Spring Break

http://www.sendspace.com/file/rrlsqq
http://www.sendspace.com/file/pdbxet
http://www.sendspace.com/file/pb7y4f

My computer broke. It's last successful boot was at Santa Rosa Computers, where one of the mechanics used it as part of a video response on a Crown Victoria message board to say that Dells were loud, comically so.

I took it home and it didn't boot. Without flickering lights, I was left only with the idea of fleshy archaic activities for I could only guess how long. I rented a lot of Herzog and read about music I might potentially find at thrift stores. I remembered previous periods of mania, how much I enjoyed throwing pittance away on fried chicken to otherwise dead towns along interstates. At least then I wouldn't be in the space with the hole on my desk and wouldn't have the possibility of just giving up and going to bed. I decided to go to somewhere. Los Angeles or Portland. I was at the I-5 when Migo wouldn't answer, making the default choice Portland.

Cola and cigarettes on the hour every hour, a bowl off the road in the shadow of mount Shasta, and a needlessly reckless 3 AM Oregon rest-stop jay on 80 dollars worth of gasoline. My body was heavy with musk and clenched muscles when I arrived shortly before dawn. Conor was asleep on one of three couches, and I had to giggle at the idea of how close I had come to death or legal entanglement to be there and how little any of it mattered before I could finally join him.

I woke up early like I had spent the entire drive asleep, and what was a hostile network of single unit houses which last night existed only to camouflage and disguise my ultimate destination among their dew covered lawns was now a block of homes. On at least two of the porches were pajama wearing newspaper reading coffee drinking community members. I went out to my car too embarrassed to see their reaction as I got some clothes and some pot out, getting myself ready for a morning walk into the extraordinary. Once my senses were untrustworthy, I hit the blocks, finding where the train ran and trying to find out what sort of economy and culture sustained this awfully wet place. I bought a popsicle at a latin corner store that I had circumnavigated three times, making sure they didn't have horchata. The rice particles from the Popsicle got in my beard and I remembered that motorists watch pedestrians. I was happy to show them what a second generation Californian looks like, corduroy and disregard for time and place in favor of my own exotic agenda.

Back in my mind and the house again, Portland had expanded from his block with the coffee drinkers all the way to the street with the waffle joint. Brick buildings and the downtown of some now incorporated satellite city now welcoming the young and the Southern. It is a place designed for the young families of hopeful G.I.'s, the space between houses that was once such a virtue as to provide safety and expanse for toddlers now seems like a mechanism for prohibiting interaction through dead space. It is more true, the rents are cheaper, and the faces less white, the further east one goes. Public housing in Portland is green and integrated. Rail transit is extending the life cycle of these otherwise obsolete residential communities. Pedestrians make the whole place look vaguely unamerican.

Conor, Ethan, and I come up with a list of things to do. Without spending money, we see the various people's landmarks and I get a brief walk through an impressive downtown I think my hosts are now bored of. Voodoo donut makes me feel like I could write for Via or an airline travel magazine if they would only give me the chance. Older girls ask with what is not an undetectable amount of sexual tension about a severed bird foot they find on the sidewalk. We speculate a bit about it's origins and head toward the library. Tribal affiliation guides Conor from the rotunda to the periodicals section, where a bin full of zines gets combed over like a thrift store bin. We leave with How To Make Your Own Alcohol and me one layer of clothing thinner. Conor keeps it in his messenger bag. I am the one without a messenger bag in this city.

Always with gray, I drove across the city a few times. The highway is unmarked southbound, and I had a lot of trouble finding it form Martin Luther King street. Rusty factories and sheet metal no-go zones make the river interesting and awesome. Conor took me to a place next to the university where the kids have tagged an empty warehouse up and down, art resistance that make the boomer parents feel like the spark is still in their children. Skateboarding culture, he says, has a lot going for it. Consumption like everything else, I argue.

I disagree with this kid again in the future. A soul food restaurant that was lucky enough to receive our sauced and stoned patronage and that had different prices for soda refills depending on the size of your cup refused to give our boy a free glass of water. Conor feels wronged, I defend the restaurant.

A girl that was mislead enough to offer us free Cold Stone ice cream was not informed by Conor upon receiving his ice cream that he had been with another girl the night before, leaving me in the dark about his location until that afternoon. She said it was too bad I was just visiting like she was used to flirting and knew what a power she had at it. They were both real game players making me want something I don't far away from home, all the while it's gray and I'm listening to His N' Hers with Conor in my car. Conor and I raise our voices to one another after he disingenuously responds to my discomforted conversation with a fake laugh. I tell him fuck you, I tell him I told him a thousand times, and he says like he knows each word long before it leaves his mouth "Well you just talk figuratively half of the time".

Don't I know it. The day before, at the Goodwill, he asks if a sweatshirt he found looks nice, I tell him the shoulders are weird, and he asks me to buy it for him anyway. I kinda laugh, wondering under what justification does he have me doing this? That it is just too nice of a sweatshirt? He says it's by weight, so it'll be like, less than a dollar. Once the register lights up, I hand him two dollars, and he takes the change from the transaction as well as the receipt, and throws them in the garbage. Motherfucker.

Boys not getting along had to happen. It is part of being boys, which boys will do. I saw Lewis & Clark a couple of times. Weak marijuana and Seinfeld DVDs remind me that no matter how frustrating being forced witness to a rich kid denying his background, resigned middle class kids have less fun.

The real joy, the real highlight, was in the house of the Laws. I did not know these people, Brandon and Richard, but they are the real deal. Kitchen as a wikipedia entry on Asian foodstuffs, homegrown bok choy and chickens on the outside, moog synthesizers and musical miscellanea on the inside. Richard described his experiences going through the most remedial and prison like of Sonoma County's schools, the physical terror that accompanied an incarcerated and meth'd up student body without hope of a legitimate career. Richard distrusts institutions. Richard knew a lot about himself, his ideas, and drugs. Brandon had the privilege of having to decide which tracks would be selected for some Portland indie-pop compilation. He included us in the process, and in the bland white styling of so many local musicians I heard the hopes and dreams of the stuff white people like liking city I had spent the weekend in.

The next morning, sick of the cold and faux poverty bullshit, I drove home. Conor left his messenger bag in my car, full as it was with applications to burger king and local grocers that had yet to be filled out and I received a couple of calls that day asking that I mail it back to him. I finally got around to doing so today, as I was able to make my mom pay for it. There's feeling guilty, and there's accepting that American society is all about permanent infancy.

I got a new computer and was able to move most of my music onto it from my ipod. It took a few days of computer games before I finally thought to try and discover new music and internet about it. The chronological distance made me realize I really do put a not insignificant amount of me into this and it is both stressful and rewarding as a result. My new computer has the hard drive space of ten of my old computers, and my music consumptive patterns have not caught up to these new possibilities. I can have more tomorrow than I could listen to by years end.

Newark burns and MLK gets shot every time I heard it through the grapevine happens. A radio station cleverly adopts the melody and she heard it on KZST. Four syllables are four syllables, and a nice melody is forever. My beard is legit now, and my hair wild man style. I know that America needs to see this shit, because it feels good. Hillary and I went to the reservoir and I found a CD on the street from Maximum Homeless Guy. The future of record distribution will have recordings in increasingly appropriate and ironic places.

I am back, facebook, okcupid, soulseek, ilxor, flickering lights. You need to stop being so indifferent about it.





I sent my application to BUNAC today. Harpers magazine is a very nice thing. The library and I are closer now than ever. Same with me and the Temptations. Art history class is nice and makes me feel like I might get laid again, maybe.