Category: Journal

wild bunch

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I tossed and turned all night watching the new L-series episodes of QI, so I didn’t wake up until very late in the day.

I got some dinner with R, and we caught up and talked about being stressed out about returning to work. I talked about how in high school, I spent the entire 45 minute drive between home and school being nauseous. I was never sure that I would have the energy to switch to being the home version of myself (or school version of myself). Even though I would get comfortable again after a day or so, it always seemed like it was going to be so much effort. Later, I found out that what I was doing was code-switching, and it gave me a lot of empathy for people that have more of a difference between their compartments, and that have to do it more often.

I went to a Meetup group with J, a film club that was watching the movie The Wild Bunch. I’d never seen it before, and while it was not my favorite kind of movie, it was a rich text for discussion, and it was nice to have the intellectual experience of taking in a work of art together and picking it apart. It was also very cool to spot the source of so many callbacks and references that had gone over my head before.

Ended my night chatting with a cute OKC boy, I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Hope springs eternal. It’s Chinatown.

bagby

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I fifth wheeled with two of my friends and their new people to Bagby hot springs south east of Portland. It was beautiful out, grey and greens, harshness and mystery.

My lungs handled the hike fairly well. I was disappointed that the exercise triggered my asthma, but on the other hand, I kept a faster pace than I might have else. I’m very impatient for my new lungs.

Frozen tree sap
Frozen tree sap on the trail to Bagby Hot Springs

There were a couple of people being slow getting out of the tub that we wanted to use. They seemed like people that moved around a lot, and maybe didn’t have a settled place that they live. Collectively, once they had left we all called them “hippies” and I felt like an Eisenhower Republican and super uncool. I try to only care about people breaking “the rules” (a concept that does not itself seem that useful) when it is harming myself or others, and it left a bad taste in my mouth to talk shit about people that were a little obnoxious but otherwise were nothing but nice to me.

The last time I went to Bagby, I greatly enjoyed being naked in public, but the chemistry of this group was different.

On the walk back down to the trailhead and our car, I listened to Frank Zappa’s “Montana” from Over-Nite Sensation. It was pretty special to rock out to that as dusk overtook the forest. I played the track later in the car, but I think it was too weird.

The drive back to Portland took a while because the fog was thick on the ground, and road conditions called for slower speeds. We went out to eat once we got back to the city, but it was one of those situations where prolonged exposure to the same people leads to everyone hating each other, and so the meal was quiet.

Sometimes the known is an acceptable substitute for the good. At least in food.

I ended up falling asleep for an obnoxiously useless amount of time, waking up around midnight. I worked up my courage to arrange a hookup with someone from the internet, but they flaked out and I got irritated because I think of myself as the party that’s entitled to the flakiness, and this was an inversion of the natural order of things.

a friday

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Books

I caught up on my book cataloguing today. I’ve kept records of what I read going back to 2009, and they’re pretty accurate. I read a hellish amount of books in 2012 (mostly because of a stretch of unemployment), and I thought that 2013 would be a real step down. I was surprised to find that I read a gentlemanly 17 books, and with such great classics as Lolita, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on the list, it was a completely respectable year.

last postcard of 2014

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Staycation

I’ve been on a staycation for the last week and a half, combining some vacation time with the paid holidays. For the first couple of days, I felt a little bit guilty about just staying home, like I was squandering a valuable resource. One thing that I’ve realized is really important to me in a vacation is not feeling like I’m rushed, and that there’s some kind of sense of abundance. So I’m glad I didn’t spend to go somewhere and then had to pinch pennies while I was there.

I wasn’t quite prepared to fall apart completely right after my last day of work, though. I’ve been trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and minimize alone time, the thought of trying to fill two weeks of free time caused me to dissolve and turn into a giant needy piece of shit. I sent out a series of poorly-thought-out OKCupid messages that dialed up the impatience and neediness by at least 300%. Over the next couple of days I was hit by a swift and severe case of the Christmas Special, Everyone-Is-Leaving-Me Blues. Once that passed though, I’ve been super content and chill and happily introverted. 

Christmas

I spent Christmas Eve at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Episcopalians know how to do a beautiful service. I misread the time that the service would start, and so decided to duck into a bar for a drink (I know, I know—what a rebel). It was kind of a shithole sportsbar that I would have hated anyway, but it was also a little bit too sad. I felt pretty uncomfortable and finished my drink quickly and just walked around the neighborhood listening to podcasts. Beautiful organ program, decent selection of carols, really nice choir program and performance. I saw that one of the apprentice musicians was somebody that I met when we studied with the same organ teacher. I had a huge crush on him back then, but I didn’t actually see him anywhere there to say hi.

I spent Christmas day and dinner with my best friend’s boyfriend’s family. It was really nice to observe family dynamics without having any skin in the game. I could sit back and watch questions go to him like “How serious is this girl?” and “So when are you having kids?” with both safety and the gleeful and perverse interest of the Best Friend that [He Has] to Keep Happy.

