Subject: It's About Time
I gravitate towards major and abrupt life changes, seeking reinvention or at the very least a reset, hoping that if I can just shake everything hard enough, new patterns might emerge. There is, at least in an analogical sense, a real ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics to this reasoning. Kicking over a sandcastle is not likely to result in a beautiful sand sculpture of a mermaid. It’s likely to result in a random pile of sand that looks more or less like the surrounding piles of sand. That’s entropy, baby.
Given that I’m like this, it feels surprising that I’ve somehow lived in Portland for 19 years now, over half my life in one city. Maybe it’s not surprising to anyone else. Zoom out far enough, and chaos tends to seem fairly boring and predictable. Probability dominates. Roll the dice enough and you start to see a lot of sevens. My feet trace habits into the city, invisible sigils used to summon, well, mostly coffee if I’m being honest. Addiction lends itself to repetition. And there’s comfort in the predictability of randomness—or should I say, the alternative is alarming. One of my favorite plays of all time, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, sees the proper terror in such order.
“The sun came up about as often as it went down, in the long run, and a coin showed heads about as often as it showed tails. Then a messenger arrived. We had been sent for. Nothing else happened. Ninety-two coins spun consecutively have come down heads ninety-two consecutive times…and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute…”
I turn 37 today and, in spite of my frequent claims that I’ve changed or that I am unknowable, I remain more or less the same as I have always been. I read old journals written over a decade ago, and apart from the specifics of people and places, I could have just as well written them a few weeks ago. A gyroscope maintains stability through constant motion. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen a number of old friends that I haven’t seen in years and been back to places I hardly ever go anymore. As it turns out, I’ve lived a dozen different lives in this city, and some of them are even less accessible; people and places that are no longer here. It’s unclear which is the more faithful representation—memory, or the partially-preserved ghosts of the past.
Despite my aversion to providing anything that might be mistaken for news in this newsletter, it seems wrong not to mention that Tita and I broke up a bit ago, and I now live in my own apartment with Stevie. I can hear the rain on the roof and birdsong right now, but otherwise it’s very quiet. Loneliness can be a hard feeling to sit with, but it has its own sort of euphoria: a weightlessness. I have always liked the expansive feeling of being in the desert or the ocean and it is not unlike that. Rilke does a re-telling of The Prodigal Son that I have always related to:
“He wouldn’t have been able to say it, but when he spent the whole day roaming around outside and didn’t even want to have the dogs with him, it was because they too loved him; because in their eyes he could see observation and sympathy, expectation, concern; because in their presence too he couldn’t do anything without giving pleasure or pain. But what he wanted in those days was the profound indifference of heart which sometimes, early in the morning, in the fields, seized him with such purity that he had to start running, in order to have no time or breath to be more than a weightless moment in which the morning becomes conscious of itself.”
What a joy it is for the clouds to pass over you just like everything else, and to be free of the burden of having to be anything at all. It’s not detachment, but its total opposite, in which one might as easily be an oak tree or a small beetle as oneself.
Proust had his madeleine; I dunk a stroopwafel in my anise latte at Prince Coffee. It’s not my favorite Prince Coffee location. My favorite no longer exists, around the corner from my old boxing gym which also no longer exists. But what does it mean, for it not to exist? In the final episode of Adventure Time, BMO reminds us that “happening, happened.” The coffee shop, the gym, they are still there at that time and place, they haven’t actually been erased. Time is just the axis that keeps things spicy.
There is also a particular delight in the imperfection of memory. I come across the traces of my past self, follow the breadcrumbs they left behind, and am in awe that they anticipated and heralded my arrival in this time and place. Each new day is a trust fall—you go to sleep each night somehow believing you will wake up still the same person. I cannot say what this year will hold. I hope to write another newsletter in the not-so-distant future, hopefully a funny one this time around. But who am I to speak for future Nome? I am just their harbinger.
Much Love,
(Already Past) Nome