The Beautiful Live Wire of 2024

Life on the Oregon Coast is lush, rainy, packed with creativity and community, and like everywhere else, doesn’t always go as planned. Barely a month and a week into this new year, my life has been lovingly sculpted by unforeseen events and I can only think about how fun it’s going to be to see how it all makes sense as the rest of 2024 unfolds. Because it all is going to make sense, right?

First off there was the ice storm that rocked our behinds, shutting down our little Goonie town for not a day but a good long stretch of days. People freaked, holed up, wondered if they had enough canned beans on hand, wondered how many canned beans their neighbor had on hand. My partner became a happy, witchy, professional homebody for a few days and I became a tennis shoe ice skater, slip-sliding my way to the Co-op every day to go and sell those who did brave the icy streets their necessary bags of grub. It was classic large-enough scale weather-related hardship. I tried to walk up our super steep drive in the dark after working a cock-eyed 8 hour shift, started slipping down, had to run, and then had to keep running when I just encountered more ice at the bottom instead of some ground to stop on, and then had to run three-quarters of a block, losing my bag of groceries, two jars of salsa flying in the night, until I finally found some crunchy grass to skid out on. It was wild and pretty funny. The next day I learned that my coworker slipped and cracked a rib that same night. That was less funny, much less funny.

Then, once that was resolved, the following weekend my partner and I’s car began making a sound like a bunch of drunk Muppets were engaged in some endless band practice in our left front wheel well, leading us to the mechanic’s and a week of being car-less. Yet again, we were stranded. Yet again, I was, as my dad used to say, hoofing it to work. Out here on the Coast you need a car, preferably one that works. Every day I humped a big bag of groceries home in the night, almond milk, jars of honey, special water for my love, heavy things to keep it from being too carefree and easy. And, because I was longing for it, and, because I was maybe overly dedicated, one of those car-less days I walked an hour and a half round trip to my little downtown artist’s studio IN THE RAIN just because I wanted some of the routine that the ice storm and the car-less-ness was monkeying with. I got soaked. It was a little nutty, but I think it was worth it. My shoes were wet for days afterwards, as was my favorite coat, but hell, I just wanted that sweet little slice of time in my studio to work on an essay, to be by myself with a notebook and the world, writing about a time long ago that I love. I got drenched but I needed it, you know? Out here on the Coast we locate our ways of feeding our souls and we’re best when we keep regular with them, car or not, rain-wet mess man or whatever.

And now, lastly, as I type this, I’m quarantined upstairs with Covid, for the second time since that whole planet-wide helluva thing jumped into our collective human experience. A third major thing, in almost as many weeks, that has stepped in to let me know that things are not going to happen as scheduled. I pulled out of a poetry reading that I was really looking forward to, where I was going to make a couple hundred bucks. I was held underground by the fever-and-chills hell worms for a good long day. I had to walk across that desert of scary health stuff so that I could get to that land of silver linings, like having plenty of time to write poems about gnomes and Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha and my younger life as a lonesome Ponca Indian in Nebraska; like getting to finish reading a nostalgic campus novel I’d read twice in my twenties; like reaching the level of life-review and reflection that comes only from doing nothing but hanging out on the loveseat in your bedroom for four days straight, finding tiny beautiful flowers at the bottom of the lake of myself that I never knew were there, that I never would’ve found otherwise. “My main takeaway is the same as last time,” I told my partner from my perch on the stairs, bowl of African peanut stew in my hand, “I just don’t want anyone to get it if they don’t have to. But then if they do get it, may it be mercifully short and not too bad, like it has both of these times for me.” My partner looked at me from across the room, in her rocking chair, a classic PNW tree-loving goddess, smiling with her own steaming bowl in her hands. Damn these things that keep us from what we really want to be doing with our time. Damn them for the unexpected good they sometimes create in our paths. Damn them like an old friend you haven’t seen in too long that you just have to hug no matter what. Damn it all just like that.

So I’m eating mint chip ice cream and writing this essay and hoping my test will be negative tomorrow morning, which I really feel it will be. Is any year ever what we actually think it will be? Does life ever shrink itself down into such a manageable little quantity? You know the answer to that. I’m glad it doesn’t. I’m brimming over with curiosity about how the rest of the shape of the year will roll with these first patterning blows; how the rest of my album is going to follow this loud, thrashing, sideways punk opening track. How much of it is on me? How much of it is the poet’s attitude? Is it our attitude that attracts the kinds of poems we end up writing and making our books out of? I swallow down another big spoonful of delicious ice cream and say aloud to my empty bedroom, “This is the best! This is the sweetest! This is my favorite!”