"Arbitrary Sacred Spaces"
AKA "Searching for a Rich Inner Life" as seen on Oregon bumpersticker
A month ago, my cat Larry and I stumbled Northwest; apparently “War-ravaged Portland” according to our Commander-in-Chief is under occupation by jackboot Feds today, although I only learned of imminent invasion via alternately alarmist and sarcastic (as in that McSweeney's hyperlink) memes via Substack as I click upon:
C/o Steve Skojac's incisive blog, where he questions the Catholic faith in which he was raised in what became by his formative years a very conservative version. This shaped his subsequent prominence as a voice in traditional circles. Then a crisis of faith sparked by a run-in with an intransigent cleric during Covid, which demeaned his family, weakened his convictions, and eroded his longtime beliefs. While I don't share his interest in conspiracy theories, unexplained visitors from astral realms, or his A.I. immersion, his struggles with marriage, mental mapping, and mourning loss of verities all resonate. I consider him an “internet friend” bravely facing pain through his determination to quest anew, on his own secular yet spiritual? midlife pilgrimage.
I'm venturing out too, via my pass as newbie (unfortunately sent it only halfway into September and the free amount's about to expire) to explore fresh surroundings. My forays to respectively the downtown public library, Powell's City of Books (twice but didn't buy as my budget’s been decimated by moving-in, higher rent than anticipated, grocery bills ditto, thrift-store runs, and more below on shopping for sundries galore), Oregon Historical Society (my favorite so far despite inevitable guilt-tripping all PNW woes pre-, Territory, and post-Admission on “non-native settlers” of the dominant culture), and Jewish Holocaust Education Museums. No luck at that legacy of frontier trade, Pendleton, in two stops at their municipal outposts (where everything cheaper—relatively—seems 100% polyester China and anything decent far above my pay grade).
Ambled around often scant-trodden sidewalks, among usual combinations of prone campers, shroom hustlers, vapers, t-shirt/shorts bearded men of every ethnicity, inked lesbians, diasporic East African and headscarved South Asians with phones buzzing, human inclusion diffusing concrete canyons, who all shuffle around the Pearl District.
My stint at the Jewish Museum having taken all of fifteen minutes including a bathroom break (its security guard shouting down an instigator of micturation against a parking lot wall across Davis St as I entered; bold miscreant roared back his SSI “rights” to threaten said enforcer’s violations of his First Amendment bladder, and made sure to finish what he’d started), I waited midday for one bus—where a looming unsteady fellow yelled calculating a half-dude, half-threat at my back “hey buddy can you help no I guess nobody listens” before loudly introducing himself to another, less-kempt, more-copacetic denizen, hitting him up for fungi(ble) smokes—under the ground-block vacated (last July, owners fire-sold $45 m their $390 m 42-story edifice--complex above framed in its prime, from Chinatown) USBancorp Tower aka “Pink”. Harbinger of smug Seattle, wannabee S.F. Exited after crime “liberated” 2020 DMZ, but there’s an ayrie grill perched flight thirty, where I quail to estimate a cocktail’s tag.
Pink’s pitches fade in glare off noon asphalt, papering over depopulated (sub?)prime retail spots. Earnestly enlarging bloated staged stock snaps of a carefully vetted array of grinned and ginned corporate casuals under forty, beaming at bum-rushed golden ticket out West. Yet my Son #1 (grizzled thirty-something, hit by sticks—SMO temp gigs—after carrots dangled for seasons, after cliffhanger Zoom and “you'll hear from us next week” dangling modifiers to whatever spiel HR hacks spin, haymaker Rumpelstiltskin) avers DTPDX doomlooped post-Covid: schemers inflated soulless offices, java joints (definitely underserved in Stumptown’s terrain), bistros, boutiques, high-rise high-dues penthouses to Moloch. A slumping impact's visceral to us walkers foreshortened groundlings beneath steely ziggurats. (“The Royal Scam” reified.) Strip clubs swayingly stay. I watched R2-D2 Robocop patrol, a blinking DarkStar sentinel.
