musesmusingz

[musesmusingz]

God's Favorite

I only love Portland through the eyes of my friends

The City of Roses through rose colored glasses,

Holy ground perched over a serpentine, toxic river

The beaches here are muddy and small connected to rivers

or rocky off the coast if you’re so lucky to make it that far

But wherever you go they’re still cold and marshy, surrounded by spruce trees

Their woodsy landscape feels alien; it’s all too green

Either way, at least I can wash myself clean in the sea,

christen my body in the salty waves until my limbs go numb and I’m left shrieking and stumbling through the sea foam in nothing but my undies laughing with my friends

There’s remnants of a dilapidated diner behind a cyclone fence on Germantown Road

and a small white Bible Church adjacent from a red farmhouse if you take the scenic route home from the coast

Everything here feels like leftovers from if the world ended in the 1950s

or entering an Edward Hopper painting

Sometimes I think I’m afraid of God when really I’m afraid of men

Still, I think I found God in a pharmacy playing John Denver

I’ve been smoking on the porch and listening to the rain in the early evenings

the ash sits on the table long after dusk and the street lights come on

I want to live so many lives and be so many people and do so many things

This chapter is the first of many, hopefully,

since my world didn’t end when I was 17

I read that God was dead inside a tunnel on i5 by the Washington border and it scared me

But a bumper sticker told me Heaven wasn’t real, so maybe it doesn’t matter

I spill my drinks and I stumble over my words

I could be anywhere, I’m on your block,

don’t hate me if I take a lap

Your words were like daffodils and they painted me golden

your lips like red dahlias, cracked in the cold and stained with my lipstick

I don’t think you’re a devil but I do think you were sent to test me

I could have stayed down at your altar forever if you’d let me

I’m such a fool for sacrifice

And if that’s the case I wonder what omnipotent being holds me captive in the dark

thinking about you

You’ve got a young god complex and I bet you thought I would worship you forever

Did my devotion frighten you?

It’s a shame I’ve become what you’re bored of now that the thrill is gone,

and my hands are shaky and cold, but my heart is still warm

My house is haunted and I’m not sure if it started before or after you left

the creaks and whines of the floors and the walls tell me it’s time to move on

I’ve found love in the small things and I think I’ve become reborn

the way my friends know my coffee order and my favorite cigarettes and what makes me

tick

speeding with the windows down and the heat high, no matter how cold it is outside

commemorating small moments from pen to paper, pictures and jumbled prose

club lights and dirty Shirleys on Friday nights

freshly done roots and blood red fingernails

calling my father the morning after meltdowns

screaming my voice hoarse at concerts

morning rural drives to sift through secondhand clothes

I wonder who I’ll be when I leave Portland

Is it true that you can take the girl out of the city, but never the city out of the girl?

I’m so glad I ended up where I did,

maybe I am God’s favorite

[musesmusingz]

The Docks

“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before” I say as my t-shirt slips down in the wind

your half smile sneaks out like the sun, your hand grazing over my skin

it’s the first sunny day in weeks but the docks are still damp,

the rotting wood is bloated and unstable,

but our faith in this decrepit structure is unreasonably unshakable

our jeans are growing stained with algae and rust the longer we sit here

absorbing the sunset, braving the wind

I lay down over a lone plank, my hair hanging over the sides, my eyes closed and body limp,

vulnerable and waiting

you step away to tag the pole and do your graffiti 

you hold your hand over my thigh,

I’m not sure if it’s for stability 

or if it’s an excuse to touch me

we readjust and collide gently

just the sounds of the water lapping below, and the contrast of our lips connecting, suddenly 

feverishly

you’re starving and I’m ripe, desperate to be consumed by your hungry hands and eyes

then we’re silent and suddenly 

four 

blue eyes 

are open 

wide

boring into each other

and I see through the windows into an empty hotel with a humming vacancy sign

you see into my garden of forbidden fruit, my gentle creek flowing through

I hope we won’t fall into the water,

Its muddy waters are far more radioactive than we ever were

and I can't quite see through it the way I can see through you

[musesmusingz]

