Finally got that second date on Friday. As you'll recall she insisted on taking her to the pearl district for some new overpriced vegan bistro. The food was bland and the atmosphere was sparse at best, part of the "Portland Cuisine" allure. I don't get it personally, maybe I'll appreciate it when I become you but I cant see myself returning there. There was this new song on the radio in the background. I found myself trying to discern the letters being spelled out over the din of the restaurant but after some concentration I could read the spelling. I looked it up earlier and it spells LIFEGOESON, by Noah and the Whale. Being a child of the catechism I appreciated the wink in the name. No one remembers the name Jonah anyway. It was only after learning the name of the song did I realize I had been sitting in utter silence with her, and she had not said a word or looked in the least bit interested in anything but her salad. It was a strange silence.

On the ride home we took a wrong turn, at her insistence, and got stuck behind a train crossing. It took what seemed like hours to go by, even at a moderately fast speed. In the darkness of the crossing with my headlights I thought I saw a familiar figure reaching out to me from behind the crossing barrier. No sooner had I seen it than did it slip away with the train, headed north to Seattle. I tried to point it out to her before it disappeared but she seemed more interested in staring vacantly into the side view mirror before rousing too late to see anything. I took her home finally but my vision started to crack with iridescent fractures and I knew a migraine was coming on. She seemed overtly warm, almost inviting when I reached her door but I knew the pain to come was going to be immense and I rushed home as soon as possible. I suffered from the moment I laid down until just a few hours before writing this.

I swear I saw someone on those train tracks

Finally got a date with that fine ass secretary we've been drooling over. Duuuude we were so smooth. It's not like we didn't know she was into us, she totally was from day one. Who isn't right? Ladies? but she kept tryin to play hard to get. All you had to do is lean over her desk and flip your hair (good call on the haircut by the way) and flash that smile while dangling a two person reservation at "The Original". She gave you some bullshit about "If I can make it" but you saw that little tug at the corner of her lips when you walked over.

Date went great, we talked about (you guessed it) me, or should I say "us". Not a heavy drinker though, kind of a shame, but that makes her a cheaper date in the end. For some reason she didn't want to stay for drinks, she seemed to want to get out of there pretty quick while seeming interested in ours-truly. She took us down this weird route back to her place. She must have thought I'd never been there but she lives close to a friend of mine and I must have known at least seven shortcuts that could have got us there quicker. After a while I figured she was trying to find some dark place to mack (lord knows I was) but it was just a bunch of dimly lit alleys and narrow one-ways with tons of graffiti. Some of the stuff is getting weird, maybe banksey's in town or something but there's a lot of screwed up tags, I noticed. Dark stuff. We finally get to her place and she gives me a handshake good-night. What am I? her dad? I'll make sure I get more next time.

We had another screwed up dream that night though. Didn't even smoke before bed. Maybe it's that salami from the sandwich platter.

It must be fall or winter because I feel that wet chilly breeze that makes my skin crawl when it hits my cheek. I'm in my winter coat, thank god, and my winter gloves of leather and yarn. I tug my scarf a bit tighter and the breeze caresses my ear maliciously. Why I am not wearing a hat is a complete mystery to me, why would I be out here without one? I am suddenly aware of a frigid pain invading my feet. Looking down I see I am shin deep in a black swamp of dead leaves and mud saturated with black rain water collected from what must have been a storm judging by the clouds blotting out the sun like angry bruises marring a perfect face of white. There is no color in this marsh. My dream is monochrome. The pain in my feet is throbbing as the water soaks through my socks and floods my shoes with gravel filled mud. I struggle to lift each foot and my steps feel like I have been running a flight of stairs by the time my foot lands back into the doughy quagmire. Suddenly my foot sinks too deep and I topple slowly over onto my chest. I feel sticks and thorns claw at my face like cat claws. It is an exhausting chore to push himself up from mud but in the effort he realized his shoe had come loose and now one foot was exposed to the near frozen swamp around it. I open my mouth to scream but I can only hear the birds scatter in the distance as my lungs pour fruitlessly into the sky. No voice, and irrevocably stuck in a marsh that knows no concept of charity or pity. I'm so tired that my heart beats through my chest and pumps tears from my eyes into the black carpet of dying foliage. I try to scream again and this time I hear only a whimper, like the stirring of a sleeping boy. I collapse into the mud and it embraces me as would a grandfather comforting a lost grandson. The cold makes me numb through my coat as it closes around me. The last thing I see before the blackness consumes me is a faceless man standing stock still among the skeletons of leafless trees in a thicket nearby. Was he smiling?

