So here, for me, is a small inventory of the things that have changed:

1. My hair is three or more inches longer, the longest it’s been in years and years and I have seen many new states
2. I have lived alone for the only time
3. I have a set of new knives
4. I worry in new ways, with less narcissism, wider and more like an anxiety about everyone and how they could be hurt or how I could hurt them. I don’t know if it is the way the claws and cranes come in, stretching you out and teaching you about the biggest ways you can feel or if it is just a small sliver of getting older and pushing down those old strategies for putting yourself in the center of all that is good or bad or the best and the worst
5. I don’t write anymore

*

In August we flew to Seattle with a friend working on his commercial pilot certificate, making our way over the Oregon trees we were lost in on foot a few weeks before. I’d just finished Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, now knowing that the word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army. On the plane there were so many ways to prevent you from disbanding, GPS and maps and the constant checking-in over the frequencies, relaying locations along the way with an alphabet stretched to more audible words.

About the last point: it’s true, or very rarely. I never think I am a writer, I think I like to have things accomplished, and to remember, and I like reading and used to be sad a lot. In the air, though, I thought how nice it was that with all the maps and GPS there was still someone from the ground to call to, someone there to tell your plans. All the time above us this is happening: here is who I am, where I am, here is where I am going. I used to do that.

*

In A Field Guide Solnit talks about the artist Yves Klein, who one day with his friends decided to divide the world among themselves: the earth, the air, the sky. Klein signs his name to the sky:

In 1946, while still an adolescent, I was to sign my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic “realistico-imaginary” journey. That day, as I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.

We saw a fireworks show from the plane, taking place somewhere right outside of Portland. Everything is well documented, small and still from that high, but this was still miraculous: those fireworks that take up the whole sky from the ground, the whole huge sky, and they don’t take up any of it at all, not even close.

I think about Klein claiming his sky, hating the birds that flew through his masterpiece that he couldn’t fathom the size of, that no one can, not from that one place on the earth where you only are. And I think about all the claims I make everyday- who I was and what was mine- and what a tiny little piece I see. There are days I miss making claims like this, though, sometimes.

Portland is the most livable city I’ve ever been to. Troubling a little, but all of the things you could need seem within such short distances there it felt easier to keep your priorities straight. Lex moved to the states from Germany where he’s in school and didn’t understand what suburbs were, ending up in the suburban neighborhoods outside of Palo Alto and bored to death. (His mother didn’t understand because she’d seen Desperate Housewives and that’s what American suburbia is.) Portland somehow takes the parts about the suburbs I miss (houses, yards, trees) and puts them in a context that doesn’t mean staying inside would be preferable.

So I didn’t write much while I was there, because I was busy and happy and fairly sure I could catch up. Whatever kind of asceticism I thought the whole thing would’ve taken was completely mistaken; it served mainly as a reminder that I am a regular person with a normal job and no children and a lot of free time, and most days I could live normally and still write 1,500 words by the end of the night. Sometimes I said no to things. Mostly I didn’t.

But I’m glad to have done it, mostly to know that I’m not lazy, and have some semblance of discipline. It’s good to do one thing for some time. It’s also good to know that a sense of story is possible without outlines or any real idea of a plot, that years of story consumption will make something emerge however mightily it may rely on clichés to get there. Better, though, was being a part of the amount of work that went on to make the event run, and watching others do it and hearing stories much more interesting than mine, and knowing how much was happening that would not have otherwise been happening.

This is maybe the one thing I feel as excited for as Lex was about the California state checkpoint.

***

Tomorrow I start moving to San Francisco. Three days after I wrote this post everything changed again to prove there’s no point in planning for anything. I’m going to miss living in Oakland a lot.

This is a picture of my home in The New York Times

Before I left for Portland– when I told my mother I was getting in the car with a stranger for ten hours– all she said was that I only have good people in my life, and she doesn’t expect that to change. It is a weird thing to have someone else tell you: when it is true completely but you’ve somehow failed to realize, and how then I felt I owed something to someone or everyone for whatever luck or circumstance means that my whole life is made up of people who are fundamentally good, and fundamentally good to me.