The Edge of the World Begins at the Oregon-California Border

I prolonged my stay at home during what was supposed to be my last winter break in all my years of schooling. It was also supposed to be my senior year of college before I pushed myself back for one more year. My mother joined me for the pilgrimage home to San Francisco’s west of Twin Peaks. We were on our own Oregon Trail, leaving Portland behind. My battered, dented, chipped, oil-guzzling, sedan was just suited enough to carry us on our journey. The seasons seemed to change before our eyes on the drive as we crossed state lines. For the next month I would no longer “expect light rain in the next hour” in 32º temperatures. Instead, I would wake to San Francisco’s consistently partly cloudy skies in the mid-50s. California welcomed us with her royal blue eyes, offering orange poppies as Oregon thanked us on our way out as we headed into the winding mountains.

The uttermost northern parts of California are their own states, independent of what is typically associated with the Golden State. Farmland seems to go out beyond the horizon and water is nowhere to be seen (besides the occasional peek of the Sacramento River off the 101). I had missed Spanish architecture, the smell of eucalyptus trees, and the salt air. I went to the beach as often as I could and spent much of my time contemplating my journey and my destination. I felt a disconnect from my former self and her life in California. I existed in two places simultaneously. Maybe the monotony of the weather made the Oregon winter feel lackluster but being home felt like being frozen in time. The holidays passed quickly. I started to understand my older brother’s detachment from our childhood home and his gloomy demeanor upon entering the house. He still lived in the city, but he was worlds away the moment he turned 18. I worked hard to ignore those thoughts and feelings.

I started to integrate myself into my older cousin Erika’s life. Erika was between jobs after spending nearly a year backpacking through South America. She lived in a highly sought-after apartment in San Francisco’s Little Italy, North Beach. San Francisco is small, but the journey across the city feels lengthy and treacherous. I wanted to see life as a 20-something in San Francisco; my only experiences thus far had been in Oregon. She included me in her friend group and their posh life in North Beach. She seemed so carefree and happy—the complete antithesis of my understanding of post-grad life. Erika and I never looked much alike. We’re both freckly with toothy smiles and big, rosy cheeks, but she’s got a sturdier build than me, and she’s tanner with blonder hair. We’re even harsher opposites now that I dye my hair brown and she has her backpacker tan. Her look is far more Peninsula than mine is, but we’ve found friendship in adulthood. I felt naive and small in her group. I was novel to them, but I think I was okay with that. Her favorite party trick was to reveal our familial connection. Jaws would drop whenever she’d say, “Francy’s actually my little cousin!” They’re all only a few years older than me, but they saw me as a representative of the “youth culture.” She invited me to a New Year’s Eve party in a house by the beach with all her friends. I had so many cosmopolitan, chic visions of what to expect at a party of 25-year-olds, but I was shocked to see men playing beer pong and gaggles of girls on couches giggling with BuzzBallz. The house wasn’t so far off from the college houses I was used to. The party scene was all too familiar, the guests were just slightly older.

There was a half-empty flask in my purse from the night of December 31st and specks of glitter left on my cheeks and collarbones, ornaments of the evening. I slept half of New Year's Day and woke up in my childhood bedroom. The scenery was the same, but not the situation. The girl who woke up that day isn’t the one who lived there for so many years. The carpet was littered with polaroids, scraps and ephemera; a lone noisemaker sat on my side table. I entered the new year mildly disoriented and fearful for what was to come. After spending a few weeks immersed in Erika’s life I realized I needed to go back to what I used to know. I started to rekindle old flames. Friendly flames. Not necessarily the romantic kind, but of course, some crushes lingered.

          I overslept the morning I was supposed to get coffee with Jonny on the second day of the new year. Luckily our circadian rhythms seemed to follow a similar pattern, so we agreed to meet about an hour later than we had initially planned. Jonny is my best friend Michaela’s little brother. The three of us became quite a tight-knit trio after high school. Jonny projects much older than he is (at his ripe age of 20), but he still dresses in his band tees, denim jackets, and heavily worn black Chuck Taylors. I wore my white prairie skirt and my “men-stomping-boots”—as Jonny so affectionately called them— and my massive black Adidas puffer jacket, which put my hippie look slightly off-kilter. Besides his clothes, Jonny has a clean-cut all-American boy look to him. He’s a tall, lanky, mousy brown-haired Eagle Scout. I once wrote a poem about his eyes describing them as soft and golden, like butterscotch. I was quite theatrical back then.

