Random Acts of Awesome

I just stood on the beach for an hour and watched lines of pelicans skim the heavy waves like they were parting cream from milk. It was incredibly mesmerizing. They were so slow, and perfectly synchronized. The leader would begin to dip, and just before he disappeared behind a white tipped wave the last in line would gracefully follow. Then back up out of the trough, each pelican a rollercoaster cart rolling behind the first. It almost made me cry out of sheer jealousy. I wanted to know what they were feeling so badly, and imagination can only take us so far. I tried to imagine the chaos of the wind skimming the waves, the sudden wells of silence within the trough of each wave, following the heavy body in front of me with perfectly instinctive rhythm, the sunlight warm on my back and glittering off the water, obscuring my view of the food below till the last possible second, the sudden shocking cold against my tongue, the blind hope that this time something slippery and wriggling woul...

I have this weird... fear, for lack of a better word, of charity. Not of receiving it, but of giving it. I woke up this morning with this idea in my head. I was going to make a ton of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, buy a couple bags of oranges, and I was going to go downtown and distribute them under the bridge. A part of that was me thinking about what Memorial Day means to me. I'm not remotely patriotic. But I believe a society has a responsibility to take care of those it puts in harms way. And the number of Vets living under the bridges in downtown Portland is testament to our absolute unwillingness to do so. Giving a grown man a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an orange isn't much in the way of thank you, but it's a start. The other part of it was the fact that I think about doing this all the time. Making a couple pots of chili, some rice, putting it in the back of my car, and distributing it on paper plates at night, downtown. Rice and beans, mashed pota...

There is a plant that is growing outside my porch which I've come to love. It's a weed, really. A greedy weed, with giant leaves that spread out wide to catch all the sunlight, and a stalk that grows tall to out-compete all the other plants. I find myself sitting here, in a comfy chair in the corner of my porch, watching the trees dance in the wind, quite often lately. I'm reading, smoking a cigar, thinking, and enjoying the trees. But more often than not my eyes are drawn to this weed, and I look at it and think thoughts that make me happy. The leaves are fringed in fine white hairs, making the plagnt look 3 dimensional and everything around it flat. It's a vivid, jewel green, peaceful and life affirming. The veins of the leaves are fractal mountains, and the edges are coastlines. It's beautiful, and deadly to every sun loving thing that grows in its shadow. I look at it, and I think about just how much I don't know. And I'm deeply comforted by that knowl...

I'm sunburnt. Like, crispy arms and back of my legs. It's from having my arm hanging out the window while driving all over this half of the state over the past 2 days. And standing still in front of (and in) a river for an hour at a time, with the sun beating on my back. I love rivers. They flow so strong, and when you stand in them and just breathe, they sweep all these cluttered lies and foolish ideas out of your head. I have plenty of Oh moments, standing in rivers. I called my sister yesterday morning, and talked to her for a good hour. I asked her why I am so consistently drawn to emotionally retarded/stunted men. And she asked me what I meant by emotionally retarded. And I described our father. I didn't realize it till she pointed out it, but seriously. I described our father while we were growing up, point for point. Smart, shiny, happy, full of frustrated confused rage, and completely incapable of handling any sort of intense emotion rationally and maturely. A man...

Life has a theme lately. Well, life has a theme all the time. It's just that the theme changes quite often. The dominant theme of my life for the past year or so, it seems, has been my sense of myself as a woman and my relationship with the world based on my gender. And everything else that is encompassed in that theme, which is a lot of crap. I have often felt like a teenager again over the past couple of years. I've lost so much of my surety, so much of my confidence. My brain feels like a squirrel caught in a wire trap, running frantically and hitting barriers far too soon. But. But. That lack of surety, that lack of absolute confidence in myself, has forced me to step back from what I thought I knew. It's forced me to reevaluate everything about myself, my relationships with others, and how I view the world. I feel like I'm going through this growth spurt, very similar to what I went through when I was in my teens. The world is a tumultuous place, shifting a...