Winter in Oregon means that the
sun sets at 4:30. My office is covered in windows, the biggest wall faces east, the haze lifted, and pink light reflected off of Mt Hood. The three of us who bothered to show up today all stood to stare at it, and then decided to go home.
I walked across the Burnside bridge and the cold wind and roaring traffic, both which seemed surprisingly pleasant and comforting.
I find that I haven't been updating my mental map as buildings get demolished and replaced. The
hung far low sign is gone! How long has that been true? But the 24-hour-church-of-elvis is back, at least in some sense.
I'm at my theoretically favorite coffee shop, the one that sprung up just as my
previous favorite (from when Wifi was still new and exciting) one was disappearing
five and a half years ago.
Candy Tan is here, but I haven't said hello yet. There's a couple with a baby and a suitcase who've set up an impressive camp in the corner-- their faces seem vaguely familiar. The staff has almost completely changed in the last year, and I haven't learned any of the new names. My coffee crush barista is gone. There's no art on the walls -- it used to be that the first wednesday of the month was a frantic putting-up-paintings-for-tomorrow day, and I could plan to come and experience it, without actually having to try to deal with the "
art opening" the next day. Actually, there's still one photograph up, a picture of the President-Elect left over from October's show, taken by a guy I know from life drawing, who I'm not entirely certain that I get along with.
Someone just put on
Shicky Gnarowitz and the Transparent Wings of Joy (I think. I'm pretty sure.) Candy waves at me.
In a few hours I'll wander up to the Polish Hall for contra, which I've decided is not actually a dance form but a sort of giant collaborative knitting without string.
Winter about the 45th parallel is still hard for me, with the 15 hours of darkness, and the daily just slightly too-cold-to-be-pleasant rain. My
what-did-i-do-today chart has a growing number of entries that say "nothing" or "hot tub".
Last week, I saw a thing that might have wandered directly into portland out of my personal utopia. Jenn's little theatre troupe -- the
all star mystery something -- performed a surreal little play on streetcorners, wandering across portland in masques and costumes, preaching about Nothing. ( "
the best thing about Nothing is that when you have Nothing, NoOne talks to you! NoOne is our guru! We would follow NoOne unto the ends of the earth! Let us listen now while NoOne reveals the mysteries of the universe..." )
and I think about my job, where I make little tools to make the lives easier for people who are doing charity work and I wonder if there's a parallel thing that can be done to lubricate the strange and wonderful
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I didn't know the sky could be blue in the winter! It's so bright-- the whole city's albedo's been cranked way up.