Even though we were both running late, I still managed to be later than him, which seems to be my brand now. I always said I hated flakers and those who are chronically late, but I seem to have become one of them in my young adulthood. We went for coffee between my childhood home and our high school. We’d been here two years prior with Michaela in the summer, nervous and anticipating our impending futures away at school. Three different schools, three different states, new journeys for each of us. Jonny would fight his battles as a scarlet knight at Rutgers University, Michaela would become a University of Maryland testudo, getting out of her shell, and I would pilot my way to the University of Portland. It felt different and bittersweet to see Jonny without Michaela. We talked about the weather and how warm it had been the last few days and how we both missed California. Still, we knew that it was nostalgic thinking and not necessarily accurate to the way things actually were at home. Jonny said it was the clearest day he had seen in the ten years he had lived here. If we were to come back, he says, the city wouldn’t feel as sparkly and out of reach and beautiful. He asked me how it felt to be back home and how the last few weeks had been. I told him it’d been strange because I missed having friends at home and that I’d found balance between drifting around trying to fit in with my cousin’s friends and spending time alone. I asked him the same question. He told me it was much better than the last time he had visited. He felt lost between two places, two worlds, the last time he was home. I then realized he’d only visited three times in the last three years. It made me sad because things weren’t ever going to be the way they were before ever again. I’d still go to the beach when I was home, but it wouldn’t be with Michaela, and we wouldn’t be tagging along to Jonny’s friends’ bonfires and ending the night writing poetry about small, silly interactions.

~

Jonny likes coming to San Francisco now because it feels like a vacation. It doesn’t feel like coming home anymore. He no longer feels lost between two worlds. He loves his life in New Brunswick now. When he’s here he gets to stay with his friends, and he doesn’t have to be the hypervigilant planner like he usually is. He and his friends can have barbecues and play basketball, spend hours playing video games and go through 3/4 of a pack of Marlboro Reds in a night. He’s picked up social smoking since he started going to basement shows in Jersey. He’s truly embraced his “indie” boy lifestyle, yet he’s softened up his coffee order. I used to mock him for his pretentious “small black coffee” but today he is showing me he’s evolved. Now his small coffee gets a splash of oat milk. How California of him.

He laments how he hasn’t been to the beach all year, and I offer to drive us down the Great Highway after we leave. He suddenly seems tense and in somewhat of a hurry. He tells me he needs to go give one of his friends attention and to keep him company. Suddenly everything is foreign and bittersweet, and we’re exchanging niceties in such an adult way. He’s not just my best friend’s teenage brother anymore. He works in a law firm; he wants to go to law school, he’s graduating college before Michaela and I are. The patio outside of the café is cold despite the crisp, clear blue sky. The buildings are painted nice warm, pastel colors. It feels like we’re sitting inside of a cloud during a rich sunset. He checks the time a few times when he thinks I’m not looking or would not notice, and I wonder if I shouldn’t have invited him out this morning. The moment passed and we laugh and fill each other in on our lives. He seems so mature and different, so adult. But when he compliments my new haircut and I show him my tattoos, I realize I’m different, too. We spend about an hour and a half on the back patio of the café before I take him home. We listen to Clairo‘s new band in the car with the windows down, and in the wind my nose starts to run. There’s pressure in my temples and jaw whenever it gets that windy, but I’ll always choose to open the windows despite the minor discomfort. We say our goodbyes and I drive off. I decide to take a right instead of a left on Sunset Boulevard, heading to the beach. It’s moments like these that I’m glad that I always keep sunscreen and a book in my purse.

