Iron Fist

I took the morning off work to watch the inauguration today, travelling across town to start the day off with mimosas and pesto quiche, among other goodies.  I arrive to find that my gracious hosts had created nametags for everyone.  I liked mine so much I ended up wearing it the rest of the day.

The inauguration was… well, I don’t need to reiterate.  You all know how it went by now.

I’ve never really gotten into politics on this blog, and I don’t intend to start now, so I’ll keep this short: the Obama victory in this last election was never so much about Obama himself so much as it was about Americans finally declaring they wanted a break from politics as usual, that they were tired of having to pick from nearly indistinguishable candidates (I voted for Gore in 2000 because I was slightly less ‘meh’ about him than Bush, and I voted for Kerry last time for more or less the same reason).

I remember the delirious smiles after the election, the fellow Portlanders I’d see in the street all grinning at each other like we had winning lotto tickets in our pockets and our favorite teams had just swept the playoffs.  There was a palpable feeling of “holy crap, we DID it” circulating among–well, everyone who didn’t vote for McCain, I guess.

I don’t have the unreasonable expectation that our new President is going to magically make everything better tomorrow.  I don’t think just one person can make that kind of change.  As much as we despise Bush, it took more than just him on his own to sink this country as low as it is now (Cheney helped some).  I don’t doubt we’ve got a long way to go in turning things around.  What I think is different now is the feeling that we’re all in this together, but we’re united in wanting to turn things around and move them in a different direction.

That’s all.  We’ll resume our regularly scheduled pablum for the remainder of the week.

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I don’t drink to forget, or to reminisce, for that matter, though sometimes the right amount of alcohol will trigger a momentary fugue state and I’ll find myself suddenly among memories I haven’t visited in years, stretched out on either side of me like a hall of mirrors.  Sometimes these scenes are as spectacularly crisp as when I first lived through them: I’ll see La Avenida Revolución at night, an apartment in La Jolla, smoky taverns in Portland, my old dorm room.

The other common side effect of indulging in the drink is that so many of the functional shortcuts you can take as a sober person become abruptly unavailable as parts of your brain drop off the grid, and if you want to function at all you have to learn new and interesting ways of processing while inebriated.  I come up with entirely different algorithms for remembering names, for e-nun-ci-a-ting so that I don’t speak in one long continuous slur of words, for handling knives when I slice up new limes.  At a recent party we’d gathered in the living room to play Trivial Pursuit, the question came up “What is the sum of the first 100 integers?” and  I blurted, “Oh, I know this,” because I knew the method to derive the answer, but discovered I wasn’t able to perform the mental multiplication to spit the answer out.  “Hold on,” I said, and held one hand up, palm out, while I sketched in the air with my other hand, because apparently I hadn’t lost the ability to hold an invisible piece of paper down against an imaginary wall and write on it with the tip of my finger, looking to all the world like nothing more than an especially manic mime.  “Wait…carry the five…ah…five thousand fifty.”  And this earned me a few open-mouthed stares, so I shrugged and picked up my glass and wandered back into the kitchen for a refill.

Later at the same party I found myself sitting in a kitchen chair, enjoying the warm glow of my last cocktail, looking at a girl standing over by the counter.  She’s pretty, I thought, and then noted a ring on her hand.  She might also be married.  Is that the right finger for a wedding ring?  Ugh. Unable to remember what hand the wedding ring went on, I started working out the steps, first mentally mapping her hand around a hundred and eighty degrees to my own.  Left hand.  Okay. I looked down at my left hand, fingers splayed lightly across my thigh, and imagined a silver band around my ring finger.  Well, that looks right.  Check it against something else.  Does it feel right?

The body has its own way of storing memories, its own way of remembering.

“Why do we even have to get married?” she’s asking me.  “Because our families say we have to?  Because society says we have to?”

“We don’t have to,” I find myself saying, surprising myself.  “They don’t matter to me, not anymore.  We don’t have to get married.”

“Isn’t it enough,” she’s saying, and she takes the ring she gave me off of my right hand, “isn’t it enough,” and she’s putting it on the ring finger of my left, “to just do this,” and she kisses my hand, “and say ‘now and forever’?”

I look at her, thinking about it, then take the matching ring from her right hand, move it to her left.  I bring her hand up and kiss her fingers, and say “Now and forever.”