Earbudded strivers, put-upon women with dyed locks awry dragging carts, trash bags of aluminum cans, and/or kids. Elderly frames hunched, pushing walkers or hoisting crutches. Backpack tokers, ruddy Nordics of no certain age with blueberry White Claw Hard Seltzer rather than Starbucks (the latter's closing many franchises, encouraging to me as a harbinger of common sense returning to consumers, who don’t need so much pricy sugared frothy caffeine, scolds me; if you're gonna imbibe, best support a small business instead of a virtue signalling corporate monolith--read on for Target).
With a strapping yapper, prematurely bald, toting tinny energy drink, who regaled our captive audience all the gear grind from depot to Pioneer Square, cursing monologues with diverse bureaucrats as he angled to wrangle a job-training grant for whatever CNSS is, steadily swearing, desperately seeking fast Amtrak engagement, claiming his security clearance (I hesitate at whomever granted such from jackboot echelons), as he squawked fifty minutes into his cell within our carceral rumbling jolt at flak-catchers of wherever our taxpayers’ dollars get disbursed. Including WES' white elephant light rail which costs $108/passenger, runs one car a few times up and down the Wilsonville-Beaverton track dusk and dawn weekdays only, to carry about a third of the riders it did recently. (Might be Nike or Intel's dippy profit margins, as they're leading firms this side of a regional riparian divide). Overruns ate up what greenwashed voters were promised, who rejected extension in length and frequency after lockdown. However, WES looks nice, as pics attest: I hear it on the stone's throw away Union Pacific line. Albeit ample fugly aesthetic installations, which grace or mar pavement of Rose City, redolent of über-70’s L.A. Triforium or ‘84 Olympics mauve-pink-teal tilting erections.
So where in this sub/urban sprawl do I find respite? River's vista fleeting, glacial Mt Hood barely glimpsed on the Barbur Blvd haul in and out of the maritime megapolis, through elms come winter will expose what autumn overlooks. Signs all memorized already, including a tie-in for a goth-lite tween series based on Wednesday Addams.
Slogan appears wise for today's apt Days of Awe, as Jewish congregants reflect on not merely repenting but repairing wrongs they've done another, forgiving and refreshing during a soul-span decidedly curdled by what Tucker Carlson jeered at Charlie Kirk’s memorial as “hummus eaters in Jerusalem two-thousand years ago.” Beware smiling iconic interstate Dominant Culture’s franchised Heartland or Heimat’s Miss Freckled Fortune; opt for “teshuvah” turnabout proffered as fixing our arrow’s flight, righting one’s wrong aim. Lucky you? Or communal resolve borne by individual determination?
“We can be heroes, if just for one day…” I’ll pass over Bowie's “dolphins can swim” lyric. But definitely dogpaddling in depths, evading caverns, battling fools, staggering into shadows. P.S. my top Thin White Duke tune, “Station to Station,” name-checks Kabbalah: “Here are we, one magical moment/ from Kether to Malkuth” You know he’d enacted a monomyth in stride.
For my own trailblazing (seeing it’s Portland: as a connoisseur of totemic logos their NBA team's akin to that severe Seventies graphic stamp—viz. Amtrak—devoid of wit, affection, inspiration), I confess that I may borrow son’s jalopy and brave back lanes over the West Hills and not far away to Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey less than an hour's tick. (I'd serendipitously seen a sign for it nearly two decades ago after getting to Willamette Valley too early for an Irish Studies Conference at George Fox U. nearby in Newberg, but I didn't wander; blame the-then deafening construction of what's turned out a dignified “in the Northwest style” sanctuary—I did roam by Monk’s Pond—ripples of Thomas Merton’s quasi-hermitage poetry publication?)
Or perhaps Chabad another hour by shank's mare in a Hwy 99 mini-mall. Or less than that in traffic (I hesitate to risk as a pedestrian, sitting easy mark for conniving drifter or alert scammer as past experience on L.A. mass transit attests to run-ins and fend-offs, some hand’s-on, to transfer downtown by Trimet after night falls) over Sellwood bridge into a come-sundown TLM in crepuscular Sunnyside. However, my residual ritual preference remains eremitical not communal. I’m in no mood for hand-holding, amped folk-mass V2 guitars, noshing as a real McGoy with MoT motley strangers or jamming into a pew for a (happily licit here by counsel of a sensible small-E episcopal shepherd) Tridentine service. What's can a poor former altar boy do, this so-low solo agnostic wishing a silent universe otherwise? Fake it ‘til you make it? “We shall do and we shall understand” as at Sinai those gathered at terrifying theophany promised their G-d? Or sally forth like Steve or Joseph Campbell? When loss crushes, will gain beckon beyond Mordor mounts? Fated, I've left behind my known realm, questi(oni)ng.
