September 16, 2006

Occasionally a feeling of depression or melancholia will fall over me. It often happens when I have work that requires deep concentration for many days in a row. I’ve been at work working on a very long manual. Then something in the real, or rather non-work world, happens that isn’t so good or I get worked up about something, and I slip into melancholia. It lasts for six hours or so and passes. During this period I become deeply self-involved in the miseries of my life, the decay of my body, the abscesses in my teeth; for example, the sudden limp I’ve acquired for some reason. I prefer to think of it as melancholia because there some irony to how intensely I feel this bought of depression. I will think to myself, “I am in a black mood.”

I know a number of people who suffer from episodes of clinical depression and this melancholia, while related, is not as deep or intense or lacking in pleasure. I’m aware of it for one thing. These people I know who suffer from depression suddenly find themselves lost in inertia, a loss of vitality, and are not aware that anything is wrong, exactly, just that existence is painful and sucks. In talking about depression, they don’t think of as a mood so much as a completely physical ailment like the flu or a lost limb or something. I find a degree of pleasure in my dark mood episodes partly because I know it will go away and partly because it makes things seem more pleasurable. I slow down. I walk during my lunch break to the river that flows through the suburban city where I work. The river has cherry trees planted on the banks, a brick walkway, and a wide expanse of running water.

I went to the river to coddle my black mood. As I pondered throwing myself into the river, knowing it was so shallow I would just get the cuffs of my slacks wet; I thought miserable thoughts about myself. I considered the fact that clothes were mostly useful not to conceal nakedness but rather as containment devices, without the border of clothes, people would continue to expand beyond my tight pants, beyond the walls of their cars and rooms, inflating and expand until they were a massive orbs of flesh.

A man in a polo short and worn but clean jeans and very white tennis shoes smiled at me, “Hi,” he said. He was grinning with a brightly lit inner idiocy unaware of the blackness of the world. He interrupted by melancholia reverie, and I grunted mostly because a grunt would be less rude than not saying anything at all. I turned back to the river. He left. I could think my black thoughts to myself.

Some time later, he was standing in front of me with his white shoes. “Are you doing okay?”

“Sure--“ I said.

“My name is John and I’m a Christian,” he said.

“I’m Matt,” I said, “And I’m an atheist,” but even as I said this, I thought it was silly I had to declare myself in negation to his proposition that there was a god. I would sooner declare myself an a-cthulthist. I do not believe in intergalactic squid aliens living at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Why should there be a term of my lack of believe in a single deity from the Levant?

“You don’t look all right,” he said.

“I’m doing fine,” I said.

“Can I pray for you?” he asked.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” I said.

And then he left, smiling at the light he’d shown down on me. I was a pill bug flung from the dank pleasures under my rock.

September 4, 2006

Generally my daughter and I have a pretty good time at Bumbershoot. Last year my daughter inhaled some bubbles from the Volcano, but no serious emotional or medical problems resulted from this action.

But on Monday, an odd thing happened at Bumbershoot. We visited a balloon man who had his cart near the men's restroom down from the literary area and across from the International Foundation.

He made a balloon for my daughter and while he made the balloon he was having a conversation with his wife on his cell phone. I didn’t mind his talking on his cell phone and making a balloon. He apologized and I made some half-hearted quip about multitasking. The balloon construction took about thirty seconds. I thanked him and tipped him a dollar. I'm not sure if this was a low amount of a high amount or what -- it was a handy bill and I put it in his basket. There weren't any guidelines posted. I'm not familiar with the etiquette of balloon man tipping.

In any case my daughter seemed happy with her balloon and then after seeing some music, after playing in the International Foundation, her balloon popped. So we visited the balloon man again to ask for a replacement. My daughter saw an elaborate balloon construction that looked like tweetiebird or as much as twisted, inflated plastic could like tweetiebird and she asked for this one.

This one took a bit longer than thirty seconds to construct. I looked in my wallet and now I only had two tens, a twenty, and a dollar. So I put the dollar in the jar. He stopped his construction even though he was just about done. He reached into the tip jar and returned the dollar to me. He said, “If this is all you can afford to tip you need the dollar more than I do.”

I said, "Oh, it's an evil balloon man." I was puzzled and trying to make light of the sensation even thought I was now mad at the balloon man.

The balloon man then finished his balloon tweetiebird and said, "I was going to give it you even though you only gave me a dollar, but then you went and made that comment. Explain that to your little girl." And he secured the balloon to his cart.

Puzzled my daughter and I walked away. “Where is my balloon?” my daughter asked.

“He won’t give it to us.”

“He won’t give it us?”

“He won’t give it us.”

July 29, 2006

A dog attacked my daughter’s beagle on Thursday while I took on her an evening walk. I want to say a dog attacked my family -- but this sounds like the dog mauled everyone in my family which it could have but instead it only mauled the beagle. Although we all feel that we have been mauled, the beagle is the only animal in our family with teeth holes in her fur.

