numb fingers.

I didn't get the better job. They hired for two spots and I didn't get either of them. I have been "highly encouraged" to apply again should another position open up. I don't really know what that means. Do I apply again only to find that there are still more people applying that are better qualified than I am, having to deal with anticipation that leads only to disappointment once more? This is a sad, bitter feeling right now. I am left to my current job, which isn't bad, but is also only temporary. There is the chance of being let on permanently, but after today's news it doesn't feel possible, much less likely.

I suppose I can stop waiting anyhow.

not so much a christmas fever as.

This is my first christmas away from any sort of long standing, established home. I wanted to say my first christmas alone, but it isn't exactly right; my folks have come to visit me and brought my dog to stay permanently. It is still all off center. It is my first christmas in a while not spending the weekend being irritated at mike's unwillingness to go bar hopping, and subsequently my first christmas not spending the rest of the eve and following day bar hopping instead, or more appropriately, only with martin. the friends i have here that i would spend time with for christmas are back in the town we all left behind.

this isn't a bad christmas. ultimately it is just any other day, but with less food options available and less aimless pedestrians on the street, but since we all seem directed into this need to have christmas be meaningful or something (be that something nothing or not) that it makes this particular one just feel odd. i am not in jolly spirits, but nor am i ever really, so nothing is up there. it is perhaps just some longing for a past that is no longer able to reached. lost loves we can't see in the same light ever again, or our scattered groupings of friends that we have been so remarkably close to and yet now don't say hi once a year.

i miss tempe in random strange moments. in the street signs downtown that i can barely read until i'm on top of them. of knowing that the gang is at casey's or the pv and that i am only minutes away from them at any given time. there are many gangs here, but none of them are mine. it is just time and patience and blah blah blah but being patient and trying doesn't make the waiting much easier. it simply makes it more obvious.

there is a grand pointlessness that seems pervasive throughout most of these posts. i don't really have my writing together yet. it, much like the rest of me, is still slightly askew.

a few mornings ago, taking a shower, i started thinking of the first few lines of a poem. it didn't go far, but it's the first time in a while something just jumped into my head and demanded attention. it is a morsel of hope, but i suppose that is all i have been asking for.

merry christmas.

a sort of lean to the left.

In what has been a somewhat ridiculous few weeks I have started pushing myself down a path towards getting more involved with this city. I mucked through google for a while, tracking down some old links to potentially old open mic scenes, and over the next few weeks I suppose I will start weeding out what still exists and what doesn't. It is not so much my hope to start becoming fiercely involved with poetry again, so much as it is simply to make a few friends and see where that leads me. Right now I find myself blaming everything I do on how cold it is. Too cold to go outside, too cold to stay inside and do anything but sleep. In Arizona it was the heat, and now that I've had the reverse I guess I realize more that either I cannot deal with weather in any capacity, or I am fond of making up excuses. It is a sad understanding that it is more likely the latter.

Since I have arrived in Portland I've read a few books.

Adverbs. I was interested and then not interested and then interested and ultimately finished but was not satisfied. I hope his Lemony Snicket series fares better.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. I didn't even finish this. It has been a long time since I have been unable to finish a book. It will be a longer time before I go back to Eco.

The Mouse & His Child. Really, what is there to say about this? A film I loved as a child, I love even more as a book as an adult.

Gob's Grief. A strange debut, feeding possibly into his sophomore work. A worthwhile endeavor. I enjoyed the hell out of this but it suffers from not ending soon enough.

Light in August. I guess I feel as if I tried too hard with this book. As if between every space of each letter I searched for some meaning that was already right in front of me. This book was beautiful and sad and dark and funny and violent and all of it.

Frankenstein. Having never truly seen the old film, and dealing with only the collective knowledge of what Frankenstein is, I was pleasantly surprised that this novel destroys that image altogether.

Today after putting down Frankenstein, I picked up The People of Paper again. I feel as if this will become a once a year read for me. I am in love with the descriptions and characters. The mood and ability to be playful and serious all at once. After this I will move on to the new translation of Beowulf. Maybe pick up the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales, or those Grimm Brothers.