Cigarettes

I finally had a “this is it” moment a couple weeks ago and decided to prioritize quitting smoking. This past weekend was really tough because I was drinking with people that I usually smoke with and there were plenty of cigarettes and smoke around. I can’t wait until my lungs come back and the cough goes away, I’m a little discouraged by how long that part of the process is taking, and there have been other side effects to the nicotine replacement that I’ve been taking that has me feeling a little bit worse off for all the effort right now.

I’ve also started walking every day—that’s a little more recent. I’m just trying to cultivate a new habit. Right now my mood is really good and filled with a real sense of possibility. Even as recently as a few weeks ago, certainly last month, I was really overwhelmed with this dissatisfaction at the thought that I was stuck in a cycle of mitigating the consequences of decisions I had made in the past when I didn’t understand what was at stake. What’s taken its place is a really nice optimistic mood, a feeling like right now I am at the beginning of my story, not at the end of a story or in the middle of one that’s in progress.

Some Bad News

One piece of upsetting news is that my therapist is closing his practice. I’m glad that this didn’t come at a more life-and-death time, but I’m really not looking forward to starting from the beginning with somebody new. I’m worried that I won’t be strong enough to be as honest with the next person as I have with my current therapist, who has really seen me at my worst and messiest.

Tires

I bought some tires yesterday. They were way past due, and it reminded me of the way that anybody who works at a job that interacts with the public (like I do) inevitably begins to judge people based on the way that they behave as customers. Please, Mr. Les Schwab, know that I am better than my bald tires.

Goodbye to 2014

It’s been a big year for me. I don’t have some big thesis about what it all meant, but as I look back, there have been a lot of highlights:

79 pages journaled • moved to a new job • got a raise • got to meet and work with some really special kids and families • finished some poems, and showed them to another human • Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood • moved to a new house, gained a new roommate • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • started therapy again to work on becoming the person that I want to be, not just out of a sense of crisis • reawakening my creative self • playing music socially • renegotiated and changed patterns with almost all of the friends that I have • made some new friends • cooked some ramen from scratch • Mindset • really attacked some of my issues of self-confidence and self-worth • walked in my first pride parade • became more comfortable flying solo and going to bars and social spaces by myself • saw Bombay Bicycle Club live • got a beautiful summer tan • went on a couple dates with boys • I had the confidence to dramatically change up my personal appearance • I partied hard a couple nights • I quit smoking.

I feel like resolutions are the easiest way to get angry at yourself in mid-January, so I don’t do them, but I’m hoping that 2015 will come with even more forward momentum.

Happy New Year

Pioneers in the Graveyard

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I went for a walk through a historic graveyard. Most of the people seemed to be dead before the 1940’s, although there were some random 00’s scattered amongst the pioneers. The graveyard in my hometown is beautiful, though it has a little bit of a sterile, David Hockney quality, all flat lawns and sunlight and palm trees. The dead find their rest and, like the living, are rarely bothered by the weather. 

The Oregon graveyard is scarred by the weather. Grave markers sink quietly into the uneven ground, while more ostentatious markers are overtaken by moss. 

The most interesting feature of the cemetery were large rococo stelae in the shape of trunks, complete with gnarled bark and forest creatures. It reminded me of the pioneer identity that must have been so important to previous generations of Oregonians–I am the worst kind of outsider, a Californian–, an identity that I don’t really see in the culture here, except in museums and school names. I was struck by its tackiness and its idiosyncrasy: I didn’t imagine that the person who could afford to be buried in the city and have a person-height memorial was the coonskin hat wearing type, and at the same time, it’s hard to imagine anything like it anyplace else.

My mind wandered to the tension between the local and the universal. I’m one of those high culture types. I believe, sincerely, that great culture can come from anywhere and be an asset to the world. Japanese film. Tequila. Gumbo. Whatever. One of the things that eats at me, though, is that it is exactly my type of person that is the most threatening to folk cultures, to local variation, to art forms not yet recognized as such. 

There seems to be a life cycle: a culture forms as a response to change. That culture challenges baseline assumptions of existing cultural forms. Those existing forms have already achieved legitimacy, so culture defenders (again, I think of myself as one of them) form ranks to protect them. The new form hangs on. The new form becomes popular because of its newness. The new form becomes old, but has built up a body of practitioners and ideas about itself. The culture defenders recognize the wealth of culture that has built up, and incorporate it into existing patterns of cultural presentation/prestige. This hybrid form becomes part of the world culture. 

For that life cycle to complete itself requires that I have a shadow twin. Somebody that believes the local/new/yet-unrecognized culture is legitimate in and of itself. That rejects the influence of the wider culture as intrusion. One of the things that most difficult for me to accept is that perhaps the perfect outcome is that we both be in balance, that neither one achieves dominance over the other. Too much high culture, and the idiosyncrasies of the local culture become ironed out, homogenized. Too much of the local culture, and it dies with its last practitioner, or never evolves in complexity in response to the mixture of other cultures. 

Portland is going through a bit of a high culture moment. Its aspirations, in its restaurants, art scene, music culture, is to be a “world class” city. But where does that leave the pioneers? Are they present with us, in mason jars of bourbon drinks, in the fresh local produce and heritage breeds featured in its restaurants, in the genderfuckery and tolerance for experiment in its art scene? Or are they dormant, preserved in the cold earth, waiting to take their place as grandparents of the future city?