~

San Franciscans will always trek to Ocean Beach no matter how cold, how overcast, or how wet the conditions are. I see men fishing for crabs by the edge of the water and I always wonder if anything fished out of the bay is safe to eat. There are people walking their dogs, people huddling over picnic blankets, struggling to hold down the corners, people fighting the violent whips of the wind with hair in their faces, and people shivering in wetsuits clutching their longboards trudging towards the waves. There are also lone wolves like myself walking moodily along the beach. Ocean Beach’s wave conditions have never been predictable; they seem to defy the cycle of the tides. The water in Northern California has a greenish, turquoise hue to it, which is harshly contrasted by the milky layer of sea foam washing over the shore. Ocean Beach is a nightmarish game of roulette for surfers due to its small, mushy waves on stormy days, which there are a lot of. San Francisco is so small that you should be able to see a panoramic view of the city from the higher dunes at the beach, but the fog hangs low and thick blocking anything beyond the row of colorful houses just off the Great Highway. Some days the fog is so heavy that you can’t even see past the road. I hang back, climbing over the ice plants, the mini dunes and crossing the Great Highway between traffic. I miss when all of the Great Highway was closed off to cars and there was an abundance of bikes and runners instead and, of course, people walking their dogs. That hasn’t changed much. The sound of the waves drowns out the somewhat distracting ambience of the cars behind me. It’s quiet and it’s peaceful and I wish I could stay here forever. I park myself on a rock up in the ice plants overlooking the water and the fisherman, hoping not to get my Prairie skirt too dirty. Unfortunately, I notice I have torn it when I’m leaving. I should’ve settled for the dirt rather than the rock and the tear.

I feel gentle in California now. I don’t wear smudged eyeliner and wake up with crippling anxiety on the weekends thinking about drinking the night before or dancing with strangers. I’m content getting one drink and going out once every two weeks, if that. I balance my childish whimsy and my striving for sophistication by oscillating between dirty Shirley Temples and gin and tonics. In the mornings my drink of choice is an oat milk mocha when I see my friends. We’ll spend our early and mid-days together drinking coffee and journaling, and the rest of the afternoon I will find myself basking in the warm rays of my own company. I’ve started reading again and I’m finding inspiration in both new and familiar places. I’ve considered taking apart my childhood bedroom; perhaps I’m going mad from staying in it for the month. I feel a simultaneous sense of familiarity and detachment. I got a tattoo of Gloria, my childhood stuffed animal, in Portland in October. Now, when I fall asleep at home, I’ll look into her little plastic black eyes as mine close.

~

My time at home was suddenly coming to a close. I had finally felt connected to the little girl from California, and it was time for me to leave her behind again. It was time to head back to school for the remainder of the winter, but this time I wouldn’t cry. There was still sand on my car’s dashboard and my Santa Cruz parking ticket under the passenger seat, crumpled mementos of the trip. Before leaving I caught myself telling my family I was going home. Only this time I was referring to Portland rather than California. I’m going to seal this month into an ornate envelope with a wax seal and file it away to remind my future self of gentler times.

[musesmusingz]

She Has All the Control

We are so fascinated by a lone flame, a moldering ember. In terms of awe, we really have not come so far from the cavemen. The ephemeral nature of a flame holds us captive and entranced like moths. The gentlest flicker could take an entire landscape down in a matter of hours. Our lush green western landscapes decimated to scorched earth and brown plains. We hear wind in the trees, but we can never hear a raging fire whizzing steadily by at 14 miles an hour, speeding by before we can register its destruction. Our simple, caveman minds cannot truly fathom the destructive power of a forest fire.

~

Fire gives and takes and kills and creates. Ash is our purest form, and fire purifies us and our surroundings. It ravages our topography while letting in new light and new life. Wildfires create new meadows and open new patches to let sunlight in. The burned earth carries carbon and encourages new growth. Ash is our end, but it’s also one of the best fertilizers.

The carbon-rich soils and sunlit landscapes after a wildfire help seeds immerse themselves snugly into the sediment and come above ground. They’ll replace the perished greenery and the cycle will repeat long after we’ve been put into the ground. Bright eyed and bushy tailed, sprightly and sprouting, new growth will always emerge.

