Failings

Dear world: I'm a failure. And I couldn't be happier.

I'll explain why. First, a note about why I'm posting today.

This is the third anniversary of Lascher at Large's launch, of the day I first penned a modest declaration about how, "Whether breath on our lips, ink spread across a page, keys hammering into a ribbon or electrons running through a circuit, I’m concerned with how thoughts are captured, contained, altered and disseminated."

Lascher at Large's third birthday also marks a massive redesign of the site. I hope the redesign will make it even easier for me to "offer a deeply connected, reflective banquet of thoughts," and that it will allow me to better reflect upon the places I've been and promote the endeavors I've pursued. Whether you're new or returning to L@L, please peruse the site, preferably from the front page or my portfolio (and please let me know if something doesn't work).

With the redesign, I look forward to recommitting to the site. I see both this third anniversary and the start of 2012 as an opportunity to reflect, to take stock and to ponder again my passion for "In-depth, unrushed reporting, storytelling and reflection" in this world that "still values words, but doesn’t neglect the power of images and sound."

As I thirst for some sense of clarity in an increasingly muddled world, I'm enthusiastic about how I've already seized the outset of 2012 as a chance to refresh everything about my life. I have a tenuous relationship with resolutions, but I feel as if  I've resolved to do something this year, and that something is living my life. My life.

To live my life, I need to be honest, so why not be honest about what I've poured so much energy into these past three years? When it comes to journalism and my effort to provide "a perspective on the world wider than a slim glimpse, something more than just a taste," sometimes I just want to come right out and say it: I'm a failure.

I have attempted project after project after project and often left them to unravel, to wither, to fall apart. I've let possibilities slip by. I've missed deadlines. I've used my time inefficiently and not properly budgeted my money. This summer, I went to a fellowship in the Bay Area, got excited about interactive graphics and spent the last day of my journey making lemons out of not having a camera by creating an illustrated tour of San Francisco by hand. I'd hoped to digitize it, but that tour remains unpublished and half-finished because I got discouraged that the trial version of the software I'd planned to produce it expired, and I've yet to be willing to buy my own copy, or to learn a workaround. Such problems could easily be remedied by initiative on my own part. Such problems are also plentiful. Sometimes, such problems are mundane and avoidable: Once this fall, I got lost on my way to an interview, forgot to bring the right memory card for my equipment and showed up at the source's office with my sweater on inside out.

Such problems are also life.

Toxic words

In admitting these mistakes, am I breaking every rule of professionalism? Many words we choose shape people's impressions of us, but few shock, few seem as toxic as failure.

How many people are saying "Here world, here are my weaknesses, here are reasons you might not want to hire me in this excruciatingly competitive professional landscape. Here are but a few of the albatrosses I wear around my neck. Here are my liabilities. Yes, world, I am fallible."?

As  I've been grinding out some semblance of a career, falling down, and getting up, and falling down, and getting up, over and over and over again, I"ve been attempting to follow the "rules," but oh, how I've been failing. Now I'm breaking the one rule so much more abhorred than any other: admitting that I've fallen down.

I am human. I call myself a journalist and yet this return to blogging — blogging, what a dirty, dirty word, right? — finds me expressing myself, finds me exhibiting a personality. By admitting to being human, that, by extension, I might not be neutral, am I blacklisting myself (and let's not forget how admitting my liabilities might impact my personal life)?

Why am I telling the world this? Why am I telling you this, you, reader, the one who has come to this site with a journalist's promise of renewed attention to this blog; why to you, the one who may very well want to assess my professionalism, who may be weighing a job offer or a recent freelance pitch I've made;  why tell you, who may be evaluating the credibility of my reporting after I reached out to arrange an interview; why you, the potential new fan who's curious about the quality of my work?

Because, I've been wasting too much time trying to prove myself, trying to fit all the guidelines I'm supposed to fit to get your attention. I am here. I am who I say I am. I am what you see on this screen. I am the voice you hear in my narration. I am the eye behind my lens. I am the fingertips on this keyboard. The best way, the only way for me to go forward is to embrace my failure.