My eyes open and no matter how many times I blink I cannot see the morning light I know should be shining through my eastern window. I can't move anything. I'm utterly robbed of all sense and control, frozen in my bed. I'm dead, is this what death is? endless void of sensation and context? a consciousness left to rot in perpetual night? I can only contemplate the horror before "it" begins. I am aware of my fingertips first, I can feel the desperate grasping of cloth and the rake of thread under my fingernails as I claw my bedspread for dear life. My Toes are curling and a flexing frantically, unable to make purchase on anything. Sensation warms my body, I can feel my heart beat again, the breath in my lungs, the grind of my teeth gradually returning to me. Suddenly I am cold, colder than I've ever been in this life or the next. My fingers and toes, knees and elbows, everything is a throbbing arctic pain that made me ache for them to be chopped from my body. The cold is in my core, I cold not just of winter ice but of perpetual blackness, devoid of light from god or sun. My skin feels frail like a brittle clay pot, I am afraid to move or even take a breath for fear of shattering myself into a million ignominious pieces. I endure a frozen mummified hell for what feels like hours, pain warps the mind's perception of time so completely it is impossible to tell for sure. I feel warm returning to my body, this time from the outside in. My frail shell of flesh feels like butter melting under a candle. It feels like hair and features are being stripped from my body and sweating down into the bed beneath me. I no longer feel things as I did before. I see with my skin, yet I see nothing. I smell with my skin, yet I have no taste. I feel my room around me, and it is not mine, yet familiar still. I am rising from the bed now, the world is still black as the void to me yet I an aware of every corner, shape, and texture in the room. I feel something more, something extra but I cannot understand what. I understand moments later, a skeletal hand caressing my featureless cheek. I reach out in panic, I am instantly holding all four walls of my room, ceiling, floor, and door at the same time. I feel the memories in the wood and I taste the sorrows of tragic moments caught in their presence like aged wine. I am stronger for it. I roar a mouthless cacophony into my perpetual night that rumbles the room like a chorus of fallen angels. I can feel my door open now, and for the first time there is light. My mind is blinded by the infinite whiteness beyond my door-frame threatening to flood my cave of black isolation. A shadow is cast out of the infinite abyss to my feet. A girl, a woman. Her eyes are green and blue. Left green, right blue. That is all I see of her, nestled in the silhouette cast through he door-frame. I feel my featureless face smile invisibly.

Weirdest dream ever. Never buying pot from Keith again.

Moving day! I bet We'll remember this for a while. Just got the our first paycheck with more than triple digits and it's all going towards the down payment on the new place! Full bath, full kitchen AND kitchenette dining alcove. Best part, and I know we'll have one of these when we build a mansion, rotating hallway wall! apparently the old owner was some great big fat guy and he couldn't fit around the first hallway corner so he took out a chunk of wall and put a revolving pivot in the middle for a push-away wall. It's soooo "Young Frankenstein".

Can't wait to show green-eyed secretary the bedroom ;)
Gonna miss the convenience of the personal trainer though...