My daughter liked to announce that we are going for a walk with the dog by shouting “walkies” over and over again because her beagle begins to yowl and roll her eyes. Our beagle is a walk fetishist. Every piece of paraphernalia associated with the walk, the leash, her collar, plastic bags for collecting her poop, the front door handle, people putting on shoes, the word “walk,” everything becomes evidence to her that we are about to go for a walk. By the time my daughter says “walkies,” in her piercing falsetto, the evidence is clear and the beagle is about to crawl out of her skin.

Part of the reason that my daughter becomes so excited by the dog’s excitement is that the beagle is nonplussed about most things aside from food. Even her endless loitering around in the kitchen and under the dining room table is done with a kind of nonplussed, despondent waiting. At times, we’ve thought the beagle was depressed. But, she is purely docile to the point of being practically inert. My daughter plays with her and arranges her limp limbs, dresses her in old clothes, and one time stuffed her into the bottom of a sleeping bag and we spent ten minutes trying to figure out where the dog was. In short, she is a perfect dog in some ways for a five-year-old child, because my daughter would most likely have been at least nipped by a less docile dog. But, it is this sense of life in her brought about by the walk that excites my daughter. She often asks why don’t we have a dog that plays fetch? Because we have a dog with whom she can peel back the eyelids when she is interested in seeing what is behind eyeballs.

Our dog’s docility is a trade off, and one that I’m happy to make because I grew up in a dog neighborhood filled with farm fields and vast lawns and unleashed dogs who would sometimes chase kids walking past their houses. I learned to lean down and clutch a handful of gravel and this usually stopped the rush of the dogs, this gesture down to grab the gravel. But, I’ve had to throw rocks at dogs. Another time when I was my daughter’s age one of my dad’s customers brought his very friendly and sleek Doberman pincher to the house. Why is he called a Doberman pincher? Does he pinch people? While my dad and his customer tried out the merchandise, they put me out in the yard with the dog and the dog proceeded to chase me down and then somehow roll me across the yard. I just remember the dog nipping me, and I was getting tossed somehow. Maybe I was flailing around. And crying and screaming and the dog was nipping me, and finally my dad and his customer came out and put the dog in the car and went back to business. Perhaps as result of these incidents, I am not a dog person.

But, we don’t live in the country like I did when I was a child with plentiful heaps of gravel and vast lawns or fields. Instead, we live among reduced sight lines and hidden spaces, a region of asphalt roads, wooden fences, and garages. The space in the suburb where I live has been divided and broken down into even smaller chunks. My father asked why we had two rings of fences on our sliver of land. The outer fence was placed to keep people from cutting across the lawn in their trucks. The inner fence was placed to have a place where a dog could wander without wandering off. This was helpful with our beagle because she smells things and becomes entranced by their smell and kept following the smell, and we were told by the pound this is often how beagles become lost. They follow a smell and then look up and are somewhere else completely. Our suburb is a compact region of subdivided, private spaces.

This abundance of privacy breaks down all of the normal civic functions I associate with living in the city. A city to me is where there is foot traffic, people eating and drinking in street level places, a mix of businesses and living but in the suburb where I live there is merely privacy, there are merely front doors, wooden fences, and garages. There are asphalt roads in which people ride in their cars. Civic activity takes places at agreed on public sites, such as the churches, schools, the mall or the downtown parks, but these are all distances that require people driving there. As a result of this privacy, I do not know my neighbors even though I’ve lived in my house for three and more years. I find contact with my neighbors slightly sinister, because their interest never feels neighborly but predatory. When Wayne came around my house, he asked a lot of questions about my daughter and really nothing else. He was missing a tooth. He wore an unwashed plaid shirt and peered through the windows of my house -- into MY PRIVACY -- while he asked his questions, which were not his business to ask. When Keith and his pleasant wife dropped off a loaf of banana bread in a tin we were obligated to return, we found they wanted to recruit us to their church, and get our daughter enrolled in their private religious school.

The beagle thought does not know about privacy. Rather she is vastly interested in the smells produced by the other dogs in the neighborhood, and I get the sense of her, her walk is a chance to break out of her cloister and socialize even it is primarily through the medium of other dog’s urine.

My daughter and I passed an open garage. We could see inside the garage to the person’s neatly staked U-Haul boxes, their lawn implements stacked on the wall, it was a bit like seeing that a button on someone’s shirt was open and that you could see their skin underneath. A tiny poodle with a golf ball in her furry mouth began to race toward us.

My daughter adores poodles because she believes they are playful and poodles, with their fluffy hair generally conform to an idealized version of “cute.” “A poodle!” my daughter said.

The beagle leaned toward the dog, excited to socialize with a real, live dog rather than a urine sample.

A very short, blunt nosed dog, a pit bull mix, or something, a dog that was essentially all legs, neck, and mouth darted from the garage. A man inside the house began to shout and wave his arms. And then, the mouth dog attached itself to the soft, fleshy underside of my daughter’s beagle. The mouth dog began to work its neck muscles. Rather than bite or fight, my daughter’s beagle made a started, docile yelp noise.