I’d retreated towards my own stolid muse in El Sur. I’ve left Ecuador, since in thrall to indigenous strikes closing highways--gasoline subsidies cut by beleaguered center-right administration in tailspin> bus fares rise> opposition activists spurred by embittered socialists out of power literally and figuratively occupy the Pana> trucks can't deliver petrol or products given the reliance on one road to ferry them all in a mountainous maze--and puzzle over how after unplugging fridge, freezer, appliances, gadgets, and water heater my bill's far greater after my departure, to return to an off-kilter homeland my wife and I'd gambled on shifting southward from, to economize practically and downsize materially in. To pivot 2.5 years to nearly the day (ironically the average expat's Ecuadorian stint) and shell out for necessities we’d given away to these very same charities where I prowl for deals on clothes, furnishings, and cookery.
Which wound me up off-center at Target. Not where I should have started, but I had to get my WiFi router at a branch next door. Daughter-in-law #1 advised their lauded housewares would fit my needs, and I filled a single cart, addled by the abundance of big-box after dipping into the intimacy of Andean shops, in what took almost three hours, messed up as I am by navigating singly (I’ve lately gotten totally swung wrong about twice in a day; my internet won't stick and the blue dot Google Map suffices to send Upper Left Coast isn't aligned with my SoCal embedded six-decade internal compass), a total of $555.75, astounding my debit tally, as fraud alert in EC shut off the last credit card I’d inherited post-spousal mortem. I’ve yet to capitulate to rosy-pink Bancorp’sed fatcats for plastic manumission: into digital, fiduciary, score-settling debt.
Well, I let three folks ahead of me while checking out. A quiet Latino father with a perky girl who found Point-of-Purchase Snickers tempting. Two women around my age who separately arrived toting only birthday cards. Given my greater heap, and my ground-down condition after filling the laden load meant stop the spree, I explained to the last my predicament, after my loss, as she’d looked over my obviously bachelor pad accumulation, broom and mop sprouting above bedding, towels, throw rugs, bins, detergent, kitty litter, quilt, hangers, anti-odor sprays, bulk toiletries etc. She paused and we shared, well, a moment. I don't know consciously why I was so forthcoming.
After she paid for her purchase, and while I negotiated with the patient cashier (even as I apologized to a third lady, behind me, silver-hair dignified, about my burden; she suggested a harness for my feline as he keeps jettisoning any collar; I tap this as he’s absconded on touchdown at my Son #1’s place; didn't come back for 36 hours due to the dog in residence as I housesit them, theoretically, both; updating this entry, Larry’s been gone in Beaver State drizzle another stretch as long, ora pro nobis St Gertrude, patroness of Felix cattus domesticus absconditus) about two carts to the car, the woman in front, resembling actress-playwright Anna Deveare Smith with far more than a trace of my wife's tousled naturally curly locks, stepped back: quietly asked if she could give me a hug. I adultly consented. She held me tight; suspended, wordless.
I assured her of keeping her in my blessings. I shrink from presumptive petition of divine intercession from forcefields above or around us for paltry Santa Claus or pre-exam list egotistical wishes. I don't countenance Big Ask prayer (faith-based after all, rather than action we can generate, in my resolute discombobulated mindset part-fact, part-fiction), this promise rose from widowed heart. Under ubiquitous red-bull’s-eye logo, a sultry, post-precipitation Cascadian afternoon clutching crimson meshed waffle-stamped cart off the lifelong 5, I skirted an arbitrary liminal realm, arbited by a kind fellow traveller nameless as the Dao, past understanding, blip of passing peace.
Public art “interactivators” at WES stations, to edify commuters and trainspotters.