First day off from our new job. The weather couldn't be more perfect. Saturdays in Portland are almost as good as Friday nights in Portland. Bright and humid, it's the perfect day to go rowing. We put in down at St. John's landing and enjoyed about 2 hours of clean sailing before the pleasure craft started churning the water. It was enough for me though, but we can already feel the burn on the back of my ears and neck, ice-pack and aloe before bed for sure. The hike back to the apartment was just like all the others, no reason to really remember it, only that years from now you'll be riding in a limo or a Maserati or something instead of walking. Can't stop thinking about the nameless girl in the elevator from our first day. I'm wondering if anything happens later down the road, I'm sure you know so don't tell me, I want to be surprised.

Thursday is the New Friday

Dear Future Me,

I can't imagine we will remember much of today. The only real significant moment in the entire 24 hours was the realization that Thursday is a cock-tease Friday. It's becoming more and more common, I notice, that people in this city treat almost every day with the same anticipatory reverence as Friday. Someone is always doing "Something" tomorrow, and it inevitably involves either coming home early the next morning or not at all. The city is like a massive resort town for disaffected youth and acid-addled elderly. There is no industry here, just the massive silos on the west side that load grain and other trade goods through the massive steel flute of a hose suspended by steel cable. You can see it when you cross the the Morrison bridge sometimes, hundreds of tons of what looks like sand and other times dirt pour out of a nozzle on the side of 4 enormous silos straight into the open belly of a tanker ship that's so big it practically hogs have the river while being docked. From a distance, It looks like a massive icon of the city's infrastructure of coffee shops and bars. As though the silos were a huge pot of coffee and the ships the cup, they spill browns and tans that dust up into the air like steam out of a mocha.

We saw Blue-Green-Eyed-Secretary again on the elevator. Pretty clever to notice she worked two floors below us when she pressed the button. I guess we know where WE'LL be hanging out on our lunch breaks from now on ;)

,PEACE

Success Tracker

This is for you future Henry. This is gonna keep you grounded when you break-out and become a millionaire. Look back on how you started so you know how awesome you are AND EVERYONE ELSE ON THE INTERNET! WOO!

Dear Future Henry,

Today way the day, you'll remember waiting on the elevator going up to the 15th floor years from now won't you? A cute secretary in a pencil skirt with short hair kept flashing her blue/green eyes at us. She kept touching her face when we caught her looking, she was into us dude! ON THE FIRST DAY! The doors opened and the the office looked like an art museum full of dumb pictures of motivation and old people milling about mumbling to themselves over papers and laptops. The secretary on our floor is old and has HUGE bags under her eyes and her cheeks sag like pizza dough sliding down a wall. I'm sure we wont enjoy seeing her face first thing every day.

The H.R. Guy is like Mr. Pontius from highschool, the older balding dude trying to be "hip" and "with-it" and friends with everybody. We get our desk one cubical in from the window and you can see out the tinted glass to the other office buildings...when that fat wad of sweat Schaper gets up to eat his third bag of cheetos from the vending machine. The computer is one of those generic narrow tower things from Dell that gives you just enough juice to run simple websites and microsoft office but not much else. Barely enough harddrive space for a boot-leg season of Entourage. The screen is just as generic, 940x1024 or some shit lcd screen. It's a far cry from our dual screen rig back at the apartment but at least it can run firefox...barely. We now know how my mom feels suffering with her '03 HP.

The building is really close to a parking lot filled with food carts. I don't usually carry cash but I found myself considering doing so because none of the carts take card. The shwarma smelled so good in the Mediterranean cart. We'll be back for it tomorrow. The second half of the day drew on forEVER. I apparantly the guy who was supposed to train me is on the last day of his vacation in Maui and it left me with nothing to do but "familiarize" myself with their report format and brokerage guidelines. It's code for busywork and it's the slowest work of all. By the time 5 o'clock rolls around we can already hear the traffic clogging up Burnside. How cool is it we live(d) in the city? a 20 minute walk and we're back at the apartment. The neighbor invited me over for a movie, she had just come home from working out. She gave you the coy pout like she always does. For a 37 year old she's rock solid. We'll see how it turns out.

,Foster OUT!