up everything for dance.

"I want to live in the body," he said, "instead of living life in my mind, as I did all my past."

This is what I want to tell him:

In order to live in the body, you have to live in the mind. All that Shelley, all that Shakespeare, all that Keats and Yeats - especially Yeats, with all his longing and sorrow, all his unrequited love and perfect form, for what is the body but a collection of injuries, a vessel filled with everything we were never given? - will come in handy. You need poetry when you get to know the intricate twisting of toes and pressing of metatarsals into the floor, the intimate twitching of the calves, the cramps in your gut. All that structure and form and geometry, the mathematics of perfect engineering. You will need it.

Live in the body through your mind, and don't worry what your parents say when you give up the stock options and future rich wife, from a respectable family. I, for one, always loved you without the ties, your collar unbuttoned, your shoelaces loose.

If you can imagine panning for concrete chips like they were gold, then you can imagine my grandmother's porch in Froelich, Iowa. This was my father's mother. She lived 100 miles away, in a town with four houses and an abandoned country store. I always slept the whole drive, waking when the car tires popped over the gravel, or when we slowed at the intersection with the rusted Stop sign planted in a small cement island. And if you can imagine the taste of blisters, or the texture of a dirty penny scraping against your teeth, or stale water leaking from a rusty pump in the backyard, or plastic checker pieces clicking against each other inside the box, then you can imagine how the flakes tasted when I put them in my mouth, pieces of the porch chipping away at my teeth. I used to walk to the abandoned store and stare through the dirty windows, dreaming of women in checkered dresses, or men with their overalls and cracked hands. There was a sign hanging over the front door, one of those classic Coca-Cola ads, the ones you see on collector's tins, from when the kick was cocaine, not caffeine, always a brunette starlet raising her glass, always the deep red background. It was fading. All that was left of the brunette was a round hip, a lock of hair, and the shiny bones of her ankle. Sometimes I stood on the little bridge over the creek and looked at the trash in the water, old bicycles and tires, pieces of tractors - who could get away with litter in this town? Once, I saw a blue leg sticking out from beneath an oily motor, but no one believed me.

The pedestrian staircase on the south side of the Broadway Bridge, wrapped Christo-like, as repairs are completed.

These steps are untrustworthy, with crumbling concrete and rusted metal. They lean to one side, like a crooked spine, the vertebrae about to snap. On rainy days, I imagine my body tumbling down, my nose bleeding and teeth cracking, fillings and bone scattered on the sidewalk like spilled change. If you stand to the side and look up to where the steps meet the bridge, you will see how they resemble a library ladder. You will see why I want to slide the staircase into the traffic lanes, and why I want to attach it to the trees and rooftops.

In white, the staircase is a ghost, floating up to the bridge. It is an old man, hunched over, with his hood up in the rain. A dirty bone. A prehistoric bird, craning its neck. A dinosaur. A ski slope. Fog floating over the side rails.

And look, at the bottom, there is a little door:

I was wrong when I said it was like Christo. He would never allow the wooden boards, or the thin pine laths nailed into the sheet. It is more like something from Beuys, with its cheap materials and filth, arte povera right here in my neighborhood. In that case, I am taking the wooden boards literally. They are a kind of door. I will open them and crawl inside.

NW Hoyt and 6th induces desire to go missing.

NW Hoyt and Broadway induces fear of earthquake and desire to take off shoes

NW 23rd induces to confusion and craving for black and white movies. Also to spy, and to push people out of my way on the sidewalk (though I don't do this).

SE Hawthorne induces to hunger for sugar, craving beneath tongue.

More to come.

Tomorrow, I will use a Seattle map to explore Portland.

inspired by the work of the Situationists

setting out with the Seattle map, in downtown Portland

Part One: I set my watch to the wrong time and headed out. If anyone asked me what time it was, I was going to hold up my wrist and show them the display - no mention of the mad, random winding I just performed, which set the hours and minutes back into the early morning.

In order to fragment the city spectacle, I had to de-linearize the concept of time. Not letting my time be dictated, my hours precisely divided and demarcated. Not letting my day be ruled from the outside. It was ten o'clock, it was five o'clock, it was no time at all.

