Well I’m a bit lonely here in Portland and I guess that loneliness is what is driving me to expose myself on a blog.

It was grey as soon as the sun rose this morning and I was chilly on my commute home from work. In the afternoon it started to drizzle and by evening Phil and I were walking through empty streets under our umbrella towards the waterfront. Hours earlier I had watched people move through the streets, the rain saturated colors and the heads turned down. There was something romantic about it. Everything seemed to be in rhythm with the weather. And yet when I went down for a walk I felt normal, uncomfortable, out of sink. I did not feel I was part of the same picture that had so aesthetically satisfied me from my third floor window. It struck me as strange that I could feel this way while at the same time someone else may be watching from their window, seeing me as part of that ideal. Well, enough about the weather.

I’m feeling intolerably domestic lately. The up-keep of a small one-room apartment seems to demand so much I can’t even imagine wanting a house. My things are a comfort and a frustration, a source of guilt and regret and yet an attempt to beautify. I’m already having difficulty accepting the purchase of our couch and table. I wonder what I can do to reduce the clutter I am adding to the world. Phil and I had a conversation about the whole warped concept of ‘giving back.’ Gestures are often seen as giving back before we take in to account all that was taken to make that ‘giving’ possible. After analysis, what we use and what we take often outweighs that which we so pride ourselves in returning. It is like giving a gift that you previously received or even stole from another. It gives the gift less value or none at all. Before you think of yourself as altruistic, think of all the privilege that allowed you to make the choices you do today.

Tomorrow we plan to go the coast. I love the Northwestern coast with its rocky shorelines and dark waters. It is nothing like the sunny lake coasts I frequented in Indiana and Michigan. We plan to go even if it is cold and raining because the Oregon coast is just as beautiful in grey as on a blue day.

I started reading a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes. I read Beauty and Sadness several years back. The novel is so sensual it is startling. I remember Beauty and Sadness being that way also. Can something be beautiful and revolting at once? Vividness is delicious in writing while making us shutter. His writing has a way of making my gut feel all twisted up. Do any of you know what I mean?

Well, now a night nurse who has a tendency to stay up in to morning hours even when I am off work, I better be off to bed. All that time I thought I was a morning person and now I relish the darkness, the city lights, the quiet that comes when the streets begin to empty.