~

Nature has no mercy; she is no holds barred. We grasp for control over the winds and tides, the landforms and gravity, and we constantly fight a losing battle against nature. We ask for her mercy and her forgiveness and receive none. I fear we are testing her patience. North American wildfire management is innovative and technological. It’s controlled and contrived. We smother the smoldering overgrowth with chemicals. Native Americans, though, worked in junction with nature, encouraging small, controlled fires to let nature purge and begin again. Contemporary forest rangers use their concoctions of water, fertilizer, thickener, stabilizer, bactericide, and colorant to silence the flames. We taint the landscape in a deep crimson red; our artificial colorants paint the land, marking it for sky-traveling pilots and their godly panoramic view. We should not be able to play God. Nature knows better than that, she fights back.

~

Deep in the woods, between campsites and picnic spots, wooden signs sit off the side of roads attempting to control and predict the forest’s destiny. Fire danger dials measure the likelihood of wildfires on a five point scale ranging from low to extreme, green to red. But never forget the holy word of the Bear, “Only you can prevent wildfires.” Nearly 90% of wild wind fires

are started by people, so why don’t we rank the likelihood of our negligence on roadside wooden signs? We’re fascinated by what’s wild but we also fear uncertainty. We do our best to forecast the likelihood of a wildfire, but we can’t pinpoint when a cigarette butt will hit dry grass, or, in rarer cases, lightning strikes a tree at the perfect angle.

~

All of the most severe fire seasons in the United States happened after the year 2000. They’re growing bigger and faster, and they’re forcing us to create new words for their increasing severity. We didn’t fear megafires a hundred years ago. We didn’t have megafires a hundred years ago. Yet, we have evidence of fires all around the wild. Forests of old were patchy from regular, small wildfires. They appeared as green and brown spotted patchwork quilts: ever evolving, creating and destroying canopy forests in the same areas. Open canopy forests created tranquil meadows and closed canopy forests emerged covering lush undergrowth. Megafires fed on the ever evolving quilt like ravenous moths, shredding its integrity and leaving it barren and flat, brown and lifeless. Fire season has changed our landscape and altered our quilt, leaving it monochromatic and severe, ravaged by moths.

[musesmusingz]

Attention-Grabbers and Cacophany

The October sun is setting at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theater, and the amphitheater is buzzing in anticipation. Hordes of young women in synthetic flower crowns and Dr. Martens pack the floor, pushing and shoving towards the stage. As the sun sets, Lana Del Rey gracefully steps out under pink spotlights. The woman I had idolized since my preteen years was no longer just an image on a screen but was now twenty feet in front of me. She looked angelic in her peasant blouse and skinny jeans. I didn’t know how lucky I was to be there— she would go on hiatus after this tour. Soon she swung over the audience on a flowery swing, holding the microphone out to the adulating masses, smiling as we shouted the lyrics to Video Games.

~

            Taylor Swift has been on the lips and cell phone screens of every American for the last year. Recently her jet-setting, carbon-emitting ways brought her 9,000 miles from Tokyo to Las Vegas to support her boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl. The two were photographed kissing after the Chiefs’ victory. Their intimate moment, surrounded by an army of cameramen, deeply immersed in the crowd, is the 2024 equivalent to Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square. I’m not sure privacy exists anymore.

~

            Deep in the woods, off the Washington coast, the Hoh Rainforest resides inside Olympic National Park. The rain from omnipresent rainstorms trickles down through the Douglas Firs, Western Hemlocks, Sitka Spruces, and Western Red Cedars, like gentle wet sequins, and tickle your nose saturating your clothes. The Hall of Mosses trail isn’t even a mile long, yet its gently inclined mossy loop seems to exist beyond any measures of time and space. Lush canopies and old growth swaddle you into a safe, green embrace, surrounded by undergrowth and banana slugs. The only reminder of the outside world is a plastic placard of Mary Oliver’s When I am Among the Trees staked into the mushy ground. In stillness, on the overgrown forest floor, life buzzes around you in shades of green.

~

            The shooting at the sports bar had everybody shaken up. Every body hit the deck. Let the bodies hit the floor! Drop it like it’s hot! 25 shots fired at 1 AM through the outdoor patio at Jackie’s in Southeast Portland, zero deaths and zero injuries. That should have been the news headline. Is it not snappy enough? Would carnage have made it newsworthy? There was no evidence in the news. Nothing but a Reddit thread asking if any neighbors heard the shots fired. Fifty bodies huddled on the sticky ground, circling the silent DJ booth, debating whether to call their loved ones. But no one died, so it clearly doesn’t matter. Are foliage half walls bulletproof? Where did the security go? Portland isn’t known for its clubbing scene, so why the fuck did I go to the bar?

