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.

A small quickening. The room responds slightly to being entered. Like a raised blind.

Before 11:30pm at Lucky’s I saw the new Coen Brothers movie which made me feel bad for not being Jewish, sort of, or more the same thing I have always felt at having no well of tradition to draw from. It made me think of “The Conversion of the Jews”, and for the first ten minutes in the theater I was pretty sure I was watching the wrong movie. It’s pretty funny though.

The next day I didn’t leave where I sat except to show them where the roof leaked and then when I’m going to go to this party. The library is on the way and I get this book though it has never occurred to me to want to write like Chekhov.

I only wanted to tell people honestly: look, look at how badly you live, how boring are your lives. The important thing is that people should understand this; if they do understand this they will certainly invent a different and a far better life.

I’d left for the party early because it’s too goddamn sunny in the East Bay; it doesn’t feel like anything is going forward. I sit in a shop and read, then go to the store again to buy beer. I don’t know what to buy but settle on one kind that I don’t like but I feel like people bring to parties. I go and everyone is nice but it makes me feel bad. I remember nothing about the trip home but that it took too long, and that someone’s mother was going to be mad.

I woke up today at 3am to drink two glasses of water and woke at nine to be up. I went to buy used things and paint, went to the grocery store again but this time with purpose. At home I cut so many onions it feels like I have been bawling all morning but I’m not feeling as bad now. The good news is it doesn’t feel good to stop making things. Today I made corn chowder and this picture of a whale. There will either be less good or more good tomorrow.

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

[From Middle Mind, a book about how our lack of imagination is destroying our country and the world, which-- though I sympathize with the hesitations-- ultimately I'll be on board with, and have spoken of before: an argument that art or culture is most dangerous when it gives the illusion of engagement without providing tools for true criticism or rebellion, and that insufficient critical thinking skills make it hard to distinguish between art and culture that wants to actually push back and that that is mostly placating. Hard pressed to disagree with the notion that Americans are fairly impoverished as to White's definition of the function of the imagination: "to critique and to imagine alternatives to the social status quo"; so here is his critiquing, the sincerely best parts of the book, I think, flexing and teeth-bearing, but then maybe because it is Most Entertaining so perhaps I do a disservice by quoting it instead of his actual arguments and I am not really engaging with his point, as this is all simply context for the book not for what he's criticizing here, which is the idea that new technologies ("wearing the internet around your neck") will bring us closer and make us, in fact, more like the village of our ancestors and less disconnected. You're already wearing the internet around your neck; this isn't very village-like. But a thing should be engaging to be engaged with, and moving on from his bite White offers possible solutions which are captivating and hopeful despite the weariness that seems to run through the rest of the book, and he is also deeply involved with my favorite book press so there you have it.]

She grew arrowy. “You look like an arrow,” he said.

The day before we were accidental witnesses to a man on the platform who lurched and met the ground with blood that pooled to a thick shadow. Today I feel like I’ve been stepped on. We phoned help, told the woman at the gate but any more we were useless; the train came. Walking home she told me about unrolling her mother’s clothes from the drawers and pulling at the threads for three days after the funeral. She was the nicest she knew how. We made it to our house where there had to be something to do– build something or stir something– like to prove we were still in this world while the air stayed smelling of iron.

I want to sit down and talk. I feel horrible.

I could make her clothes, sew her up in a thick cloth. I could wrap it around her for days, leave her breathing but remote. It keeps spilling out of her that we’re at a loss, things are uneven– if it could only drip from her tongue to the soft web I could build around her, taking what was edgeless and spongy between us, it disappearing in the threads. This was one small ominous disaster, not a series.

Her feet swinging I tell her I don’t know, slip my hand in the hollow cave behind her knee and move away.