Odd thoughts

Yesterday was beautiful. Today was... just odd. I dunno.

I had a beautiful thought, though, while going for a walk in the night.

If the recession just gets worse and everyone's out of job, will there be more street musicians? Because even if they can't get any money, they won't have jobs, and if you don't have a job and don't have any hope of getting one, why not just create art all day? If you can still eat, that is, I guess. However unrealistic, it is kind of divine to imagine a world where people just play music and paint and everything else because the gears of the universe seem to have ceased turning.

Those are my parents. In like... 1975, I would guess.

I'm in love with our old family albums. With everyone's old family albums. It's strange... I don't really have much nostalgia for my own childhood, since it kind of sucked (just... socially and emotionally difficult; my parents were great), but I have a sense of nostalgia for everyone else's past. I love old photos so much. I'm trying to take more portraits now, partially because they're interesting and I avoided it for so long because I'm sort of shy, and partially because I know that those are what will be important in thirty years.

I Drowned A Little

But only a little.

The weather was pretty magical, really. Enormous gobs of sleet falling from the sky and splatting everywhere, melting on contact. Phenomena that exist only in the air, suspended, for a second, are strange. Frozen mayfly missiles!

The sleet broke up everyone's routine. People scurried, hunched over, and I just let it fall on me because, really, I didn't have anywhere particular to go and I was wet already.

I feel like the city I grew up in was much more black and white than Portland. Residential, commercial, and industrial were all very separate. You had to drive to go into downtown, and so there was a divide. We had stinking hot summers and (occasionally, like this year), very, very cold winters. 100+ degree swings. Clear demarcation between the seasons. This feels like some strange kind of suspended existence, unaffected by time.

Anyway, it was a beautiful day. I got some new coffee for myself and another bag to send to my sister, and the scent is wafting up from the bag on the other side of the room. Delicious. If I didn't feel totally wretched and if I wasn't in desperate need of a good night's sleep, I'd make a cup.

Good Weekend

Hello, blogspot. You've tempted me for so long, and now the time has arrived to finally use you. I give in.

It was a good weekend, mostly. I kind of forget Friday night. Saturday, though, was wonderful! Kenna and Anna and I took the bus downtown and went to Hawthorne. Chatted up the owner of Smut and found out how it all started, and then he kind of slyly gave us a few things for free. It pays to be friendly. I feel like I'm getting better at talking to strangers. Instead of just being, you know, petrified and probably off-putting and pretending to be suddenly busy whenever I might have to talk to someone I half-know.

I need to buy more dried cranberries.

I went for a walk over to the cemetery today. It's so... enormous and beautiful. I like to just walk around and read the headstones. I guess that's a little morbid, but they're fascinating. I guess I'm a little morbid - that's probably a better explanation. When I was nine or ten and we still got Columbus's craapy Dispatch, I read the obituaries every day. I can't help it. Death is fascinating and familiarizing it keeps it from being frightening. It was strange; I saw a woman running around with her two dogs, and eventually they settled down by one grave. The dogs sat there and she lit a candle, and they were all still for ten or twenty minutes, like she was performing some kind of ritual. She probably was. I felt like a voyeur, perched several yards above on a hill, on one of those gravestones that doubles as a bench, observing her.

Anyway, photos from this weekend:









It's like I'm in a sepia-toned funk. No good.



More later, maybe.