Scriptor Press - The ElectroLounge

38
Within a month, about mid-October, unexpected circumstance landed me down in
Portland, living in a rooming house, working a low paying telephone survey job. I’d arrived
where I wanted to be, though not under the circumstances I desired. Lisa was living with her
family & boyfriend, hardly miles away but walled off seeming forever.
So I thought. Looking back simply angers me how drowned I was. She was a weak
young woman with a disturbed mind living with the urban trash she came from. I’d been a
temporary diversion from her boredom. Her first words to me in person back in June had
pretty much been: you’re supposed to be in Boston. To her I was a fantasy; to her people I
was a threat, unaccountable in their TV-&-fast-food circumscribed lives. To myself I was the
singer, I was Orpheus, but I kept ignoring that Orpheus loses. I thought I’d one-better him.
I eventually did—by letting go his myth, choosing my life over his demise. Perhaps that’s the
best way to see this tale.
Those fall 2002 months in Portland were hard & lonely, yet there were then also
other streams rolling within me. The romance I chased is long gone, yet there are other
memories I bear without rancor; memories I am carrying with renewed interest at the time of
this writing. It took me a long while to sort out, but I have & share here not merely old
melancholy snapshots but new green shoots. Both amazingly.
What strange depths within suffering, what glints that remain when time has drained
off the murk, what good will discover to the surviving soul if he but lets enough ticks of the
clock pass. I don’t have answers to unfold here, but questions strangely near to them.
My mornings began waking up in a rooming house bed made by tipping upsidedown
a dining room table & piling mattresses on it. I pushed off the Mickey Mouse cover &
looked about dazed at the kitschy knick-knacks filling the room—tables & dressers & closets
of junk—& a small corner piece crammed with pictures of the landlady.
I bathed in an old tub surrounded by more junk—Joe Camel, etc.—& eventually was out to
the boulevard to get the bus to the light rail to downtown Portland and, while I worked, to
way outside the city. When jobs lacked, I spent my days in a job center, then a sparse meal at
McDonald’s, & evenings in the lovely downtown library, & thereafter with my notebooks &
Philip K. Dick novels to Taco Bell & the late night Coffee Time Coffeehouse. Cavernous
freaky lovely of a cafe, rife with loud music, old furniture, weird art, strange lost souls
looking & forgetting & talking, & looking some more.
Cyberspace provided me with some comfort as I accessed it free from the library and
from various coffeehouses for a fee. I was often at the Spiritplants.com chat room, or posting
my tale to a journal at its forum, and I worked on The ElectroLounge quite often, posting
Nocturnes for the most part, but also posting in a journal kept there too. I used what power I
had left to write to give a few truly caring souls account of my days and nights. I kept trying.
The Cenacle / 54 / April 2005