Unexpanded Notes From Portland

Am I the person you remember?

I can't get my head around the fact that events happened before I was an adult.

They were making a movie!

A still from a surveillance video of a man standing, not moving forward, back to the camera, not even waiting, filled me with terror.

Young man with an unfortunate moustache showing off his not new car, but the one he's been working on, to his friends whose high opinion is more important than the accomplishment itself. And they, knowingly or unknowingly, had the grace to bestow it. He looked drippy, uncool, next to them, and their praise clearly meant so much. And I wanted to give him fashion tips, a few basic things to make him look sharper and, hopefully, think more highly of himself. He looked like a kid seeking the approval of his older brother's friends.

Indiana seems further away than 13 years, a greater, more unimaginable distance.

The dog chewing on the stuffed cow's face like they're kissing.

All my writing is being done in notes on my cell phone. It's not even a smart phone, which means it suits my writing.

"The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting."-Eileen Myles

I am only broken in my dreams.

He sings songs for people who hurt.

I ride the MAX one last time to leave Portland and, sitting in front of me, is a man whose deodorant has failed if he used it at all. This is how you leave when you leave alone.

A girl in the last seat of the car in front of us is wearing large headphones and touching up her make-up. It's like something out of an ad.

He asked her to come back because he was dying and it would mean so much to him and be such a minor inconvenience to her and she said yes but she died first and it was so unfair. He was supposed to be giving her his last days, not the other way around.

We are too trusting of systems. We assume we must do things because this is the way things are done, this is what people are doing. We live in a tautology: we do what we do because this is what we do.