But so for whatever reason I still place a lot of weight in location, being in a place for a time and the right one, when everything I know says that it is mostly beside the point. In one of the best things I read this year the author asks to imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and then everyone else would cease to exist:

Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

and it is horrible, but how quickly. And this is the point, if it is four people or ten there is no boat but they are here. Here, as a life; not here as a place. Everyday we expect to live out the door and to the end of the block and up the elevator and back home again, and expect that somewhere those people we love to do the same, without thinking or checking while the world keeps moving. They’re there. Someday this isn’t true, and it is its own special kind of narcissism the way I worry that I’ve not said enough to those four people. To anyone.

Someday I would like to build a house and fill it with nothing. There would be rooms and closets but each of them would be empty. In winter I would keep it warm and in summer I would keep the windows open. For months I would search out everyone I’ve every known and invite them to the empty house and many wouldn’t come, but those that could would fill up every wall and corner until it makes sense to own nothing else but everyone in those rooms.

***

This year when so many things stopped working the conversation seemed to turn– more than I ever remember being the case– to seclusion and labor and building a life that exists tangibly in the way you spent your time and the food you put on the table. When being too far divorced from the effects of our actions finally made a lot of rich people poorer and a lot poor people even poorer it seemed maybe nicer to live a little more immediately. But to do it immediately? I’m still making the money I can, buying the things I can. There’s been so little change.

Leah came with us too on the drive to Oregon. She was going home to Eugene for a month before she left for Japan to join a monastery.

So this was how I saw it: I’d sign a lease and go to my job each morning and take all of these good people in all of the time in what ways I could, and somewhere Leah would take a vow of silence, and we could maybe build a balance back in. But it only works if I find a better way to balance growing up and learning how little I matter with mattering more to those people I don’t deserve. In Oakland or here or Portland or on a farm or in Japan or Croatia.

The point of the novel I wrote was meant to be that we don’t own anything, except if we’re lucky someone else or others, and after fifty thousand words I should’ve found a way to mean it.

So far it’s not that difficult to get words on the page but I am also not delusional; two days is not many.

And: do it, buy stuff, donate. It’s a beautiful thing. Doing and making, world.

Criminal Justice Babe: Your new office sucks.

The Temp: Thank you.

Criminal Justice Babe: Why’d you move in here?

The Temp: Some are born with shitty offices, some achieve shitty offices and some have shitty offices thrust upon ‘em.

Criminal Justice Babe: It’s really small.

The Temp: It has one redeeming feature.

Criminal Justice Babe: And that is?

The Temp: (Points at self with both thumbs) THIS GUY.

Criminal Justice Babe: … Who are you pointing at?

The Temp: Myself.

Criminal Justice Babe: I thought you were pointing at the wall.

The Temp: I have to get out of here. I wish I was in love with you or anybody or anything external to myself. I desperately want to find something external to myself to be fascinated with but I have found nothing that can sustain my interest. Or more accurately, I cannot sustain my interest in anything and it is killing me.

If he could go back through his life and edit out the bits of which he was least proud, which chapters would go? “Oh, without number. Whenever I was cruel or insensitive.” Has that been a theme? “Yes. Casual, focusing only on my own needs and requirements, yes. Inability to know that other people are truly alive as I am.”

Barthes, quoting Wahl:

This is what death is, most of all: everything that has been seen, will have been seen for nothing. Mourning over what we have perceived.

—Writing is a simulated conversation. You’re still alone. It’s masturbation that sometimes later gets projected onto the wall and then couples couple and copule beneath it.

—People making love while a porno plays on the TV.

—Right.

—I don’t think you’re listening to me.

2: Somehow I made it this far not knowing that Pale Fire is funny. 

Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand. 

3: Newest goal is to write something that spans at least two pages so I can be personally aware that keeping things short is out of preference and not laziness. Something to look for in 4-8 weeks.

4: Swagger and action missing from previous thing. 

5, regarding 2: No? This?

Virgins have written some resplendent books.
Lovemaking is not everything. 

Conchology would be the study of mollusks, though it isn’t important.

6: Here are some Literary Virgins

7: Once my father dreamt every problem in the world was caused by sex.

“Salome,” answers the young man,
“I wanted them to bring me your head.”
       He said this jokingly.
And the next day one of her servants comes running,

carrying the blonde head of his beloved
on a golden tray.

-Cavafy, Salome