As it happens, this year has started with an abundance of life, so why not run with it? I'm spending less time worrying about the rules, worrying about whether I'm doing it right, and more time just doing it.

Feeling it in your fingertips

Failure doesn't mean defeat. It means an opportunity to regrow. This year I"ve been taking more yoga classes, and so far that's meant recognizing my body more, identifying its limitations, and beginning to see how I can move beyond those restrictions. If I fall down doing a balance pose, I fall down. There are other poses to do, and other opportunities for those same balance poses.

Still, I'm also accepting something else, that it's not so easy just to not worry. It's not so easy to "just do it." One rule we have to remember not to pay too much attention to is this rule that somehow we should just magically snap our fingers and relax, that all you need to say is "don't worry." For now, I'll try to remember to take delights where I can find them. That feeling of asking a source a question he hadn't thought about, but about which he has so much to say. The satisfaction when your web design looks not just as you imagined it, but better. The flavor that last dash of ginger added to your meal. The way the dough feels in your fingertips. The little blush racing through you when the phone rings.

Is a new year or an anniversary an artificial starting point? Perhaps, but who cares that our landmarks are artificial if they help us? What is artifice, really, but something we humans create with these amazing, fascinating minds of ours? If we can find utility in artifice, is it still artifice? If we open ourselves up to living, who cares when it happens?

For months, maybe years, I've been grinding. Every element of my career, my personal life, even my mind has scraped and jammed and grated against every other element. It 's been as if nothing flowed, or when things did, they'd eventually catch on the gears again. Now I don't have time — let alone the energy — to try to make things fit. I don't have time to adapt to the gears of this machine any more, so the first thing I'm doing to break with the past is admitting that I don't fit, that I just don't care about the rules any more.

Though I'm breaking the rules, I have no intention to break connections. Rather, I'm eager to connect with others more — professionally and personally — by being clearer about myself and where I stand. Among the things I'm excited about: writing more letters to people, welcoming guests, and sharing what joys I find in this world with others (a passion that should also aid my storytelling).

Last week I took a seed start class and became fascinated by the idea that these little dry specks, with the right attention, the right balance of nutrients and light and air, can emerge, wander through a mess of soil, and explode ever so slowly into this world, full of nutrients and life and flavor and reality. But such explosions must start somewhere, imperceptibly, somewhere that, ultimately, comes from substances packed with energy but which are the product of decomposition.

In just a few weeks, deciding to be more present has allowed me to notice where aspects of my life have fallen apart and left room for others to take root, elements squirreled away in dark, innocuous little corners of my world that for so long I might have overlooked as I've fretted over securing assignments and getting paid and not wanting to feel alone.

So what's happened as I've let go? I've found new assignments. I've completely reconstructed this web site. I've made new connections. I've planned adventures and found new and renewed passions in the most unexpected of places. My writing, and my faith in it, has blossomed, thanks largely to the inspiration of others, some through their own writing, some just through honest conversation, some in these and other ways at once. Meanwhile I've found more clarity about the stories I want to tell, and I've become more adventurous with the new tools I'm learning, like audio equipment and cameras and all the nuances of web design, not to mention the focus I've found outside the professional realm.

I've had enough with what was, and whatever it might cost me to say so publicly, I'm admitting it. Today I'm letting it all snap. Today I'm letting go. Today I'm admitting I'm a failure.

And I'm so excited about it.

Following a War Correspondent's Footsteps to the Oil Spill

Melville Jacoby sitting on the grounds of the Chungking (Chongqing) Press Hostel in July, 1941.

Two nights ago I tweeted the following: Dreaming of dropping everything to report on the oil spill like an old fashioned war correspondent. Anyone hiring experienced reporters? At first it was a bit of a whim. I've been working on a complex but often dry assignment. During breaks I've read these fascinating — if horrifying — stories about the spill. There are just so many pieces of this story that need to be covered. How could I contribute to that coverage, particularly when the story will have such far reaching impacts on our world?

Then I thought: why not just ask? Who needs help reporting on the spill? Why not offer my services as an experienced reporter who'd be willing to contribute his work, his time, and his energy?

So, who needs help?