I started to yell and kicked the dog off the beagle. My daughter backed away and looked around at the houses for help. I kept yelling, go away. Get back. I was yelling as loud as possible and the dog would circle and then dive at the beagle again. By this time, I thought the dog had finally opened up the beagles’ stomach. Saving the beagle seemed improbable now. She was in pain, but she kept making these soft yelps that I could hardly hear because I was screaming.

I kept kicking the dog, and it kept diving and this seemed to go along for a long time and I thought it was only a matter of time before the beagle was turned into hamburger.

Finally, the man who had been yelling pulled the dog back and took the dog inside.

I began to check the beagle, and I was amazed to find her soft tissue under her stomach intact. At first, I didn’t find any marks on her.

The man came out and began to apologize and for some reason I apologized for kicking his dog. He said the dog wasn’t supposed to get out of the house.

Your dog is crazy, I said. Why does anyone own a dog like that? I kept thinking as I looked at this man who seemed like a very nice man, he was softly spoken and he owned up completely to the fact that he owned a crazy killing machine mouth of fangs for a dog. Did the fact that he had an animal like this make him feel safe? Did the possibility that his dog would kill a passing toddler make him feel any safer?

In a strange moment of contact, I asked the man for his address and he gave me his address wrote in shaky handwriting on a sticky note. “Well, it’s nice to meet you,” I said, “Even if this is how we met. I live just over there.” As I gestured I pointed across hedges, fences, garages, and houses full of who knew what private horrors. I might as well have been pointing to Ellensburg or Boston. I lived blocks away.

When I returned home, my wife inspected the dog, and found a number of puncture wounds. The worst was a bloody hole in her chest. I kept thinking as she inspected her fur and the beagle yelped -- far louder than she had when she’d been bitten -- how this could have been my daughter: a hole in my daughter’s chest.

July 7, 2006

Through the arbitrariness of technology, in seventh grade, I was assigned to share a desk with Lorrie Brown. Our similarities began and ended with the beginning sound of our last names, BR. She wore downy blue sweaters and a minute silver chain dangling a tiny heart in the furry cleft of her breasts. I wore flaking white Reeboks. I didn’t change them. Adam Ant transformed Stacey. She ended the term in leather pants and a Union Jack bandana. How could she have abandoned me when we shared the same consonant cluster?

The alphabet as a technology at once provided order and a sense where none intrinsically existed. Why does cat follow ball follow apple? There is no reason in this. Yet, the alphabet has a capacity to organize and transform our bodies. I may be no more than an animal, but I am an animal devoted to eyeglasses, alphabets, and underpants.

Speaking is an act of transformation because it is only in speech that something acquires a relationship to something else. In a sentence, someone can write, say, “Bread hardness into stone.” In language, I can occupy the same space as a girl who begins with “BR.” I followed her in her leather pants down the hallway repeating our connection, br-br-br. She turned to ask me whether I was cold.

February 17, 2006

Q: Can’t you put your nose to the grindstone?
A: If I put my nose to the grindstone, I’ll grind my nose off.

Q: Do you think it was wise to hire a fiction writer to do accounting?
A: I didn’t hire you.

Q: What do you do all day?
A: I don’t know. Work?
Q: What do you do all day?
A: I work. I’m at work. I work.

Q: Should I just fire you now?
A: No. Wait until I find another job.

November 24, 2005

The other day, I felt compelled to provide reports on what I saw and kept calling the answering machine at my house and leaving messages. I saw that the color of Japanese maple leaves that had been left on the sidewalk before being swept away had left tiny brown silhouettes of their shapes. In the dusk the sodium lights cast shadows of the trees over the sidewalk so that it looked like shadows of the naked trees still had their leaves. I reported on two middle-aged women each carrying a take-out bag from the Hooters on South Lake Union. It didn't occur to me that the place might be frequented by dinners actually looking for food. I had assumed it was frequented exclusively by creepy middle-aged men with Mick Jagger hair dos. I had also assumed that like other theme restaurants, such as the Rainforest Café, that the food was not of sufficient quality to warrant carrying it off the premises. Mid-way through this report the machine filled and shortly after that Lisa erased the contents of the machine since the majority of the messages were of her father calling at nine o'clock asking her if she was still asleep.

November 3, 2005

I won't be able to participate in the November InPrint event at Richard Hugo House. It was my misunderstanding when I initially approached them about talking experience as a panelist for 4Culture and along with the arts administrators of Seattle fairly robust grant giving arts community that the event would be a no charge event offered to writers around town.

In fact it was pretty important to me that this event be offered without charge because the process of applying for grants is a process that is arduous and very off putting for most writers. Hugo House was only talking three or five dollars. This isn't a lot, but in my experience talking to writers as a former writer-in-residence at Hugo House, there are a lot of writers in Seattle for whom three or five dollars means they won't do something; they won't come to a literary event; and they won't pay to make copies for a grant application.

I was hoping to talk to these very writes at Hugo House and encourage them in not shying away from standing up for their writing in a grant application and saying to a government agency that their writing is worth something and here is why it is worth something. In serving on this 4Culture panel this last year I was struck by how poorly written and conceived the literary applications were in comparison to the often elegant and sometime enjoyable applications assembled by the dancers, film makers and visual artists of Seattle.