According to the map, Pike's Place should be right across the street, on the waterfront. So I crossed Naito and looked for the water. My map was one of those slick tourist fold-ups, with detail boxes of city attractions. It indicated I should head north, so I did. I walked along the sidewalk behind McCormick Pier, but I never found the fresh fish and artisan clocks the map promised. In the distance, I thought I saw the Space Needle, but it turned out to be a skyscraper with a helicopter hovering just above it.

I did find several "No Trespassing" signs, and on the sides of several buildings, the word "door," stenciled onto the foundations or wood. I pressed my hands against one of them, but it wouldn't budge.

note for psychogeographic map: waterfront by McCormic Pier induces to extreme sense of privacy. do not want anyone entering my space. also induces to feelings of being patrolled, or watched, or the sense that I'm about to get busted for a crime I did not commit. this might be because of all the no trespassing signs. terrible place to live.

see previous entry from today . . .

The problem is taking the map literally. The empty, straight streets and sharp right angles, all in blue. Maps are another way of saving time and preventing experience. Transportation made easy. The shortest distance between two points is a map. Using the wrong map is subversive because it is not efficient, and because it allows you to redefine space. (That was one of the reasons I screwed up my watch: to subvert time itself. Why should I worry if it's time for lunch?)

The other problem, of course, is taking the city literally. We grow accustomed to the labels and definitions laid out for us by city planners: Pearl District, Waterfront Park, Cultural District . . . it is hard to see them differently, to find the loose wires hanging from the cracks of a fancy loft building, or to discover that the texture of the sidewalk makes your tongue ache.

Today, as I walked along the waterfront looking for Pike's Place Market, the spectacle of public space broke apart. There were boats anchored at the little dock and birds diving in to catch prey. Steps that led down to a small beach. But no people. Where I had hoped for a market, there was only an empty sidewalk. And everywhere I looked, "No Trespassing."

This weekend I was paying attention to my movement patterns, trying to understand why I cross busy streets at certain intersections and not others, or why I like to turn certain corners or cut across certain empty lots, when I noticed I was walking in circles around Pioneer Square. It occurred to me that I always do this. I rarely cross the red-brick commons area, and I rarely sit down to relax there. When I do, I always have this sense that I should move on, that there are things to do and errands to finish. I feel kinetic and restless and nervous.

Perhaps it's because the square is surrounded by retail towers and stores - Banana Republic, Nordstrom's, Abercrombie and Fitch, Gap, Meier and Frank . . . If you looked in the store windows, you might think it's late summer, with the sandals and swimsuits and beach-towel color schemes. Those windows are a kind of calendar, shifting time forward, constantly taking us away from the now.

note for the psychogeographic map: Pioneer Square induces to faster heartbeat, confusion of seasons and time, desire to move on and away, longing for synchronicity between time and season and desires.

Michael Totten at www.michaeltotten.com has written a nice, brief history of Portland city planning and architecture. He also snapped photos while walking around the various districts, so you can see exactly what he means. (There's some funny commentary, too). Check it out.

Bagdad Theater, SE Hawthorne.

I love the periwinkle sky and circus-like lettering on the theater sign. And it's so perfect that "Adaptation" is listed on the marquee - a movie about the struggle between process and product, the ultimate internal battle for writers.

More than once, I have arrived at this street corner with a deep sense of sadness and anonymity - on Hawthorne, everyone seems to know each other. Groups of two or three huddle on the crowded sidewalk, making plans for the weekend, or talking about books they recently read. People stop mid-crosswalk and say hello, as their dogs sniff each other's noses and bark. When I stand alone in front of the Bagdad, I feel like something is about to happen, as if a whole new set of possibilities has opened up for me. Maybe it's the whimsical architecture. Or maybe it's just something about the movies, especially when they have a real marquee, not those ugly signs that jut out from Regal Cinemas.

I will walk several bocks out of my way just to cross Hawthorne at this intersection.

The boards didn't used to be here. There were dirty, cracked windows, with simple graffiti tags and spray-painted arrows directing pedestrians to an imaginary cafe. How sad, that after passing this building every day, I can't remember the ghost cafe's name, or whether the graffiti was spray-painted in silver or grey, or how many windows were intact or shattered. What does that say about memory? Or for that matter, perception? There were doorways, too, where homeless people curled up tight inside sleeping bags, their feet sometimes sticking out onto the sidewalk.

I wonder what purpose the boards serve, and why they were installed. When I look at the doorways, I think a little space has been lost, in a neighborhood where so many have already been displaced. And from the windows, a dream has been erased. I wish I could remember what it was.