Tag Archives: love

moving to portland

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By the end of this week I will be living in a small bedroom in my brother’s house in Portland, Oregon, with probably about $50 in my pocket and a plan in my head. Since Monday I’ve been staying at my parents’ house, which is calm and secluded and unchanging like a Walt Whitman poem. My only regret is that I can’t take all of my friends with me. My problem has always been my introverted nature (surprising to some). I’m a bit of a loner. So the irony is that moving to Portland, and being even more of a loner, kind of frightens me, because being pulled away from my friends made me realize how many friends I had. I don’t regret having a lot of friends.

I suppose this blog will become more of a travelogue and journal of my time in Portland. Most people when they move are much less pretentious and amazed by the whole thing than I am, but what can I say, I’ve lived in Idaho my entire life. Change is much more change to me than other people’s change is to them, I guess. I’ve only lived outside of Nampa for about three years, and then it was just in Boise (and the summer in Auburn). It’s a big deal.

So off I go, into the wild blue … well, gray wonder of the perpetually overcast pacific northwest. I promise I’ll write more once I’m out there.

In the meantime, here’s a poem. It doesn’t have a title.

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some people say they
want to fly; i just want to walk.
i don’t care where.
up hills, down mountains,
through streams, underground,
on clouds, it doesn’t matter,
just as long as i’m no longer here
but there instead, amongst
things that aren’t the things
i’m used to being a part of.

(one day you and i
will lie in clover fields,
surrounded by green,
searching for some
long-lost four-leafed
clover which will prove
our undying luck and
love for each other)

some people say they
want to fly; i would rather swim.
to hold my breath and fly
flimsy through the pressure
of billions of tons of microscopic
water and creature, to flap my
pasty white arms and surge,
unhindered–a form of flying
but one with death behind
every crusty old rock.

(we will marry who we
think we are, and fall in
love with the notion that
we can never change,
and soon we’ll sag and
sunder and separate and
all we knew about the
moon and stars will die)

some people say they want to fly.
those people are idiots.
what else is in the sky besides
the clouds and the sky?
even birds grow weary of gliding
through the air, and their children
are born on this good green earth,
to be suckled into life with
earthworms and earth beetles
and nothing from the sky.

(in death we’ll be buried
intertwined, like mummies
in love, destined to be
together through a rough
manipulation of our rigid
bodies and a foundation
poured above our heads,
to shelter us forever)

ah, sickness

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I’m amazed at how asymmetrical illness is. People say that beauty is in symmetry, and that beautiful people are, for the most part, extremely symmetrical. It’s interesting that the opposite of beauty — malaise, illness, sickness — is depicted in asymmetrical specificity rather than all over your body. Right now I have a cold and a sore throat, and I noticed that my right nostril was plugged up while my left was not. The reasons for this are simple; if both of my nostrils were plugged up, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. But it still says something about the ugliness of disease.

Cancer starts in a specific spot. Headaches attack certain parts of the head. I suppose migraines feel like they’re all over but probably emanate from one spot. It seems like all illnesses start from specifics. On the other hand, beauty emerges as a whole, equal on both sides. The egg is symmetrical. The sperm is too. When they combine the cells divide equally into mirroring sides. Things that are one always split into two. Symmetry.

What, then, is symmetry in love? It’s a little more difficult to pinpoint the concept of symmetry in intangible things like that. A lot of people, myself included, have been deluded to believe that having similar things in common equals symmetry in love, when in practice that doesn’t seem to work out at all. In fact, the opposite idiom, “Opposites attract,” usually works out better than having the same things in common. Why is that? Why do higher concepts have a yin-yang approach to them, rather than a symmetrical approach?

Balance, in nature, is in symmetry. Physically, it would be harder for a man to walk if one of his legs were shorter than another. And most beautiful things in the world are symmetrical things. It’s a form of natural balance. But ideas like love and good and evil are dictated by a different kind of balance, where having one concept become greater than another becomes “bad,” like evil becoming greater than good. These things are to be balanced, usually by social constructs but ultimately by nature. Is this the same with love? And what balances love?

I’ve noticed that if a woman loves me too much, it turns me off. And alternately, if a woman doesn’t love me enough, it frustrates me. It follows, then, from my own personal experience, that finding a balance of love is fundamental to a good relationship. But how does that work? How does one achieve a balance of love?

The only real answers to that question come from the Beatles (“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”), which is a warmer way of explaining Christ’s fundamental belief: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Karma, essentially, though Christ didn’t exactly flesh out the karma part of it. He set out the first principle, but didn’t tack on the “if you do bad things to others, bad things will happen to you” part. It looks easy but I’ll be damned if it isn’t.

Well, my throat hurts so singing sucks right now. I wanted to record a cover of “Thinking About You” but I can’t reach the high parts without going into a really girly falsetto, and even then it still sounds shitty. So maybe I’ll just strum my guitar for a while.