And for once, I finally feel normal again.
I have to apologize for my late absence. The Country Fair doldrums are something with which I have come to reckon as a natural condition; a cyclical byproduct inherent to the energy expended making the pasta stand performance in addition to all of my other bits & explorations.
I come back home fucking exhausted.
Heart & soul fulfilled, but a mind in need of equilibrium. It’s hard to recognize that our default world does not operate on the same level of magic & whimsy. Hell, even into the fairgrounds does this creep in; the fair itself is, in starker terms, an open-air mall for bourgeois hippies.
But I refrain from rolling my eyes & biting my thumb. Capitalist complaints end at the door of cottage industries. None moreso when my introduction to the Country Fair came by way of friends more committed to finding their music & spurring serendipity with as many interactions as they could.
Thus so I was during, thus so I struggle after. It will be a whole ‘nother year until I return home again. I am cornered by a default world until then.
There is beauty here. I am blessed to live in a city such as Portland, as gorgeous as it is weird. Yes, even as the state burns & chokes the horizon with smoke for air. There’s a strange attraction in the wildfire sun’s orange glare. As it it promises not to blind you should you not help but stare.
A comeliness to grief in the apocalpyse, when the end of all things feels near. The city rattles on, no matter, ever the bazaar. It’s diabolical but this joint isn’t going to stand outside & mix with the bonfire smoke by itself, my dear.
Last time I took a walk downtown, I saw an honest-to-God pimp, zoot suit & all, with a feather in his cap, jive-walking to Voodoo Donuts or so I guess[ed]. And for the first time in a while, I rumbled a public laugh. Snorting as I gave a chuckle & my lighter a flash. Suddenly I felt I was getting back.
I finally feel like I can write again. Not that I hadn’t–just that I can share it without a rote sentiment. Work has resumed on the poetry collection; I had been debating whether or not I wanted an ISBN for the first edition.
I am combing my journal for ideas from Fair & beyond, scribbling the new ones as they come, engaging in exercises to keep the senses sharp & the tools then some.
In the time I was lost, I became engrossed so thoroughly by Christopher Nolan’s interpretation of The Odyssey that my critique had become a creative essay. And though I am loathe to discard it, its initial draft is overwrought & the nature of my critique far departed from the field of cinema.
So much so that I have to piece to render from the germ of a singular idea.
Then there is the matter of the Portland Trail Blazers, last spring’s sporting darlings become this summer’s villainous anxiety. There is much to be written there, though I have to commend the professional reporting that already been done [particularly from Mike Richman & Sean Highkin.]
My opinion hasn’t changed; billionaires are scum.
So this is where it all stands:
–(1) poetry collection in the final stages of completion
–(2) poems ready to be published as resume the daily week standard [starting next Monday]
–(3) rambles waiting in the chamber to written; two for The Odyssey & one for the Trail Blazers & their new owner
–(4) August, a poetry drop in earnest; I am aiming to have to it done & published next Thursday (8/13) but bear with me as I gear up the pace & reestablish my daily practice.
We have less than fifty days of summer left & though the smoke has turned Oregon’s golden month into a blazing harvest, there still are days to savor before the rain shuts down the furnace.
Whatever default emotion or [righteous] rage induced by the makers of this climate, the greatest lesson I learned from Fair was to always [be on] the search for the magic.
Ramble on,
–The Casual Rambler
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