Lately I've had a series of thoughts rumbling into my brain again, things I have been unfamiliar with for some time. It has always been just wake.move.work.eat.sleep routinely and I, if not exactly having been okay with this state, have at any rate accepted my losses and continued on with it.

I need to start carrying a notebook around with me again. A pen and stray thoughts and equip myself with some ability to build a collection of thoughts to start writing with again. Right now you come into my head but just as quickly you flee and leave me distracted by the green light of the traffic sign, only to recall hours later that there was something perhaps near brilliance that was just right there only what could it be. I can never recreate the situations in which you usher yourself into this corridor of electrical jams and crashes.

This never will really have on concurrent thought will it?

alternate endings.

I am running. In my dreams, past these brief waking moments, it is as if I am perpetually running this three block trip. Over and over and over missing the bus. Today, not for the first or last time, I missed the bus and stood in the rain as it coated my body and clothes in a thick wetness and waited for the next bus to arrive. The bus driver, she always says the same thing every time. 'Hey could you just wave or something when you see me coming, I can't hardly see you kids this time a day yer all wearing black.' It's true. It's a darkly lit bus stop, surrounded by trees and cars and an apartment complex that shines a light directly into the path of the bus sign. Last week after she made the same request I stood almost in the street and waved both arms frantically in her direction and only in the last minute did she barely stop at all. 'Can't hardly see nothin here' Really though it's a safe bet there's someone there right at the point in time or close to it. I take the bus home five times a week and it's always the same story. 'Hey I can't see you, can't ya just'

Lady look I'm just trying to get home you know? I try to make things easier on you I motion into the sky summoning down some potential wrath of mass transit and pray you will take me out of this rain and deliver me into a house that offers no wamrth but at least protection from the sky trying to drown me. But you have to meet me halfway. When my arms are up just look around for them. Tell me you're doing that at least. You have a terrible job and I have a job that is mind numbingly simple and at the end of the day I just want to sit in your damp dank seats and let the engine of your machine carry me off into some future somewhere.

The first bus drive into Chinatown is something like 10 minutes and the bus is never crowded and I pop out a book and read for a page or two and avoid the gaze of the two other people that, compelled with nothing else, stare silently at me. By the time I get off I am sick with the shudders trying to get their eyes away and then just as quickly as it came it is gone and I have forgotten both of you and the bus and arms waving and how little attention you pay me and the rain is back and chinatown is screaming in the voice of egg rolls, hot and sour soup and bums meandering down lanes of traffic whispering obscenities to themselves as if by saying it low and almost to some hidden track of sound that only the most perfect ears will find they are somehow doing everything justice.

whattimewhattimewhattimeisitbuddyfuckigottagetsomewherewhattime.

and at the second bus stop in chinatown under the HUNG FAR LOW building (no joke here, laugh as you'd like) I watch cutouts of people as they stand beneath overhangs and shield themselves from the rain and an old man with the smoothest skin I've seen in a while eating from a small snack portioned size of frito lay chips say shit man where's the damn bus and he crumples his bag in his fist and throws it into the wastebasket because he is a concerned citizen. and the bus comes

the 33 to fremont comes and the 35 to some garage and the 4 comes twice almost on top of itself as if somehow it set new records in lapping town and then the 17 comes on ooooh you 17 i've gotten on you too many times mistakenly to be dropped off to my hand waving start to be tricked by you once more and then the 4. again again the 4 comes by three fours come by and i've been standing around for 10 minutes waiting on my bus just my bus and here is the 33 and the old man now

pacing back and forth around something invisible, or at least something that i cannot see in my weather wearied eyes he starts mumbling and i wonder obscenities but likely it is just thatdamndamndamnablebuswherecouldyoube and really i don't know.

and then you come.

