With Or Without You: Frames

Part 1

So on my first day of school I wake up, begrudgingly, on time and reach over to grab my glasses and they’re gone.

What the hell?

But then remember that I watched an episode of Peep Show on my computer, lying down on my bed right before I went to sleep.

Well damn-it, they gotta be around here somewhere!

I start searching my floor. Unfortunately my floor, which is wood and covered with a dark brown rug, is the same color as my specs and I have to shuffle my socks so I don’t step on them. Nothing. I get down on my stomach and try to look horizontally at the ground and see them peeking up. Nothing. I tear my bed apart.

Are they folded in the sheets? Stuck in a pillowcase?

Nothing. So now I’m kinda feeling defeated, still really tired, and the brilliant idea came into my head…

What if I reenact the scene, maybe then I’ll get a better idea of where to look deeper.

So I doze pretty quickly, almost sure that they’ll just show up in my hand whenever I decide to wake.

(2 hours later)

Nothing. Things start to get very frustrating for me. I’ve now missed my first class at my new school but I can deal with that, whatever. It’s more that I’m literally quite attached to my glasses, they have been a part of my life – my face – since I was in the 4th grade so naturally I am put in a weird position. I feel totally helpless, lazy, and a huge eye-strain headache coming on.

WTF?!? Why today?

So I decide to take the bus to work, I can’t drive. I adjust the computer monitor to the lowest resolution it’ll go and still scooch my nose up to the screen. But then I start to realize something….

Without eyesight, I have total freedom. Well at least a sort of freedom…from stares, uncomfortable directness, details.

I know I have to take advantage of the day, this feeling, and I start to enjoy being eyeless in Portland. When evening comes I play a show with Davis and Adrian at Valentines. Quietly content with not trying to make contact with much more than the sounds my heightened ears are awakening my conscious mind to, I listen to Privacy perform one of the most beautiful shows I’ve ever heard her play. Our show is a mixture of me fumbling a bit on an old Casio keyboard and closing my eyes and feeling my way around the electronic drumpads. There’s a unseen energy that comes out when you forget about looking. We were feeling it.

Even if I find those damn frames I think I’m gonna ride this day out sans sight

We go back to NoPo and Davis and I look around my room for a few minutes. I’m checking the bathroom again, just in case, and Davis calls out “Hey, I found them.” I hear his voice as I walk down the hall. “These it?”, he says as he picks up my glasses from a milk crate next to my desk.

Yep, that’s them. But I’m just starting to let go….I think I’m gonna finish this day on my own.

Part 2

There was a pretty rad event last night on the 4th floor of the Oak Street Building, 16mm film loops by experimental short filmmaker Devon Damonte and music from Michael and Curtis Knapp, Adam Forkner, and Adrian Orange. Co-presented by Marriage Records and our neighbor 40 Frames, it turned out to be, well, a lot like Damonte described it:

“Multiple projectors manipulate handmade cameraless 16mm motion graphics. Imagery is textures and text forms rubbed from beach glass fragments onto variegated grids of engineering plotting papers. Magical contact plastics, photocopies and lots of adhesive tape are also involved.”

Read more about one of the films that was shown, “Radioactive Spider”, in an interview from 2002.

Here is a short video montage of the event:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=320992&server=vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF

Jump In Too Easily

As organic as the opportunity for me to stay in Portland presented itself, it’s hard for me to feel like the decision grew out of me the same way. I guess what I’m trying to say is god damn, I hope I’m doing the right thing. I suppose I am, and I suppose I know in my gut what I should do. But does that make it any easier? Hell no. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard. How can a decision to leave the most supportive, loving people you know and trust on the whole entire earth be a gut feeling? I’ve been wrestling with this sweaty question for a while now and I still feel beat and only mid-match.

Recently a dear friend wrote to me, saying “do everything with your whole heart”. These words have made themselves comfortable in my head and I would smile when I thought of the words and the voice of the words. They would revitalize my core and continually refresh my spirit with burst of positivity and enlightenment. They’re not out-of-the-ordinary but they turned into a solid mantra, capable and utilized by anyone and everyone. But recently I’ve realized that because I’m so torn by my decision, I feel the dead, lazy feeling of incapability, the inability, to do anything with my whole heart. And that is a dark place.

When I visited my grandparents on my return trip to Portland, my grandmother was showing me around their small apartment in Ripon, CA and she opened up their bedroom. “And there’s grandpa sleeping, sound asleep,” she said. I looked over and he was lying still on his side, no real motion from any part of his body, eyes wide open. This is how he sleeps: eyes open. He is now legally blind, fighting skin cancer–amongst other things–from playing too much tennis when he was a kid in Denver. He is now close to the end of his road. I have a gut-feeling that I just saw him for the last time.

I’m not trying to formulate a correlation between my grandpa dying and my friendships dying. I’m really trying, but how can I not? I understand that there most certainly will be loss. But out of that loss will come gain. It’s like I’ve cut a tiny branch, fertilized by the growth in my lush forest of lovers and friends, and am now trying to regrow a huge tree from the little bits of sap that I have preserved from the beautiful fermentation of memories. It’s not unnatural, in fact most of nature encounters it far more than I ever will, but it’s a new experience, for me, in doing it to yourself. A process I can relate only to my experience of going off to college and leaving my high-school friends and family behind. Looking back, there’s only a few friends who I still talk to regularly and even those conversations seem to be harder and harder to jump into easily.

I’ve always hopped into groups of friends quite quickly, immersing myself deeply and then leaving. This isn’t something I do consciously, but it in hindsight I’m very afraid to how it’s perceived by others. The worst part I imagine is not that I did it, but that I did it without expressing my sincerity for the relationships that I took part in.

During my decision making process I broke down one night when I thought about what my future looked like, and more about what it lacked. I sat in my car and listened to Privacy and remembered so many cherished memories with the friends I was about to leave. It was a painstakingly wretched process that I, only after the packing and the final goodbyes and the drive and the settling in, am now finally unearthing the tingles in my belly, my gut, and my head.

Although my eyes still work, I imagine myself someday at the point my grandpa is at now: eyes open, seeing every cherished face and reliving each memory over and over again, sleeping with light and crying beautifully, without shame, basking in the pure gratefulness he has for his life.

Thank you.