In trying to force the issue with Hugo House, I overstated my case and said I would cancel my participation in the event if they didn't relent on the charge. Lyall Bush, the Programs Manager at Hugo House, wouldn't relent on the charge, so I'm out.

My apologies if you were planning on attending this event. Please feel free to e-mail me and I'll let you know (for free) what I was going to talk about.

September 29, 2005

Traveling alone in strange cities and sleeping under new ceilings makes me nervous. There are many patterns in different ceilings and it takes some time to get used to the things that you might see there. Nothing bad has ever happened but sometimes out of the corner of my eye I might see something I didn't want to see and then when I look even though I didnt actually see anything I have already seen it out of the corner of my eye. I used to see a woman walking down the steps into the basement of my East Indian babysitters house, a brick building near Volunteer Park in Seattle in the late 1970s. This woman didn't exist, but I thought she did and I would only see her coming down the stairs when I was tired. I think I imagined her the first time and then when I saw the shape out of the corner of my eye when I was tired, she is what I saw. A ghost for instance exists. But she wasn't like that, more like a kind of optical shadow and then my brain filling in the blanks. I even thought this as a child. However I thought maybe I might also be catching a glimpse of another dimension and then I realized I was making myself see this woman. Even though I was willing myself to see her, that didn't make it any less startling to see her. Traveling to new places and especially a prolonged break from my daily routines is always a worrisome endeavor.

July 25, 2005

We had a hornets nest in our backyard that provided a great deal of drama for Riley this weekend. I had to purchase a can of compressed noxious fluid and then in the early morning, while the hornets were sleeping, I doused the paper hive with this noxious fluid. In preparation for this activity, Lisa showed me a video of hornets attacking a beehive. The video shows the hornets closing on the peaceful hive of industrious bees, and adds the sounds of helicopters. The hornets land in the middle of the bees and then proceeded to eat all 30,000 bees in about three hours. When they are finished, they eat all of the honey. Killing works up a hunger. So, I gleefully dosed the monsters with a can of compressed poison, and then ate breakfast. Later in the day, a stray hornet, confused no doubt by the sudden death of his entire family, wandered into the house where I was again dispatched to kill. I whacked the hornet to death with a Highline Community College course catalog. Hungry, I ate a bit of honey.

April 24, 2005

I went to Canada recently to participate in The Unassociated Writers Conference. While in Canada, I acquired a tidy sum of Canadian money. One of the bills, five dollars, was coated in bright red paint.

When I took the money to a local bank to exchange for US Currency, the clerk flipped through the stack of bills and then stopped at the five dollar bill. "Is this blood?" she asked.

"It's paint," I said. I didn't want to explain to her that blood when exposed to air turns from bright red to a slightly rusty, brown color. It also flakes off. To explain this to the clerk in the middle of the neat Bank of America Lobby would have been unseemly, I figured. So, I just shook my head. "It's bright red," I said as a way of explaining this. It did cause pause to come across the bill. The red was splotchy and very, very bright.

She took the bills and then fussed at a counter and I waited. She talked to the manager. He crossed the lobby. "What is that on your money?" he asked me.

"It's paint," I said. I didn't want feel it was necessary to explain how blood looked when it was left out. It would make it sound like I had a sinister experience. I already felt a little sinister having red paint on my my Canadian money. I felt a little dirty.

"Is that blood on your money?" he asked me.

"It's not blood," I said. "You can see from the color it is paint."

"If it is blood we need to know," he said. He didn't believe me. "Someone could have an open cut on their hand, and then it would be dangerous."

"You shouldn't take my word for it," I said. "If this is serious. If you really think that red paint is blood, then you should have a means of testing it. Why should you take my word? If your concern is real, you should do something about it."

"We are," he said. "It's marked for incineration."

I left the bank a little shaken. Wondering, then why tell me about it? Why drag me over the coals for a little bit of paint on the Canadian money?

December 13, 2004

I live across the street from a swampy vacant lot. Cottonwoods grow on the lot’s margins. And around the lot there are houses, apartment buildings, highways. There are a lot of people who never see one another.

A bird's nest clings to the tree closest to my subdivision.

I’m not exactly sure what my stretch of suburbs is called. There is a sign on the arterial, but there is a sign at each of the three intersection of my neighborhood at the arterial and each one says something different. PineHurst, I think mine says. There is an Oakwood, and a Mapleleaf, too, I think. Inside, though, the same three house plans have been built on top of small knolls, in dells, in a steady ranks up the slope of a long hill. In the forty odd years since they’ve been built they have been modified. Extensions hold RVs and hot tubs. The yards have overgrown trees in them. Some of the houses sit among clumps of gigantic fir trees. The generation of maples that must have been planted when the construction crews first installed the units have matured and the city is cutting them down, leaving smooth, whitish flat places where there had been trunks.

