05.13.05 - 8:46 a.m.

A couple weeks ago on the street in Portland i started talking to a senior printer at The Oregonian newpaper. He was smeared in ink from head to toe with a white mustache and rosy rosy cheeks. After finding that I was a visitor to his city he directed me to an imaginary map stand (supposedly under a brick stairwell). There was a sign hanging from a peg there that sent me to the previous business's new address, which only led me through the doors of a huge black international bank once I found it. (No maps of the city...just the currency of the world.)

And if all these places had been way across town from each other, I would've assumed the printer was a wise man trying to teach me something about the landscape first-hand. But I guess he wasn't. Although I never came to own a map.

Portland was so beautiful and green and shimmery. Like some kind of Emerald City, with no tall gates, but 6 bridges. I was told weeks of drab weather left the evening I blew in. My old friends drove me around in their new town's sun.

Thousands of miles later and I'm not sure how many days, I left Victoria in the night again. A stiff gale was filling the dark air with little white blossoms. The airborne flowers grew closer to the moon than ever before.

In Albuquerque I was recognized by a girl who'd been on the only Phoenix-to-San Francisco flight I've ever flown in my life, over a year ago..........and now I'm in the desert, where you have to stare at either the ground or the horizon to actually see anything. I feel like I should set out through the Cholla and Chamisa dressed in white, so I could be enigmatically spotted from afar by someone days later....it seems like epic would work so well here. I know the desert would respond and do its part...but I just don't know how to begin when there is no ocean, no people, no geomancy. This incarceration is wide and flat, and I'm land-locked. 2 more days.

see< >saw

i whisper hello to everything