Field Report

It was crazy townwide party weekend- I was in the streets. I figured out my community building project medium, and it turns out it’s so simple. Five dollars worth of nylon rope, and I’m set. Get a friend, start spinning the ropes (elbows in, it’s all in the wrist) and all those people, milling around, wanting to be part of something, they just emerge. The double dutch experts from 20 years ago(go now! go now!), the kids-experts of now, the wild risk-taking boys who just fling themselves in, the humble but totally coordinated women (oh, I haven’t done this in ten years!), the quiet bystanders who finally carefully cross the line, they’re all in. And normally they might not ever talk to each other. It’s so absolutely fun. And it’s so easy.

Lying. Sometimes when I think about lying, I think of it like hard drugs- I don’t do it, so I forget that anyone else does. They do, all the time, but I’m not paying the right kind of attention.
But really, there’s this other kind of lying. Like sugar or chocolate or coffee, the kind you do every day, and you think it’s not drugs, except when you don’t do it for a day, you get a massive headache. Lies you tell to yourself, nice ways to ignore things, like the person I’m dating doesn’t REALLY pack a gun into the movies, and they’re also not really courting some other person on the side. Convincing myself that it’s okay to just be mad, and not communicate. Rationalizing driving a car around as much as I feel like, since I’m not driving an SUV like some people. The thing is, I get a headache anyway. Even when you’re lying to yourself, you can’t lie all the way.
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The other morning I took a walk in my friend’s neighborhood in Portland. It was crisp and sunny, and I brought my camera. I took pictures to document my thinking and my seeing. As I walked, my brain slowed down enough to open up and notice some new ideas. I started noticing how I see things as lines. Lines dividing things up, and lines connecting things. When I was a kid, I would lay in my bed and look out the window, watching the outside world through the boxes of the wooden panes. Compositions created by lines.

One of my oldest memories is of watching Taj Mahal play at Hannigan’s, some bar that is now a gas station. He was wearing a railroad hat, and a piece of the ceiling fell down while he played. I got to watch him play music tonight, and the theater full of people my parents’ age was transportation back to 1978, when we listened to records and lived in an apple orchard.