Two years ago, when I applied to grad school, I described our shifting environment and its impact on society, politics, economics and culture — let alone life — as perhaps the only great global story. As I did, I had my grandmother's cousin, Melville Jacoby, on my mind.

As I've described before, Melville served as a correspondent in China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early 40s. His work appeared in places like Time, Life and the United Press Syndicate at the onset of World War II. Younger than I am now, he was so deeply immersed he reported from the midst of a narrow escape from the Philippines after the Japanese invasion and, during his travels through China, became close to Chiang Kai-Shek. Killed at 25 in an accident in Australia in 1942, he left behind rich accounts of his life in the form of letters, dispatches and photos now in my grandmother's possession.

As I learned from my grandmother about Melville, I realized he played a central role telling stories about one small part of another great, global crisis. Perhaps the war was more romantic than seemingly glacial environmental changes (though really, they aren't so glacial) but both crises are the defining milieus of a particular generation. "Like Melville," I wrote, "I want to chronicle my generation's response to its crisis."

I have some travel credits, some time, and a little cash saved up.

I even have Melville's typewriter.

If that could get me to the Gulf Coast, could there be a floor to sleep on for the minutes I'm not in the field? Who's in need of a collaborator? A researcher? An errand boy? A transcriptionist?

Let's talk. Even if it's not in the field, how can I help?

Do what I would do.

I'm going to someplace not Portland this weekend. If you feel like following me, you might head east of Idaho, south of the Hudson Bay, north of Mali and west of Bhutan.

However, if I were staying town, there are a number of things I might do:

• Check out what the Cascades Volcano Observatory has to say about the 30th anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
• Explore the Sunday Parkways in Northeast.
• Make up for totally spacing last Saturday on National Train Day and ride the train somewhere.
• Find a hammock to string up in my yard and whip together some micheladas.
• Finally finish reading The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring after eight years of constantly losing every copy of Tolkein's classic I get.
• Write letters on my typewriter.
• Head to the coast and see if there are any last minute yurt cancellations (doubtful).

Have anything else a would-be me should do? Let me know in the comments ... and share some ideas for later, when I'm actually not somewhere that's not where I am right now.

Extreme Measures

Geomicrobiologists look to harsh environments for organisms “disobeying” traditional chemistry teaching.
(This story was originally written and reported in October, 2008 at the University of Southern California).

Petri dishes might not be replacing AA batteries at Radio Shack any time soon, but a growing body of research shows it may soon be possible to create fuel cells made up of bacteria cultured to digest sewage or other substances.

Such wastewater remediation is but one application of the field of geomicrobiology, which has evolved rapidly since 1966. That year, Tom Brock first shook the field with the discovery of organisms thriving in the cauldron of Yellowstone National Park's geothermal geysers. Before then, general wisdom held nothing could survive in such high temperatures.

“There's nothing more fun than finding something that disobeyed what your chemistry teacher told you 35 years ago,” says Ken Nealson, a geobiologist at the University of Southern California and a teacher of Orianna Bretschger and Yuri Gorby, two microbiologists working at San Diego's J. Craig Venter Institute on projects connected to wastewater remediation and biological fuel cells. Nealson is a Venter Institute board member.

After Brock's discovery, organisms were found all over in environments scientists had insisted life couldn't exist. Life was being discovered in places with high temperatures (more than 60 degrees celsius) or very low ones (zero degrees celsius), extremely acidic or highly alkaline soil, and even in areas devoid of oxygen; all areas lacking nutrients scientists thought organisms needed to survive.

These findings had far-reaching implications. Astrobiologists realized that if life could exist in so many different environments here on Earth, they may have been too narrow-minded in their search for extraterrestrial life.

But it didn't just mean E.T. might not look how we expect. Many microbiologists just thought it was outright wacky to imagine life could exist in such forbidding environments.

One way to understand life's adaptability to different environments is to think about how life is powered.

Think of a NiCad battery. Electrons flow from a positively charged nickel cathode to a negatively charged cadmium anode. That movement creates electricity. Placed in a circuit and switched on, the electrons move from the cathode to the anode, creating electric energy.

