In San Fran for at least the rest of Tuesday and possible through Wednesday to. I've lost my debit card some-fucking-where or another, but I'm not too put-upon about it. I think I can draw from my account with just a check and an ID card. I have to stop in some San Fran Bank of American and get a hundred bucks, at least to cover the cost of tolls. I can put the gas and the rest on a credit card.
I felt completely lost and uncertain my first 18 hours here. I had almost no sleep for several consecutive days in Portland just before I left, and it really dragged me down for the trip. I left under extreme emotional drift, and have taken a full day to just settle down and begin to try and take a look at the city around me.
This place will always have a magic to me. The sequence of random events and people here just baffle me. Portland is so isolated, so protected, so well-made and harmonious compared to places who's scale and depth simply cut across any amount of urban planning. It's the diversity that kills me. Everyone in Portland is an early-twenty's artist of some kind or another, all struggling against the delicate flower of their intuitions. Here, you have to be bold and thoughtful and alert. Life is working but that doesn't stop the freaks from being freaky and demanding their place. Some of Portland's crowd seems a bit, I dunno, affected in comparision. This place is weird just by its existence. Portland people have to work at it a bit.
In defense of Portland though, the safety and comfort you get from living in a clean and respectful enviornment cannot be overappreciated. I'd forgotten how giant chunks of San Fran look like bombed out third-world country's. Getting around is confusing and exhausting...and the coffee is not as impressive as you'd maybe imagine it would be. Stumptown alone would increase the productivity of the city by about 80% in a week. Angie took me to one place that was pretty good, but it was a (seemingly) rare gem. You can't throw a stick in PDX without hitting great coffee, really good bars, and a person friendly enough to tell you all about it. People still smile here, but just, ya know...not as often.
Portland's warmth and kindness are what reflect on me the most. In comparrison with any other place I've ever been, there is so much acceptance and heart there. Provided that you aren't too much of a social challenge, I suppose.
San Fran, I'm sure, has a great deal of heart as well. But just a casual glance does not emerge it. You have to look a little deeper, and I'm almost out of time here.
A ticking little clock in the back of my head counts down the minutes and hours until home. The minutes of mindfullness of the GOAL.
Another part of my head wants nothing to do with clocks. It wants me to beg Sunshine tommorrow for help in finding a job, and a place to crash. Wants me to ask him to help me register my car, sell it, buy a better scooter, and just fall away from both PDX and Akron forever.
But that part of my brain is the part that never wants to answer to the negative's I've ever accidentally or willfully created. That part of my brain would be a rather interesting, but generally terrible father. That part of my brain is the one that see's the interesting glow of the fire, and wants me to put my hand into it.
I am me wherever I go. If I'm going to go through this process of getting on top of all the things I said I was going to do, I'll need to be in a place I feel is going to be forever. Ohio is the only place that will feel that way to me.
If I had a free choice? If I didn't think about family, or friends, or school, or tommorrow? If I lived for today? If I lived for NOW?
If I lived for the moment, I would spend the rest of my life on the Highway's of I-5, and I-80...bouncing back and forth from Portland to San Fancisco to the Eastern Coast. I would never stop except for fuel and for desperate scrambled messeges of false hope one direction or another. I would never be in any place at all, because there is a possibility that another place just might be where I needed to be. I want too many things, and have to finally grow up enough to have the one that best suites me. It's good to be flexible, it's good to be free. But at some point, you have to be the boring guy in the movie.
At some point, you have to be the one the audience feels sorry for because he's a bit of a drag. After the credits roll, after the lights go on, after the hero or challenger or desperado desides to not let anything get in the way of his dreams, the boring guy just goes home. He goes home, and he kisses his wife, and he plays with his kids, and he gets up the next morning and goes back to work. It's what he does. He's so very good at it. The hero? The hero was happy for awhile. Hee made passionate love with his love interest, he went on wild trips of abbandon to achive success in any number of artistic enterprices. He made history books record his name, and sent darting bits of passion into the minds of a million viewing women. After the credits rolled? After the lights went on? The hero, where did he go? He didn't go anywhere. He never was there. There are no hero's. Just a mass of beautiful people no more heroic than the one's they name coward sitting next to them...or the one's they label terrorist across from them...or the one's they deem weak that are behind them. A world of fallacy's, the walking flesh of the desirable and dispicable.
Perhaps I will run the random highways for an eternity.
Or perhaps I will finally make a decision on what it is I might be.