There isn’t any sound of people in my neighborhood. Jus the sound of the cold wind moving through the cottonwoods, the hollering of some neighborhood girls as they walk down the street taking joy in the sound their voices make among the empty yards, the moan of airplanes as they pass overhead, the rumbling and hissing sound of traffic on Pacific Highway and I-5. Even though my neighborhood is populated with people, everyone remains indoors. Even in the summer, but now that is winter they are inside. Christmas lights appear at night, strung during the day maybe, but there nonetheless to cast their light on the empty streets.

I walk my daughter’s dog through the empty neighborhood. She stops to shiver and poop on someone’s lawn and I pick it up with plastic groceriy bags from Safeway. They are thin and I can feel the poop, still warm and fragrant, and then I reverse the bag around the poop and tie it into a knot. As soon as she is finished with her business, she racks her paws across the ground, scattering moss and grass, and then she drags on the rope. I pull her back and finish tying off the poop and then we wander through the dark neighborhood. I wouldn’t come out of the house if I didn’t have the dog to walk. Outside, though, the sun has just set and it is dark but Puget Sound glows purple under the dark, dark blue of Vashon island. An airplane passes close overhead, silent, except for the rush of air. Banks of lights flash. And then it is gone and still around me there is the sound of moving people and the houses are full of people and I am among them on the empty streets.

December 11, 2004

My father belongs to a generation that lived on Reuben sandwiches. In fact they took Reuben sandwiches for granted as something that would always be available on the menu of any restaurant. A kitchen contained certain things, among them sauerkraut, corned beef, and rye. We were eating lunch at the Deluxe Bar and Grill and they lacked sauerkraut.

In reference to my parents’ inability to really cook, a friend asked me, “Wasn’t your dad a cook?”

“He was a cook at a city diner,” I said. “If I wanted a Crab Louie, I was in luck.”

My father pulled out a pair of glasses from his pocket. They were a big pair of glasses with lens as big as the base of a coffee mug. The brass stems glittered. They transformed his face into a wizened old man’s face, magnifying the trenches of bunched grey skin under his eyes. Tiny red filaments threaded over the whites of his enlarged eyes. “What are those?”

“I can’t see,” he said. “When I wear I contacts I can’t see up close. So I bought these after I was at Andy Boonstraw’s house. He had glasses like these and I tried them on and I could see up close. I forget that I couldn’t see.”

My father consulted the menu not so much to see what they had but to see what they had in the kitchen. He can tell they had a corned beef sandwich but wondered if that meant they really had a Reuben. He said, “That’s not a Reuben sandwich, that’s a corned beef sandwich.”

“What do you mean, Dad?”

“It’s a corned beef sandwich. Not really a Reuben,” he said.

‘It’s called a corned beef sandwich. They must not have a sauerkraut,” I said.

My father found the absence of sauerkraut in the kitchen troubling because sauerkraut could be kept in a jar. It was pickled. It didn’t go bad. If one person in three weeks ordered something in sauerkraut, they’d be able to accommodate them. The absence of sauerkraut indicted to him the absence of the kitchen as a place where food was prepared and where thinking people cooked, but a land populated by the assemblers of food. He wanted to occupy a world where he was in control and didn’t want anyone to anticipate whether he really wanted a corned beef sandwich or a Reuben.

He ordered the turkey club.

November 27, 2004

My daughter noticed a man living near the storm drain lake near our house. The storm drain lake sits behind a chain link fence and collects the run off from the city streets, the strip mall parking lot, and Pacific Highway South. The water sits in the pond and slowly filters through the gravel to the Sayworth Creek running in the green belt near the highway. The creek runs down a steep gully and passes through tunnels beneath side streets. Finally it comes out at the top of Saltwater State Park. The park seems like a little stretch of beach from the shore line, but really runs like a nervous system in thin belts through our entire neighborhood, green spaces that hold the inexplicable sound of the creek, birds, and frogs. The green belt behind our house is near the headwater. A man lives in the forest.

We left the house one day to buy Slurpees. We cut through the vacant lot, between the clumps of blackberries, across the field that had been bulldozed and then overgrown with scotch broom. An old aluminum truck trailer split and rusted and accumulated spray paint. An old couch collapsed in the rain and sun. We passed a bundle of rags holding a man sleeping under a stand of maple trees. At first I thought he might be dead. I realized it was the man who I’d seen on the sidewalk a few times, mostly in the early morning when I was on my way to work. He slept now curled under his rags. He had a puffy, grey ski jacket, blue jeans stained with dirt until they were the color of asphalt, a knit blanket rolled into a garbage bag. He wore a knit cap. His skin was shiny at the exposed edges, his nose, his cheeks. He was covered with long, grey and brown strands of hair. He had a shiny hand over his face as he slept. We walked past him without disturbing him.

