I live in a house in a room where the walls are painted a blue that is a cross between the deepest ocean and a blueberry popsicle. The weather outside was luscious today, a chance to get a dose of Vitamin D that we usually don’t have very often this time of year in Portland. Still, I spent half of my day inside. When I’m here surrounded by the blue walls and paper blinds covering windows with old bars on the outside, I feel trapped. My mind can’t even escape and it becomes a sort of echo chamber in here, except that implies that I have thoughts in my head that ricochet off the walls and set up an uneasy resonance, but it’s more like a heavy sedative that holds me in place and keeps the mental traffic down to a slow trickle. Sometimes I step on the front door and look around the neighborhood, test the air outside with my nose, skin and lungs. If the sun is out the glare of it makes me squint my eyes to protect them. Everyone knows how overwhelming bright the sun is in the Pacific Northwest. I put out feelers and think about leaving the house, but I don’t know what I would do. I usually crawl back inside after a few awkward minutes on the porch, wondering what the rest of the people in the world are doing and why, what compels them to go out, to strive and achieve, and why they aren’t affected by the sedative in the way I am. Maybe it is just because they don’t have blue walls, but I doubt it.

Like a man lost in the desert or at sea,

my thirst is strong and unquenchable by anything within my reach;

yet I will be afraid and untrusting when salvation is at hand,

doubtful that my senses are honest and what is before me is good and real.

Tentatively I will get to my hands and knees, bending my elbows and dipping my head

to lap, like a cat from a bowl of milk, from the new thing I am drawn to yet find so worrisome.

Will my desire prevent me from noticing the milk is sour?

Click.

That’s funny… The last thing I wrote here was, “…back to our regularly scheduled programming.” I guess the TV went blank after that. Well, we’re back, and we’re going to be completely random and sometimes weird, so hang on. What I wrote below could be just the beginning of something. Or it could be last thing to ever appear on this blog. Or I’ll post it here and then never make mention of it ever again. But what the hell?

You wake up spread-eagled in the middle of a freeway with a large orange cone protruding between your splayed legs. You have no recollection of how you got there. Nor do you have the sense to get up and move out of the road. Luckily, there are no cars. No sounds except for the high-pitched buzz of various insects. It’s hot, and as you let your head settle back onto the asphalt it feels as if there is a little give–it has softened in the heat of the day and now has the texture of well-chewed bubble-gum.

It’s dark except for the stars above which you can see clearly. The moon hasn’t risen, or maybe it’s already passed over. Maybe it’s new moon. You have no idea. What day is it? What month? It’s hot, so it must be summertime. Deciding it’s time to assess the situation more thoroughly, you push yourself up to sit with one hand, face coming within inches of the orange cone, your eyes focused directly on the white reflective stripes near the top. Odd, that, having a cone between your legs. You scoot your butt back on the road, heels of your cowboy boots dragging along in front of you until you’re a few feet away from the cone. Your head hurts. Reaching up, you touch the back of your scalp then run your hand forward through your hair, feeling for the cause of the pain, but there aren’t any bumps.

Letting your hand fall, you look around. You’re in the middle of four lanes, all with white-dashed lines between them, so it must be an eight-laner. But where are the cars? There are no lights coming or going anywhere you can see, and the only light you can see aside from the star is a faint amber glow on the horizon to your right, the direction the road seems to be heading. 

If you are bored, click on these or one of the links at the bottom:

• Archive of Fiction from The New Yorker, some of which you can read for free
• No Posit, Fiction and Poetry
• Chemically Imbalanced (espresso-jogged screeds)–maybe you might not enjoy it as much if you’re not a coffee-geek like me, but he does a good Hunter S. Thompson impersonation
• Share your writing forum setup on Yuku by vonswevleg … vonswevleg? vonswevleg! We need an explanation for that one.

What follows is not creative, nor does it have anything to do with riding public transportation. Perhaps this is just to prove to myself that I can, indeed, post crap here and not be overly concerned with what anyone thinks. Sorry to subject you to it, but it’s something I have to do. Come to think of it, that depressing rain thing was crap, too! I guess I should apologize for that, as well.

Hey, before I lose everyone’s attention, maybe you guys can help me overcome my block and give me something to write about. If you have funny suggestions, potential writing experiments, an idea you’d like to see someone do something random with, then I’m your man. Leave comments here and I’ll see what I can do.

I have writer’s block. I believe that’s the technical term. Look it up. I’m not. It’s artistic license. You should probably look that up, too, just to make sure I’m not totally fucked. Oh, yeah … the block. It’s this big, immovable granite thing. For some reason it’s in the shape of an “O”, only it’s squared-off like the wheel that guy created in that comic strip B.C. before some smarter guy made a round one. But why is it square and why does it have a hole in the middle? And if it were really a block that I couldn’t get around, wouldn’t it stretch for miles and miles and miles and become completely unsurpassable and insurmountable? Maybe I’ll just write about it.