you always come in swift and creeping all at once and not like a dream because the rain and chill and the wet crawling down my cheeks from my massacred hair always makes it much too real but there you are suddenly beside me and i never notice you until i look up from the ground or down from the shaky pillar of light construction above us and am always startled

you are always beautiful. you are always beautiful and you are always a red head or a blonde and sometimes you're probably 21 but more often than not you seem to have been in your early 30's these days and always off somewhere and nowhere important but you just wait and that's a patience i can appreciate and i think as i watch you wait for the bus that here you are every day doing this i can't imagine you wouldn't be able to have the patience for me. see i have a lot of things wrong with me but i just need someone to be able to wait them out and let me grow out of them or figure out how to fix them anyway and i think you are exactly that because you are so suddenly abruptly always on time.

but with a patience that is borderline simple habit you step on the bus. today the four. another four. four fours and nothing i need at all. and you step onto the bus and climb up the steps and sit down so i can still see you and our eyes meet like always and also like always i think i see just the slightest hint of a smile on your face but probably you are grimacing at maybe the smell of the bus or the shortness of space available within all the shoving and standing on top of one another or then again perhaps you aren't doing anything at all and finally i have begun to fail myself.

and then the bus. finally. the 8 to my neck of the woods is typically over crowded to a point where 'Ladies and Gentlemen please stand towards the back of the bus to make room' is more like an inside joke than it is any sort of actual request. I stand for as long as I need to until luck allows me to be standing next to someone sitting that is now departing. and so i sit down and take out my book again and i put it on my lap slowly without opening the cover because secretly, person sitting next to me, i know you're looking at the cover and i hope you're going to say something about it and i hope we'll spark some sort of interest between the two of us because this is the only way i know how to handle things. and so after that routine fails i take in about ten pages and suddenly am overwhelmed by the smell or proximity of strangers or just drowning perhaps in the poor palpable feelings running loose within this bus. we feed each other our own personal sadnesses and take in as much or more than we give out.

and then the bus stops and i stop and the bus goes on but i don't go with it. it is raining still and dark and i have gone back to my non-waterproof shoes and stepping into unseen puddles of collected water and my feet are damp but this is all mostly okay.

when i get home i stand at the bottom of the steps waving my arms again. hoping it will notice me.

snow.

It isn't quite the same waking up here. Quickly upon arriving I bought curtains for my not so private windows, a slightly transparent green color. Pea perhaps. Perhaps not. At first in the sun the light threw a hazed green sensation all over the room. Lost mostly in the dark wooden floorboards and the grey poupon colored walls, but still there. Trapped somewhere between the small dots of color left permanent (or as permanent as things easily painted over can be). In the mornings for that first week, waking up sometime around noon the sun brought to my waking eyes some sort of vibrant sign of life.

And then today it snowed. I am awake and sitting up in my bed, amping myself up to get out from the covers by pretending to be better than the cold. The rumbling outside brought my eyes to the window and the leaf machine was barreling down the streets, in the direction of my parked car. Amped enough, pants on t-shirt on, outside and before I knew it I realized that it was not rain that was lightly pelting this too sensitive skin. Rather crystalized points of ready to melt snow. Clinging desperately to the skin on my arms trying to be a part of something warm for once yet destroying it at the very same time.

It has been grey for weeks and the sun only comes out once or twice a week it seems. I wake at 7 in the morning to make it to work by 9. I take the bus and I stand most of the time and when I'm lucky and get a seat I read and I don't do as much thinking as I'd like but occasionally it happens. At work they're talking about the procedures to take in case of a snowstorm, whether we will remain open or not and if we do or don't how this affects us regardless. I stare out the window, glossed and blurry and search out a sun behind the clouds threatening past the tops of buildings. They don't leave and that's okay. It's nice to have a reason to appreciate the sunlight for once.

I have found a few bars that I like to frequent and perhaps this is the most important thing to me right now. In turn, perhaps this is also sad but. There must be something to strive towards. I am searching for a better place to live right now. This place is somewhere to take my shoes off but not to place my hat. It is cold and empty and loud but with silence.

I'm not sure what I'm even saying at this point. This is more to get letters out from fingertips than for anything similar to wanting to write.

Once I wanted to write. Now I just want to want to write.

It's there somewhere. Hidden beneath something. Around a corner. Just out of sight.