The 7-11 parking lot has trouble. The asphalt was laid in a haphazard way so that it has peaks and valley and stray pieces of garbage collect in the folds, cigarette butts made fuzzy in the damp, straw wrappers, bus transfers, and slivers of lotto tickets. The pole for the bus stop lists and is surrounded by a heap of butts. The cement slab in front of the 7-11 holds unidentified stains, nicotine from Kodiak chewers spit, caffeine and coffee grounds from spilled travel mugs, and inside the store with it’s worn but clean yellow linoleum, the slick wieners circling on their oiled, rotating bed, and the long aisle of candy my daughter inspects. She eats Wonderballs, a sphere of Nestle chocolate with tiny, sugar tokens inside in the shape of famous Disney characters. She gets a Slurpee in the day glow green cup with a day glow orange straw – electric blue raspberry. We pay and cross the sidewalk and encounter then the Sayworth Stream on the other side of the highway, behind the stripmall. In this space – undeveloped, lies another empty fields. At one edge of the field there is a stands of trees that leads into a forest. In this forest people have been dumping things for twenty years. Unlike a country dump, as a dumping ground this material finds itself in heaps convenient to the existing roads. Local kids have set up old chairs in room like spaces. Some old pallets have been set up as a stage.

We drink our Slurpees under the clouds and then cross back to our house. The mad man has moved on. He isn’t there.

I’ve seen the mad man a number of times.

1) He walked on the sidewalk with his coat on backwards. His sleeves hung loose from his hand and he swung them. He wore his stocking cap and shouted at the sky.

2) He walked from the Safeway strip mall down the main north south road passing in front of the development where we live. He had his head down and stopped to inspect something on the ground.

3) He left the 7-11 carrying a hot dog. He stopped at the bus stop and started to eat it. I was at the stop light, and the light turned, so I turned toward my house.

He lives in the same space that I live, this plot of land at the head of the Sayworth Creek.

June 22, 2004

After a week of heat, after a week of meaning to get to the fish bowl that held my daughters first two fish, even though she wasn’t interested in them once she realized that they didn’t talk, bark, or really do much of anything beside bob just under the surface of the water and act up slightly if we came with in view of their fish tank, Hector, the larger of the two fish died.

I found his bloated corpse stuck to the side of the bowl this morning. Just after changing the water, the two gold fish, Goldie (with orange lip stick) and Hector (who didn’t have lipstick) swam under the white and silver meniscus. Their billowing fins flared in front of the greenish mermaid my daughter wanted for decoration. However, the water turned orange within three days of getting changed. During most of Hector’s brief life in our household -- he lasted about nine weeks -- he swam in a murky pool of bacteria infested fish excrement and festering, uneaten fish pellets. This last week has been in the high nineties and low nineties. We’ve kept air moving through the house. The fish bowl turned from slightly orange to a viscous yellow. Hector spent the last day of his life pushing his lips through the water to breath. Sometimes the fish would hurl themselves up, trying to jump clear of the bowl, I realize now, to safety. We laughed as they splashed. “Goldie and Hector are freaking out,” my daughter said.

June 6, 2004

On Intestate Five on Friday morning, at the Boeing Field and Martin Luther King Way exit, a tire on a detached semi truck exploded. The explosion shook the cars on the freeway. Tiny fragments of rubber scattered into the oncoming lanes, against the cement barriers. Blue smoke hung over the concrete. The sound and smoke suddenly made the entire freeway seem remote, the site of industrial activity. The majority of the tire peeled away from the semi and flew directly up and then fell into the red sedan following the truck. The truck jackknifed and luckily wasn’t pulling a trailer. The sedan behind it had by this time started to stop because of the length of rubber. I kept moving and moved a lane over watching phone book sized pieces of rubber slide across the freeway and them I passed in front of the truck. The entire flow of traffic abruptly stopped behind the truck. A half mile further down I-5, I had the entire place to myself.

May 27, 2004

A cistern of boiling coffee foams in the basement of a library near Red Square on the University of Washington Campus. To get to the cistern, I find a free meter on the lower part of the University Avenue in the shade of a rhododendron that just started to lose its thick, pink flowers.

The flowers hang like empty leather gloves. I cross a pedestrian bridge over the wires of the electric trollies, past the pidgin smeared statue of George Washington staring vacantly through the iron scaffolding of the I-5 bridge passing toward the blue peaks of the Olympic Mountains. The cistern gurgles in a café called By George. Before I go into it, though, I stand in the massive square where students sun themselves on the cement steps. No one speaks today but on some days lunatics proselytize and as she or he picks their voice up and fills the cavernous brick space, it becomes muffled with straggling students who stop and listen. The coffee drops from the brass bucket into a paper cup and tastes the same no matter what blend. It tastes the same as it did ten years ago when I was a student. The gesture of retrieving the coffee from the cistern is good. But what is better is standing in line for the woman who has worked the cash register for more than ten years. I can hear her say to each person buying their foil wrapped Husky burgers, their fish sticks, their bruised pears -- Have a nice day -- as she hands back their change. I wait until the transaction. When she will say, “Have a nice day to me,” I will feel she means that I will have a nice day. She hardly looks at me, but her head, at each person turns slightly and she looks at what we have, she sees me with my two dollars. She says, “Have a nice day.” It isn’t a perfunctory have a nice day. Enjoy, she seems to say, the combination of myself and By George and whatever it that I’m buying a Husky burger, fish sticks, bruised pear, cup of coffee. When I visit the UW campus, even accidentally, I buy a cup of coffee from the cistern and stand in her line. The coffee is so hot that it takes the skin off the roof of my mouth.