In humans, sugars take nickel's place and oxygen replaces cadmium. Oxygen speeds up the process of metabolism in which the sugars are broken down and cells are powered. Every organism has a similar process, but the cathode doesn't have to be sugar, and the anode doesn't need to be oxygen. As long as there's an atom supplying electrons and another receiving them, the process can occur.

Nealson spends much of his time in a strange landscape north of the San Francisco Bay area characterized by deposits of soil with high pH levels. That means the soil is similar to lye, a substance that destroys many chemical bonds and keeps oxygen away. But Nealson found a lifeform thriving there using excess hydrogen in the soil as an energy source.

“You know, if someone would have told you ten years ago that they had a bug that grew at pH 12, you'd just laugh at them and say 'yeah, you're just crazy. You've got something wrong with your experiments.” Nealson says. “And yet, we see plenty of bugs growing in these samples and we've now got some in culture here [at USC].”

It turned out the organisms used iron to receive electrons from the hydrogen.

“This is my microbiologist fun,” Nealson says. “These bugs disobey all the rules.”

As more and more research about organisms which broke the rules emerged, resistance in the scientific community began to to fade. In the 1980s Japanese scientist Koki Horikoshi discovered how microorganisms could be used to speed up digestion used in industrial processes. Researchers working with Nealson built on that research to study how organisms in a California lake were metabolizing iron and manganese without oxygen. The Air Force took note.

“It's almost the first thing I've ever done that has any application,” Nealson says.

Nealson's team had isolated the genes of the organism responsible for electricity production in that metabolism, and the air force realized it could build on ongoing research into the reactions to design a fuel cell. This is where Bretschger's work at the Venter institute on wastewater remediation comes in.

Already, wastewater treatment facilities use microorganisms which don't need oxygen to digest organic materials in sewage. In these oxygen-free environments bacteria dine on feces and other waste. The bacteria produce methane as a byproduct. That methane is used to power the sewage plants, but the bacteria produce so much there is often excess to burn off. Bretschger says it may be possible to skip that last step.

Lifeforms, whether bacterial or not, digest their energy sources because they've evolved to survive on the resources available in their environment. Bretschger says while she can get the reaction she wants to occur in a cup of water in a lab, it's still too difficult to scale up to an industrially useful process. She and her colleagues need to understand how to make those reactions happen quickly, and they have to happen consistently. For that to occur, they also need to learn how different organisms might react, compete in and adapt to environments changing constantly in terms of what substances, nutrients, and conditions are present in waste streams.

The bacteria she is studying, called shewanella oneidensis, or MR-1, interacts electronically with solid surfaces. It contains a collection of proteins necessary for electrons to move to those surfaces. If a gene controlling that movement is removed the transfer could be stopped. J. Craig Venter, Bretschger's employer's namesake, was the first person to sequence the human genome. His institute is now working on the world's first synthetic organism. The genetic tools developed at the institute might make it possible to engineer a catalyst for a microbial fuel cell or to identify other organisms with similar electrochemical processes.

Bretschger sees other impacts beyond Air Force fuel cells if this process can be properly honed.

“If we can understand the biological reactions well enough to both accelerate the degradation of organic waste and engineer a system that can efficiently harvest the energy released from this degradation, we could provide clean water to areas of the globe that presently have no energy infrastructure to employ conventional water treatment,” she says.

Nealson, meanwhile, cautions against thinking microorganisms can do anything and live absolutely anywhere.

It's one thing to take an organism and imagine how it might be able to live in seemingly harsh environments. You don't violate any scientific laws if, say, you rearrange the basic building blocks of life to withstand extremes, much as one might build different models with the same set of Lego blocks. But those blocks and the bonds holding them together must still be able to withstand the physical forces which govern our universe.

Right now the only known building blocks are proteins formed by carbon-to-carbon bonds. Those bonds can't withstand forces such as extremely high temperatures or very strong kinetic forces (think earthquakes and other geological forces), while there's a possibility life could be based on other substances besides carbon, such as silica, those bonds couldn't be supported in any environment that could support life as we know it.

Still, that doesn't mean there isn't vast opportunity for life on this planet and elsewhere.

