How the Road Beckons

As far as nostalgia goes, I used to have a lot of it, but little fibers of it remain.

I drove my car for the first time in two and a half weeks yesterday, and because it was low on gas, I filled it up. Then... I went for my usual drive around Portland.

I find that I drive mostly for fun. Some places like the Blue Ridge Parkway say that driving is America's favorite recreational sport. Well... I think that is somewhat true. I really enjoy driving. The independence, the control, the fact that you are the sole pilot of your own little steel and fiberglass landship.

I have a hard time explaining this to people, who see cars solely as a means of commute and maintenance money robbers. To them, cars are a "necessary" expense. (I put necessary in quotes because many people I talk to have the resources and ability to ditch the car, metaphorically, and rely only on public transit and carpooling to get around.) To the average commuter, the car is a four wheeled machine designed to accelerate your life and to get you where you need to go. I don't like to see it that way. That is what buses and other people's cars are to me.

The car (or truck, van, motorcycle, or other personal automobile) is an embodiment of the space to which you dedicate your "inbetweeness". You are in the space between two destinations, and to some that would be called the journey. And we all know that old phrase.

My car, her name is the Catalyst, is... well I've already given it a name so far in the description. That should tell you loads about what I think of personal vehicles. I see it not necessarily as a person, or autonomous character, but gendered with a personality. She gets cranky, her underside is rusted, the exhaust rattles like you will bottom out. Her parts are shaky, and the inside is rarely pristine. Its not the most comfortable ride, we are talking about an economy car here, but on the open road with landscapes too grand to imagine, she will get you 40+ miles per gallon.

I wouldn't quite use the phrase the band Queen so wonderfully wrote a song about: I'm not in love with my car. But I do appreciate such an intricate, interlaced, multicomplex gathering of steel, copper, and plastic, which to no end or means of studying I will ever be able to fully understand.

I am in awe of many things in this world, and my imagination is captured quite easily. When driving along the stretch of I-5 going northbound opposite of downtown across the Willamette, I couldn't help but feel as if I were in an average car, rolling down a concrete and asphalt ribbon in the late 70's.  Led Zepplin was on the radio, blaring "Rock n' Roll" and the overpasses of the city streets and signs just felt like I was on the ultimate independence granting journey among the new found youth in an aging decade. A place and essence so enticing that I even role played that I was in that time and city; its soft yellow lights refracting through a haze ridden skyline, a dying timber industry giving rise to a new tech culture, and the face of a city which would lead the charge against so many paradigms about living urban.

A MAX train whizzed past, and broke my spell, and I took the exit back to I-5 north, switched the radio to modern country, and felt the cracking pavement on that nearly 100 year old remnant of a more traditionally industrial time. How the road beckons once more, tempting me to see all the landscapes I can, and never being able to fully know all the places that exist even within my tenuous home states.

Fog Wrapped Lights

Tonight walking home, I found myself thinking about the stars, the clear night, and how happy I was to see the lights of the port as I crossed over the I-5 bridge. It may seem silly, but There is something to be said about a bedroom community.

Attempting a definition here is quite a request, but I feel up to it.

The fog sinks into the road as we cross the river. The weather patterns vary on each side of the Columbia. It must be a microclimate effect with the large body of water. It could be raining in Portland and when back in Vancouver all is clear, roads wet with cold steam from the moisture that lingers in the air. Each light takes on its own shimmer of fog, a chill not quite as harsh as rain, but not as crisp as winter. An in-between.

It seems as though I have lived on the in-between my whole life. Nothing is as solid as it would like to think. Ohio being the intersection of two major landscapes, the city of Asheville being the mixing of two socio-economic cultures, Barcelona being a hub for commerce, tourism, and flavorful tastes from all around Spain. Vancouver fits well into these seeming dichotomies, with being the ultimate definition in contrast to the other; the other being the city of Portland.

When discussing the proposed "Columbia River Crossing" project (a new bridge from Portland across the Columbia into Vancouver), there is always contention with the addition of light rail on the bridge. Some slogans in protest to the bridge and the light rail addition called it "the crime train", which would bring in all sorts of crime from Portland. As if Vancouver wasn't without its fair share of crime.

But this brings up the more important point: What if there isn't a "solid state" where something is definite and absolute? Even the weather does change and mix across the river, usually creating a dense fog which envelops everything. 

Air stagnation is a new concept for myself as well. That is the effect when air cannot flow because of the two mountain ranges essentially trapping it. It just constantly hits these barriers, and keeps rolling onto itself, eventually slowing down, and loosing the force to exit the valley. As much as this does trap the pollution and particulates in the valley, it does create some great calming situations.

On a dark street at 10 at night, the fog rolls in quite quickly. The motions are amazing, and barely noticeable as you walk down the street. All at once, there is a fog. But this is not the scary ominous fog that creates the dark where bad things lurk. This fog invites you to get wrapped up, to get lost and to show you the very filters from different lights which can't show themselves in clear weather.

As you embrace it, the moisture and ground clouds reveal a mysticism to the everyday objects you walk by on your morning and evening commutes. The light on the porch of the house three blocks down now flickers on as you walk by, and reveals a hazy soft light, much different from the luminescent directness you usually experience. The warm light shows you your path, and brings the individual droplets of water in the air to the forefront of your brain.Those droplets hang stock still, only shifting to the slightest breeze.

The port is much like this from a 50 mile per hour bus crossing the I-5 bridge. It reveals to you the warm structures, like a megalithic alter of modernity which sits off in the distance, inviting you to investigate more. The cranes, booms, and pulleys now obscured by the fog and lamps, into a soft radiant orange, an impressionistic smudge in the now smeared outline of the city.

The people on the bus don't notice this, except for a small woman in a heavy coat laden with bags. We make eye contact for a minute, but she soon gets off the bus in town.

A suburb and city have never seemed to capture my imagination this much before. Perhaps you can come visit, and if we are lucky, there will be some fog late at night.

Airport Words & Lines

It's been a strange trip to Ohio and back for the holidays.

First: It was short. I never realized how little time seven days was. I loved the time I had; but, how limited it was.

The nostalgia caught up with me fairly quickly. It really is amazing how much you can build up around a place when you are not there, only to have that idea completely disputed or disproven entirely. But not in a bad way. Recreated to make not what you wanted to see, but what is actually there.

I guess this is pretty universal.

The only way to know reality is go experience it in real-time.

But isn't it something, that we try to create this whole world to describe to others, and ourselves? This entire experience, where it is easily discernable between black, and white. Or black, white and grey. Even the "third way" still limits us to a range which does not exist.

Humans tend to be complex, rich, and fibrous beings, with complicated pasts. Landscapes are that way too. "Place" is a word that is often thrown around now to describe a state of being, along with a location. The almighty geotag.

But what is that place? Can we prick it to map using one pin only? Yes, that is where we "were". But that is only one place, sometimes not correctly positioned, where we were in one moment of our lives. It becomes incomprehensible to determine the paths we take in our geographical landscape.

Perhaps that is why we make "places". To narrow down, and discern where exactly we lay. The lines which comprise our lives make endless amounts of polygons, concave, and convex alike.

That is one goal of my career right now, is to make sure everyone has the ability to draw lines and make the irrelevant shapes which comprise their days. My dream would be to one day compile these lines, and see what we can see. A recording of a human trail.

For if we mapped our routes for the first migration out of Africa, why can't we do it today?

There are only a couple of more people and a larger distance to cover. Seems doable to me.

New Years

And with a flick of a second we roll into a new set of integers, all at 24 official set points (with some in between). What a thing, to consider time. A day, spaced across a sphere... What distance it holds, what wonders we celebrate.