Portland

I just got back from Minneapolis, a weekend spent with admirable Minneapolis kids, whip-smart and dedicated, articulate and nerdy and cool. I like Minneapolis because it reminds me of Portland. On the airplane home I started poking around in the old files on my computer and I found a draft of a zine that I was going to write in 2002, just as I was getting ready to leave Portland. It was basically a love-letter to the city and as I was re-reading it I found myself asking why? Why the hell did I leave?!

What I tell people now is that it was hard to find a job there, and I guess that was part of it.

And I didn’t really know what to do, that was another.

And my apartment was crappy and I looked for another one but didn’t find it. And it seemed like everyone else had left, was leaving or was going to leave. And I wanted to get out of that relationship I was in that didn’t feel quite right. And I wasn’t aware that moving across the country would be a rather extreme and, in the end, pretty financially, emotionally, and in in all other ways expensive manner of doing it.

Oh well. Live and learn.

And I thought that I wanted adventure, that was another thing.

I was ambitious. I just wasn’t sure for what.

Anyway, I’m drowning, drowning at 40,000 feet in nostalgia for Portland.

Portland the big easy. Portland the green. Portland, the happy city. Portopia.

The other day I was talking to a friend and he was relating a story by Borges or Marquez or someone about how nice it would be if we could age backwards—one would start an old man, slowly grow stronger and sharper, then smaller, more innocent, and purer of heart, and finally, at the end, as the coup de grace, crawl back into Mom.

Sometimes, I want to go back to Portland. Sometimes I want to crawl back into Mom.

Sometimes I wonder why I ever left. Do some of us have repetition-compulsions related to birth? Do we become inclined to squeeze ourselves, with tears and wailing, out of close, warm, and comfortable spaces, and into the cold unknown?

Maybe.

I want to know who coined the phase “You can’t go home again,” and what the exact circumstances were that led to their saying it.

Release

Sometimes it all seems like too much. Make the money, pay the rent, get to the grocery store, feed yourself, go to work, take brown-bag lunches, exercise, see your friends, look for love, do well on the job, do your projects, keep your dreams alive, think about what’s next. Read books, listen to music, keep up on the news, stay conversational. Look all right in clothes. Phone home.

Last Sunday I went to a barbecue/picnic in Prospect Park. Sitting on the grass, I got into an interesting conversation with two women about a disparaging remark that one of the women’s boyfriends had made about her looks, to another friend of his, early in their relationship. The other woman was trying to understand. Why would he have said something about your looks? You are lovely. At last she hit on an explanation she felt confident with. No, here’s the problem, she said. It is not about your looks. He would not have said this if he hadn’t been comparing you to something already in his mind, a vision or an ideal. It’s like Freud, she said—the difference between mourning and melancholia. Melancholia: incomplete grieving for the lost object. The object that was lost is swallowed, protected; he’s harboring something in there, a memory or a fantasy or an old girlfriend, to which he’s comparing everyone, and therefore this bizarre remark to another man about your looks not being right.

So what does this have to do with me feeling that life is too much? It occurs to me that maybe I, too, am playing a game of unfair comparison. A woman’s boyfriend couldn’t see her loveliness because he was hung up on some kind of ideal girlfriend that probably never existed the way he imagined her to, anyway. Perhaps, when I get to feeling overwhelmed, I’ve become hung up on a life that exists predominantly in my imagination. Maybe the beautiful life in there, the life that’s all things at all times, prevents me from seeing and admiring the real life out here, with its many causes for joy and pride.

Karen Horney wrote somewhere that the essence of neurosis is needing to have it all. She described a neurotic woman as one who simply must be a consummate hostess, an accomplished pianist, learned at languages, a patient listener, exciting and vivacious, an excellent cook, an avid traveler, and the best-read person in the room. Horney pointed out that it is not possible to be all these things. To not be miserable, the neurotic simply must let some of it go. She’s unbelievably loath to—but she must.

It occurs to me that in this sense we’re all more or less neurotic. We’re living in a neurotic age. New York city might be the most neurotic burg of all. Or maybe Los Angeles or Washington has that distinction. At any rate. I dream of balance. Perhaps I need to let some stuff go. But I don’t see what.

I’d like to let go of the job.

But I probably need to let go of the vision of the life that feels good all the time. The life where I already have everything that I want.