“Chemistry is chemistry and physics is physics and you can't violate those laws, but within that range of not violating those laws you can do a whole lot of stuff we didn't think was possible,” Nealson says.

Cooking Up Frustration

In the middle of the night I had it all figured out. In a journal rescued from stack of half-finished tomes, I penned thoughts about what I am doing here, free of school, free of work and ready to cast out on my own yet again. Writing with a sudden fervor, I listed the major projects I wanted to work on, projects I've discussed tangentially here on this site from time to time, and repeatedly in conversation with my friends and family. I knew what it was I wanted to do. After an uneasy weekend of random, mounting bits of disappointment and frustration, I went to bed content. Hours after waking, it all seems to have dissipated. I can't start one project for fear it will distract from another. I send out queries. I update my résumé. I catch up on my reading. I research. I follow-up and I wait in silence.

Meanwhile, the life I want surrounds me. The radio crackles behind me as I type. Through a light fog of static Warren Olney spends 45 minutes catching listeners up on the rapidly changing situation in Iran then deftly switches the topic to American policy in Afghanistan.

Across the room one of my typewriters rests on a table. The paper is rolled up to reveal the few lines of faint text I've randomly typed on it. A reused sheet, I can see enough of the paper's opposite side to know it's an old 460 — a California campaign finance reporting document — printout I must have consulted for some story about political donations, or one I hoped to tell. It makes me hunger to pore over documents, to analyze connections, to question and prod and explore.

A pile of books sits stacked against my bed. Stories and stories and stories full. I want to tell so many similar tales. I want to bring people and places to life; to recount histories of far-off lands as well as all-too-familiar backyards. I want to look beneath the veneer of political and social idealism to the true machinations occurring in even the most progressive atmospheres. I want to translate complex knowledge to lush, page-turning narratives about the fascinating processes governing this world in which we live.

On one corner of my computer screen a little box occasionally lights up. It tells me I've received new updates about stories I've been following. Subjects that matter to me. Right now it's announcing the release of the full text of a new federal transportation reauthorization bill in Congress. It seems boring, but what it contains will directly shape how we get around our neighborhoods, our cities, and our country. I want to dive into the text, to carve it up, to continue one thread of my master's project. Then I realize that project still sits on a shelf. I wonder whether it will see the light of day, whether the editor pondering it will write me back, will find it suitable for publication, will believe that I have something to say, a story to tell that no one else can tell.

I've talked about this project for months and I'm starting to feel like a liar, like a cheat, like I've told all these people how I was compiling this grand tale of movement and transportation in Los Angeles. So far, most of them haven't seen word one. It's there, it's on the page, and I think it's fantastic. I think about it every time I ride the subway or the bus, or tell someone I am doing so and they look at me quizzically, as if they're shocked to learn there are ways to move about this vast, deep city without a car.

I understand — trust me I understand and kinda don't want to discuss — that the publishing world is rapidly changing. Even if it weren't, it takes time and patience to get something published. But I wonder about the rules of the game. With information spreading so rapidly how am I supposed to do this, to wait patiently on a story that is constantly evolving? Even if things go well with this story, how do we publish, how do we write or report anything? How do we set boundaries? Do we just say “that's the story” even as it continues to change? Do we just cut convenient slices of ever-lengthening timelines out?

I've just finished reading Roxana St. Thomas's most recent “Notes from the Breadline.” The poetry in her words. The honesty. Most importantly, the resounding familiarity of her situation, despite our differing professions, has brought me close to the point of tears. When she wonders why she left “The Big Law Firm” I ponder why I left my Big Job, then finished school feeling less certain than before about where I wanted to be, more certain than ever about my ability to do it, and completely lost about how I could ever fit into this transitioning world of journalism.

She ultimately recognizes the fight she has left in her and I think of the times I've come to the same realization, of the numerous times I've gotten off the mat, of the blessings I've counted, of the gratitude I have for the ceaseless support from my family and of the friends who have lately been crawling out of the woodwork. But I also feel the ebb and flow more than ever, the impermanence, the sensation that everything about where I am is foreign. I feel as I always have: neither here nor there. Too experienced to start completely fresh, not quite accomplished enough to stand out.