We stand there looking at each other, savoring the feelings, the moment, the joy and relief.  Joined, then, in that little studio with wood floors, and nobody knows it but us.  It doesn’t seem like there’s anything that needs to be said for a while, but finally, smiling, I-

“Hey.”

Blinking.  Focus.  Hand.  Wide focus.  Kitchen.  Party.  Hostess is talking. Acknowledge.   “Hey.”

“You doing okay?”

I was still looking down at my hand.  I flexed the fingers closed.  Opened them.  Closed again.  Yes, I guess that is the hand the ring goes on. “Yeah.”  I remembered that I had a party smile in my bag of tricks, and clicked it smartly in place as I looked up.  “Yeah, totally!  Do we still have vodka?”

She smiled.  “Plenty.”

I got up and walked around the counter to cut some more limes for the cocktails while my friends poured various bottles into the shaker.  I handled the knife carefully around the edges of my buzz, and when I finished I found that I was staring at the bare fingers of my left hand.  And nobody knew it but me.

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Sometimes we go a few weeks without rain here in the winter, and with no moisture the air becomes incredibly clear.

Sometimes there’s just enough moisture to leave a few clouds in the west, though, and so as the sun begins to dip down behind the West Hills, the refracted light turns the sky in the east a deep purple.

Sometimes you’re sitting at your desk on a Friday afternoon and take note that the sunset has painted the snow on Mt Hood that same shade.

Sometimes you pick up the camera bag that you brought with you on a whim, and nonchalantly walk around the floor to the freight elevator, where you punch in the security code you recently learned to have it take you to the roof.

Sometimes you find yourself on the roof of a tall building, icy winds blowing in your hair, squinting through a viewfinder at the distant mountain and thinking, “My God but that’s a great sunset.”

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It’s been a weird couple of weeks, hasn’t it?  Exceedingly tense and not a lot going on, what with the coming and going of that crazy holiday season, and here in the PacNW we were tantalized by the threat of snow, and then we had actual snow, and then there was still snow and we were going out of our minds, and then it left and feinted its return, but even though it was tense nothing really happened, did it?  We either had short work works or no work weeks for weeks and weeks, and then suddenly BLAM there was last week with five grueling days in a row and it seemed to go on for ever, and we all breathed a sigh of relief and drank a few margaritas when it was done with and said, “Well, at least THAT’S over with.”

But now that that shock has worn off, today’s the day that it sinks in that those of us who don’t take bank holidays have no more short weeks to look forward to until May, at least.  Months on end, and it’s cold and grey out, and it’s a bit dispiriting, isn’t it?  And then there was that build up throughout the week with those Twitter hints about TequilaCon, and then we finally made the announcement about when and where, so again we’ve got that weird balance of nervous energy and dragging apathy.

So what to do?  How do we burn that off and get back to normal?  How else but by starting this week off by letting your freak flag fly?

COMMENT ORGY.

Maybe you were around for the most recent one over at Hilly’s place.  Maybe this is new to you, so here’s how it works.  Leave a comment.  Or two.  Wait a while and come back, maybe with some ice cream or a cup of hot chocolate or something else entirely in one of your hands.   Leave another comment, or not, but we’re gonna keep going until we hit 100, and then we all get to carve another notch into our bedposts and the orgy will pop up somewhere else later.  Do a few stretches first if you need, and make sure you drink plenty of fluids.

You ready, people?

Have at it.

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It was pointed out just the other night that those of us that live in the damp, temperate part of the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades have been complaining very loudly recently about the huge volumes of snow that have been getting dumped on us recently.  I can’t speak for everyone but where I live close to downtown Portland it’s rare for us to see snow for more than a day or two each winter.  Since snow is a “fringe condition” we’re not terribly prepared for it, not unlike when we’ll hit the other end of the extreme and have four or five days of 100-degree temperatures in August and everyone will freak out all over again.

It started snowing just as New Year’s Day ticked over into the even less remarkable January 2nd, which I only noticed since I was up late reading a book again.  I grumbled a bit, since the snow was unexpected, but my inner photographer was secretly pleased, because you can get some really cool effects at night with snow and an anti-shake lens.

I hope you all had a good New Year’s and didn’t completely destroy your livers, there’s going to be some good drinking in the months ahead.

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