March 13, 2004

I walked down Eastlake Avenue today, along the docks. I saw a man from my work place. I have only seen him sitting behind a desk. I didn't know he had legs. I could presume he had legs as this is the usual case of things, but I'd never seen them. His legs looked pretty normal.

A flock of birds sat on the docks. I counted the seagulls. I counted to a hundred before I realized I was just counting. I don't know how many birds I saw.

He had legs. That man from work that I've only seen behind a desk had legs.

December 2, 2003

A Datsun Z80 honked its horn at me yesterday while I was in the left hand lane, the fast lane, doing a little over 70 miles an hour.

I became a little mad. The Z80 veered around me and went down the highway. I was a little mad and wanted to get in front his car and cut him off. I wasn’t livid or anything but I wanted to teach him some civility -- that is how I thought about it only it wasn’t as articulate as that -- it wasn’t that I wanted to teach him anything except I felt a little ashamed that I was in the fast lane and I wasn’t driving fast enough.

I don’t really like driving down the freeway at seventy miles an hour even in light traffic. On an empty highway it is sort of nice, but among traffic going anywhere from fifty miles an hour to over ninety it seems like I am going to slam into a car at any second. The surface of the freeway itself is scared with high speed gashes, long streaks of rubber, broken pieces of car on the shoulder, strips of split tires, hunks of metal, and dropped garbage from overflowing loads, cushions, blankets, fragments of plywood. For the last several weeks I keep passing the front end of cars. On the Mercer On ramp there was the front end of an Acura or Toyota sports car lying in the shoulder, the entire thing with the license plate and everything. For several days it lay against the cement wall covered in ivy except where it was gashed from high speed collisions and then in inexplicably it had been carefully set on the ground, and then several days later it was gone. I saw the same thing gold instead of red ten miles south coming north on I-5, the front end of a sport car laying against the cement dividers abutting the shoulder.

I have yet to see a wreck happen on the highway, although I see the aftermath of wrecks in various state of clean up once a week or so on the interstate. Usually it is in a region of merging traffic mixed with high speed and low speed streams of cars. The wrecks cars are pulverized. Their front ends mashed. Their doors ripped off.

Last week an ambulance headed to Harborview passed me. I could see it a mile behind me on the freeway coming through the traffic. Everyone pulled over and slowed down to fifty miles an hour and then it kept by as it passed I finally heard the siren and then it was kept moving through the traffic causing it slow and move to the right as it inched its way at eighty miles an hour closer to the medical center.

January 31, 2003

Snohomish County Courthouse

The Snohomish County courthouse was built in the late 1950s. I'm guessing. It looks like it came from the same manufacture as the Pacific Science Center, built for the World's Fair in Seattle in 1962. To say architect is along the same lines as complimenting the chef at Denney's. Although the waiters at Denney's invariably ask, "How was your food?" I mumble back because, well, it's food at Denney's; my wife, however, will cheerfully exclaim, "Give my compliments to the chef!" because this sends them scurrying away to refill her ice tea. The courthouse had a plastic mould quality. White pebble conglomerate pieces had been assembled like a hastily and somewhat glue intoxicated toy store kit construction. Everything seemed period, that is, it seemed like it had just come out of its cellophane wrapped box and had been left to sit -- used by the various civil servants and citizens involved in legal proceedings -- but not modified in any substantial way except for the wear of forty years of lawyers, policemen, jurors, clerks, entering the place. The landscaped trees had grown out of their planters and cracked the cement. The daffodils had died and rotted and turned to mold. The mold had dried out, and blown away leaving behind the oxide casing of the flower cups around the central sculpture that looked the same as everything else, as if it too had come out of a cardboard box with plastic wrapping and been airplane-glued to the base. There was a plaque honoring the valiant men who died overseas. The statues were melted bronze monstrosities that repudiate everything else about the courthouse. One appeared as if his torso had been stolen, and the rest recovered from a cow field ditch. He'd been re-welded to his legs. He had long, slender legs, leaving a gapping cleft between his legs, and then a chest starting at his breasts and his arms drooped like melting cheese. One of these slender arms draped out and connected him to the other figure. A woman, overweight and wearing jogging pants and a sweatshirt sat with her daughter or granddaughter on one of the benches, and she watched me as I circled the statues. The benches were two pieces, an angular jutting of preformed conglomerate material and a long, hexagonal bench. A seagull squawked from the roof. His beak flashed over the tall face of diamond shaped windows, each window edged with jet age chrome and bisected with an almost churchlike (or maybe jet plane icon) of chrome. The grandmother, or maybe mother, I couldn't really tell her age, really, glanced up at the gull and then turned to look to where it was calling, down the hill, to the ripped up street where backhoes installed cabling for the new Everett hockey stadium, to the vast, air between the city and the blue foothills, swamp, river, and nothing.