I've become good at what I call step one. Last week at the Los Angeles Press Club's Southern California Journalism Awards I countered my disappointment at not making my mark beyond a finalist in the commentary category by introducing myself to a few people I wanted to meet, getting my name and my card out there, and getting excited about journalism again. The question, now, is what is step two? I'm there, making the connections. What do I do with them? More importantly, why am I asking? Shouldn't I know by now? Shouldn't that be what I learned, if not in my years as a professional journalist then certainly during my master's studies?

The day after the Press Club awards I set up shop at a Melrose coffee shop and spent hours reading old Lascher at Large columns. The originals. The ones my dad wrote. The ones I always heard about at the childhood dinner table but never really grasped. For much of my adult life I've avoided them because I just didn't want my entire writing career to be some sort of cliched following-in-my-father's-footsteps endeavor. Finally, a few months ago, I realized they really had something relevant to say, something worth expanding upon.

Last week I sat at this coffee shop watching the traffic pass and savoring the sun despite irritation from a nearby smoker. I was riveted. In my father's words I found a tremendous richness, a biting wit, a sense of humor and an intelligence I wasn't old enough to appreciate before he passed away. I don't want to idolize a man I really barely knew, and there were elements of his legal columns that really are too specific to his field and his time to be of much interest, either to a general audience or a current one. Still, I did find threads I will eagerly pick up and weave, not just into my own writing, but into today's contemporary political and social discussions.

As I was saying before, though, do I pick that up or one of these other projects? Those with whom I've spoken are probably wondering about other plans of mine I've discussed. Where have they gone? Why am I not focused on them? I won't detail them here. I've articulated them again and again. Repeating what I want to write about like a mantra is meaningless if I don't do any of the actual writing (just as journalists' pondering repeatedly of how to monetize and disseminate their work means nothing if they have nothing to monetize and share).

My problem isn't forgetting what's simmering on the backburner. It's figuring out what I'm trying to cook in the first place.

Landings

Lately I’ve been thinking a tremendous amount about places I’ve been, places I am and places I may be going. Since Friday I’ve been in Portland, Oregon. While here, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with a number of old friends, beloved members of my family and a city I am finding so full of meaning to me, even though I've only lived here a few months. Yesterday morning I drove along Lombard Street. Stopped at a light where Lombard intersects with Albina, I pondered a craft store in a small house on the north side of the road. A large shingle hanging in the yard read “Yesterday and Tomorrow.” From the road I could see through the windows to view what looked like vases and sculptures and other knick-knacks, but the store’s name and the fact the sign featured a dragon (See postscript) made it hard not to think it catered to lovers of fantasy novels and science fiction. I thought of Renaissance Fair fans and Trekkies and how the two groups share a category somewhere in my brain.

Something dawned on me. Fans of these genres spend so much of their entire lives concerned with either what has been (in a loose sense, since we’re talking about fantasy), or what might be (as fanciful as such visions may be constructed). I don’t say this out of judgment, for I admittedly enjoy a great deal of science fiction and the odd medieval-themed book or movie. Still, it’s an unsettling thought. What about the beauty of the present?

I’d rather not delve into a cultural/literary critique, especially because I don’t want to discount the power and beauty of imagination. Nonetheless, these thoughts arose as I’ve pondered the intersection of my own present with my past and future. Here in Portland this week I’ve seen how so many paths have intersected. I'm always awed as I drive East and West by the 10 bridges spanning the Willamette River, and only now am realizing that Portland itself has been the backdrop for so many transitions across my own life.

Over the past year I’ve flown into this city three times. There’s something about landing here that stirs a tremendous amount of nostalgia. When I land in Portland, it feels like home. I understand where I am. I see where I’ve been. It feels like a real arrival, unlike any other city I’ve been to. It makes a certain amount of sense. Whether it’s mist dancing through City Center skyscrapers or bursts of green splashed across the outskirts of town, everything seems to fit together. Certainly, Portland isn’t quite the emerald masterpiece it’s cracked up to be. Like most American cities, Portland displays the scars of sprawl. As I landed, I saw huge swaths of recently-sprung developments. From the air, the foreclosure signs and anxious faces that surely populate many of the capillary-like cul-de-sacs were invisible. All I could discern were patches of conformity spreading around the city. Visible evidence of turn-of-this-century greed that left this and all of America reeling.