Now that I think of it, I can’t get writer’s block. I’m not a writer. I don’t sell books or anything, so I don’t meet that definition.

This is really pathetic. This is not your daily adventure. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.

This September rain in Portland is romantic.

This October rain in Portland is crisp and very fall-like.

This November rain is getting chilly; the city seems so grey and Portland-like.

This December rain continues on without end, but I guess this is Christmas in Portland.

This rain throughout January belabors the point that it is still winter in Portland.

This long, dreary winter, with rain continuing on throughout February in Portland, has got to be coming to an end soon.

My God, it is March, and yet the rain continues in Portland … seemingly God feels an endless need to weep over our sins.

April … there should be sun. There are flowers sprouting here in Portland, but all they have to look forward to is more rain.

It is May here in Portland and … I’m going to kill myself.

And I began to write, feverishly, like a man possessed, not knowing where I was heading or even that I’d begun. Words formed on the page nevertheless.

Ink flows out, scratching noises flow in. A squirrel catches my eye, distracts, and then a blue jay. My thoughts fragment and I’m unable to continue until I do, stillness and otherness replaced again by scratching and thought, intense concentration on a fog, a cloud that words and paragraphs emerge from, newborns yet fully-formed. I was not aware of them before they appeared in front of me. The pen stops moving again and I hold it up, looking for the source of the words, suddenly aware that something has occurred but I don’t know what or who caused it.

I am alone in the room and alone in the universe as far as I can tell, until the squirrel comes and inspects me, perhaps evaluating my writing. I shrug at it, not knowing where the words came from.

She looked over in class to make eye contact and smile. Maybe it’s a signal. Wait for her outside after class. Chat about the other night when you met up with people from work and she was there and you were talking then you went off with someone else to someone else’s house because they wanted to leave and smoke a joint and you don’t really do that much but it sounded like fun and movement is a good thing, continuous, so you went along. She will say she met up with a friend and they went someplace else and then someplace else and the friend was really drunk. The plan was just to use that as an opener, an excuse for waiting, and then get her phone number. She came on to you strong a year ago when you weren’t available so why wouldn’t she be interested now?

She is already on her cell phone coming out of class and that makes it awkward so you’re already at a disadvantage, but play it cool. Then she says she needs to check herself in the mirror. Waiting, then she comes back, finally gets off the cell phone and, somewhat more awkwardly than you had planned, you bring up the other night and start a conversation. Conversation is great, but she’s not really your type and what you have doesn’t qualify as conversation. You should flee. Instead tag along like a docile pet, but assure yourself you aren’t. To the grocery store. Follow her around the store. God, it’s not worth it. If she were your type (physically or mentally) it would be, but this isn’t supposed to be anything. Not dating, not future long-term relationship or a whisper of marriage. A fun distraction. But a delicate sense of timing and propriety holds you back from being an aggressive dick like so many others (perhaps her type) and you hang on to your plan. Get her number and give yours. Not even sure you want it anymore. Pretty sure you really don’t.

Agony, ridiculous self-abasement. Goddamn.

So there’s this place across from where I live. My upstairs neighbor calls it a trailer-park that has taken root. The residents are a strange assortment. There’s the woman with the bubble-butt and a tummy spilling out in front to match. She stands at the stove every day with her door wide open, wearing too-short shorts and a wife-beater, stirring the contents of a big pot. One time . . . one time, I swear I saw a paw reaching up out of the pot before she beat it back down with her wooden spoon, but I can’t be sure. That was the same day the cute family from across the street knocked on my door. They were looking for a lost kitten.

Then there’s this old guy who lives down on the end. I used to see him come out every night with a folding chair and a fishing rod. He’d sit on the balcony and cast his line out into the street, but he never caught anything. Then one night this crazed-looking woman whom I’d never seen before came out of the place next to his and talked to him. The next day he was sitting there first thing in the morning and there was something new on the end of his line. He cast out into the street a couple of times and caught the attention of a squirrel. The furry little thing took the bait and he yanked hard on the rod, then started reeling it in. Once he had the squirrel securely in a gloved hand he knocked on the neighbor lady’s door. She jumped for joy when she saw the little thing and they both went inside.

The garage doors on the bottom level never open and they’re secured with heavy padlocks and chains. Sometimes I can hear and awful racket down there, and at night there are flashing lights I can see under the door and a sharp smell like when I accidentally singed my hair lighting the grill. I’ve noticed there aren’t as many dogs in the neighborhood anymore.

On the opposite end from the old man there lives this really big amoeba. He . . . she? What do you call those things? I can’t remember. It has a lot of parties. Almost every weekend there is loud music–strangely it only seems to listen to David Bowie–and all sorts of other amoebas, parameciums and what-not coming and going all night long. I never knew there were so many simple organisms living in this city. I should get out more.