~

            This year’s Milan Fashion Week was littered with banana peels, candy wrappers, whole eggs, and soda cans on the AVAVAV catwalk. The designer planted haters in the audience—actors armed with artillery loaded with garbage. Models stumbled and fell, slipping and sliding on the trashy runway laid out before them. The designer made a statement on hate and the fashion industry as her runway show descended into filthy chaos. Hateful Instagram comments passively scrolled by on large screens, overwhelming the audience with grimy, hateful text and imagery. The hate was real, but the medieval tomato-throwing was staged. Spectacle and staged anarchy will always be on-trend. 

~

            There’s an urban legend in California that it’s a legal offense to pick a wild, California poppy. The rich orange blooms pop sporadically in road medians and sidewalk cracks, teasing and begging to be picked. Pavement, condominiums, parking garages and urban development in the 20th century killed the abundance of orange that once painted hills with a lush brush and covered meadows with a blanket of wild grasses. Californians are more likely to see a poppy on a postcard than dancing in a dense patch. California is a temperamental muse. She’s plagued with earthquakes, fires, droughts, and the mystique of the Santa Ana Winds, but she’s also blessed with wildflower season and superblooms. The long dormant Arroyo Lupines, Canterbury Bells, Desert Primroses, and California Poppies reemerge, carpeting the rolling hills. The wild poppies reenter the scene, welcoming the spring, and tempting kids to pluck their ripe flowerettes.

[musesmusingz]

Swimming Caves in Copperopolis

City kids aren’t used to the sound of crickets and coyotes in the humid night and dodging rattlesnakes in the hot afternoon. I was lucky to leave the city ambience every so often. Free weekends in the summer were dedicated to the two-hour trek to a small mining town named Copperopolis in Calaveras County, 40 miles east of Stockton. The summer of 2007 was one of economic tension for parents as the impending doom of the Great Recession began to breathe down their necks, making their hairs stand on end and their brows furrow. For a five-year-old, it was the summer before 1st grade and a time for freckles to multiply and blonde hair to tint green in the heavily chlorinated Saddle Creek Pool. Pulling into my grandparents’ garage was like landing on Mars. One late summer afternoon, the garage concrete somehow felt hotter than the pavement outside. Despite its covering, the air felt thicker indoors, like the heat was visible and wavy. There wouldn’t be any life on this barren, foreign planet until Grandma, Grandpa, and the cousins would arrive later in the day.

We spent our days chasing rabbits and lizards in the backyard, taking golf cart rides to the pool, and indulging in sodas from the drink fridge in the garage. Copperopolis itself is an incredibly small (now defunct) copper mining town, and we hardly ever left its limits during our trips. Sometimes we would enter new territory in Angels Camp (the lesser known City of Angels), Sonora, or one of the other barely incorporated towns in Calaveras County. They were never worth the visit, and they all had the same low resolution travel pamphlets listing the same few local haunts. The only one worth exploring was the Natural Bridges trailhead just east of Angels Camp.

The Natural Bridges Trail’s contents have no connections to its name. It’s a two-mile, winding, dry, dusty trail on incredibly uneven terrain full of loose rocks. After traversing all of the rocks and small valleys one day, my dad and I reached a watering hole gently flowing into massive limestone caverns. We couldn’t see how deep they went or whether or not there was another side.

After taking off our dusty sandals, my dad took my small hand and we walked into the water. I was already a strong swimmer, and a strong kicker, especially. He told me there were more natural pools on the other side of the cave if you swam through. I was determined to get across, despite the cavern’s threatening size and the darkness of the water. It was about a two- minute-long swim across. He let me ride on the back of his shoulders when I got tired, but I was determined to reach the other side (mostly) on my own. My breathing was incredibly heavy and my small legs were growing weary as we started to see light at the end of the cave. Suddenly we were back in the sunshine, and children were playing in more pools on the other side. We had struck gold.