It’s so jarring, because on the ground Portland proper, if not its suburbs, swirls with the pot luck attitude of a true community, although strong, valid critiques exist of redevelopment within the city as well. Far more than any place I’ve been in the United States except perhaps, as a matter of fact, the original Portland, this is a self-determined city, including the blemishes of its modernity.

As I land and swirl through so many past worlds of mine, I remember I can move about the city without thought. However, I’m still constantly discovering more beneath Portland's surface. The only time I ever had a similar sensation was at my five-year college reunion last year, and that feeling was aided by the presence of so many others who had experienced that period of my life with me. But where the grounding I find among my undergraduate peers is most firmly rooted in a mindset, there seem to be physical roots here in Portland.

It’s strange as well because if my sense of home has something to do with the experience of landing in a city, I’d imagine my ties to L.A. would be stronger. Where I can count the number of times I’ve flown into PDX on my fingertips, my journeys to and from LAX are innumerable and stretch back to my youngest days. But the meaning carried by a descent into Los Angeles is far different, likely because until last summer I had never resided there. I’m still forming my understanding of Los Angeles and the placement of that megalopolis into my mindset. I’m still defining what it means to me. As much as I’ve come to love the city and begun to understand its layered intricacies, I am far from knowing it, from internalizing it the way I’ve internalized Portland.

And the thing is, i don’t know if I ever will, and not just because Los Angeles is such a massive place by comparison. It’s something deeper. When I am in Portland I feel little more than the now. Like the city, I’m not perfect when it comes to finding serenity, but, I think importantly, I don’t feel rushed to find it. In L.A., as I did in Ventura, I feel I’m constantly trying to get my footing. To get settled.

That divergence might be stronger now, when I feel myself trying to pack an entire life into a one-year graduate program, then find myself this week coming to understand perhaps more deeply than I ever have just what it means to be on vacation. I am aware there are thousands struggling to live in Portland. Thousands without the luxury I’ve had this week of time and loved ones and treasured friends with whom I can reconnect. Thousands standing at the precipice of an uncertain future, as there are across the world. But I also am finally at a point in my life where I’m finding it’s pointless to fight the way I feel about anything so I will savor this sensation.

This weekend, a couple days after I landed in Portland and first started forming these thoughts, I thought about what Portland and the other parts of Oregon that have been a part of my life really mean to me. In my life it has been not just a place of respite, but something of a transitional zone. A buffer. I move through lives here. Most of the major phases of my adult life have been book-ended by travels, sometimes quite literally, through the state. These journeys have been moments of re-centering, of rediscovery.

At many instances I find myself upon bridges traversing two sensations. I have rebuilt myself, found esoteric escapes and torn down shells of myself here even as I have simmered amid apprehension and self-doubt and pushed myself beyond my limits. When I’m here, I find myself chasing the faintest of distant lights and simultaneously fighting to stand firm against the over-exuberant facets of my personality. I find myself wandering through semi-charmed moments of surreality as if amid dreams yet feeling incredibly alert.

Again, I’m still here. My words still get tied, get excessive, they get me in trouble and go too far. Somehow, though, Somehow even if I resist, I know there is comfort and rest here. I know myself here. I can free myself, I can be myself here, whether the "here" is this moment, this place or neither.

Postscript:

I took a few moments to peruse the Web site of the Yesterday and Tomorrow store after I Googled its name. I didn't get too far, but I did notice this hilarious description of one category of their products.

"Our Gargoyles & Dragons are only visiting us, while they are waiting for just the right person and place to call home.  A few stay only a day and some are much more picky and stay a while. So we never know who will be here moment by moment, but it seems that as one moves out another moves in. There always seems to be a number underfoot. Big & Little, they come in all sizes, some like to be tucked in small places and some like to be the center of the show."