Abandoned Vacation Cabin

Under the stand of Douglas fir, the cabin rotted. The owners hadn't driven out to the place in ten years, or if they had, they weren't able to do anything about the state of the house. They didn't sell it for one thing. They didn't even take the dishes out of the cupboard. They kept the place even though the roof had collapsed on the southwest side. The rest of the building still, technically, stood. The majority of the interior was damp, but not wet enough that the tacked up Life magazine covers hadn't foxed. It was only a matter now of a couple of years, another season even, before the bracken ferns now growing in the raw, red earth spread across the floor, and moss began to creep down the walls. The two bedroom packed with box springs, blue quilt sleeping bags with checkered linings, matching art deco dressers, and a lamp with cowboys and raw hide trimmings didn't look damp at all, and the only sign they hadn't been used was the layer of brown, furry dust the covered everything and the cloud of cobwebs floating against the ceiling. The light switch didn’t switch. It wasn't a switch, but a thick plastic button that clicked off with a direct hit against the surface. The button marked on popped out. The light came through the windows coated with webs and stray cedar tree needles. The light filtered down through the Douglas fir boughs and the maple tree branches and then finally through the hole in the roof, this light didn't change at all when I hit the on button. The blue glass phone terminal sat on a pole visible from the kitchen. Cedar boughs curved in through the hole, leaving behind long, fuzzy strings of cones. A streamlined white enamel stove sunk in one kitchen corner, with oven door still open, revealing a rack with long burned, long molded, long dried up and fossilized baked things. Everything still lay stacked in the cupboards, plates with pale blue streaks on them and coffee mugs with matching saucers. The drinking glasses, short, and modestly sized, diner glasses, really. From the center of the room, I could hear the river slosh and drag gravel along the bank. Birds relayed twirls and chirps up and down the forest. The ferns around the house draped against my legs, leaving the thighs of my jeans wet. I came out into the soggy, grassy yard, now a tangle of short salmonberry bushes and looked across the river at the neatly manicured lawn of the neighbor there. A man sat on his desk drinking a cup of steaming coffee and reading his newspaper. His cell phone rang and he leaned down to pick it up. I couldn't hear his voice, just the sudden cut off of the beep beep beep. It was just the sound of the birds again and the river and the wind knocking water loose from the branches and the drops fell down each drip making a slight tic as it met leafs, and fronds, and stones.

January 11, 2003

The Christmas Tree is Broken

I went walking with Riley last weekend. We walked around the block. She stops when we leave the house to inspect the plants. She has on white shoes, the model of shoes that she wore during her first year of life, but she hasn’t worn these shoes through the summer and in the fall she got a new pair of dark blue shoes, and she generally wears these but we left them at our friends house after New Year's. She wears her white shoes outside. We live in a duplex, on the bottom floor, next to a street named Ruffner and an alley. The alley travels behind peoples' houses. In the last couple of years the large backyards, once filled with old orchards of twisted fruit trees with gray branches and yellow leaves for most of the year, except for the profusion, suddenly in the autumn, of pears and apples. The apples sat on the tree this year until a November rainstorm knocked them down. They were bright yellow with thick brown bruises against the faintly blue sky and the gray tangle of brittle stick branches. A row of new duplexes has gradually moved over the orchards and stands of cedar trees. We live in one of these. Construction trucks drive up and down the alley. They have left deep ruts that fill with rainwater. A stream trickles. And Riley unaware that anything in the world has changed because her presence in the world is as much a part of this change as the ruts and the overgrown density of buildings, stops to admire the brilliant red tomatoes on the long dead tomatoes plant. She stops to pick up a stick. And then she picks up another stick, and says, “Here, carry this for me,” and hands it to me. She stoops over the stream and riles the water with her stick. We pass Christmas trees that have been set out. “Look,” she says. She stops in front of a Christmas tree. “The Christmas tree is broken.” She looks up at me as she makes a preliminary stomp into the shallow edge of a deep pool. “Do you want to go back to the house and get your lady bug rain boots? You can splash in the mud puddles if you have them.” “No,” she says, and then stomps into the pool anyway, and I pull her up. “I want to splash,’ she says. I explain about the boots again, and she says, finally, “Okay.” A woman passes us, and she says she passed some children making mud pies. We come to the blocked storm drain, clogged with leaves. I show Riley what happens when the leaves are cleared, making a pile of mud and leaves on one side of the drain with my bare hands. Riley and I dig our fingers into the muck to make a channel. “It’s cold,’ she says. And we pull our hands up, covered in old leaves and grains of gravel. “Dirty,” she says. I think at that moment that I should make sure she doesn't put her hands in her mouth -- although she doesn't do this much anymore. The water slips down the channel we’ve made. We watch the pools sink to puddles, and then a little rivulet trickles down the middle of the alley. My daugther is calibrating the Christmas trees, the movement of water, the feel of one stick and another in her hands; these are things and objects in the world as she is an object in the world. She knows more than she knows because of the odd connection of one word to the next, but her fluency in the world is gained through her fluency in the word, this tying down of word to thing and thing to word.