There went January

Apologies in advance for the negativity, but 2012 is certainly off to a shitty start.

A few days before the end of 2011, I caught some sort of cold thing, which was miserable but that did prompt me to throw out not only the cigarettes but the ashtray as well. The cold lingered a bit and then went away. Sort of, but not completely. Those five words are the theme of the year thus far: Sort of, but not completely. The sickness, the illness, was at just the right pitch that if I was experiencing nicotine withdrawal, they were covered up by cold symptoms.

Underlying the sickness, in the background of it, was the murky malaise brought about by being sort of working but sort of not working. I struggle to see myself and present myself as a flexible, go-with-the-flow type of person, but when it comes to work, I am simply not. Beginning around the middle of December and going straight through until last Friday, there has not been a single normal week. The last week of last year and the first week of this year were screwy because while the holidays took occurred on a Sunday, they were observed on a Monday. Most people in my work sphere disappeared the Thursday and Friday before Christmas, so that week was a weird one. Then on the last Thursday of the year the cold arrived, and I feel like I’ve been hacking and coughing and sneezing and complaining ever since.

The week before last I got on a plane and went to Saint Louis. Then last week I got on another plane and returned. So there went two more weeks. And, just to add to the general weirdness of it all, last Thursday afternoon I was sitting right here at my desk and at about 1 or so in the afternoon, I realized I felt awful. After arguing with myself for a while, I conceded and buried myself beneath the covers, fully dressed except for my shoes. A couple of hours later I got up and was shivering so violently that I could barely shut the computer down. I took the hottest bath I think I’ve ever had and while it was still light outside went back to bed, where I remained until a little past 9 on Friday morning. I don’t think I’ve had the flu for more than a decade. It was strange getting out of bed on Friday. First, I am usually up before daylight. And second, the little white lights in my living room window were on, which was odd. Why I would have turned those on during the afternoon is beyond me. Maybe I did a bit of sleep walking and plugged them in during the nearly 20 hours that I was in bed fighting the fever. Who knows? Anyhow, when I got up I was craving scrambled eggs, which I took as a good sign. But then it got worse over the weekend, then a little better, than worse again. And the sort of but not completely continued.

So, I have a couple of notions about how to better enjoy next January. The first thing I’m going to do is to tell any and all clients – provided I’m still in this business – that I am absolutely unavailable from Christmas Eve through the second day of January. And the days after the second day of January will be normal business days whether clients are working or not. The second thing is to reschedule or completely forego the trip to Missouri. Because January is one of my favorite times of the year, and even though I’m still in the sort of foggy vagueness that can only be brought about by combining little illnesses with fuzzy schedules, I just realized that it’s over this week.

Public seating

For a couple of years now I’ve been complaining and carrying on about people at the coffee shop in my neighborhood and how territorial they are about tables. Seriously, I often want to scream when I’m down there, just because you have a Twitter account and a Facebook page and a glowing image of a fruit on your laptop does not mean you own the space in which you sit. And sit. By the hour. Wearing earplugs, cords stretched across aisles, that horrible, horrible look of manufactured intensity I know so well shielding the faces from any human interaction.

So I have decided to do something about it. On many occasions over the last few months, when I’ve been seated at a table and people are standing around with mugs and plates in their hands, I’ve shared the table. There were two women who meet for coffee regularly. There was a guy and his sister, who was here for the holidays from somewhere back east. There was a guy and his daughter, who was about eight or nine years old. There was a woman who was expecting someone who never showed. It’s not that big of a deal. We didn’t have to have conversations. The little snippets about each of them that I just shared were all overheard by simply listening after saying hello and you’re welcome and please, by all means, have a seat. Then I’d return to my book. In all instances there was nothing painful or even awkward about sitting at the same table with complete strangers. We all came through it unscathed.

At the coffee shop in my neighborhood there is a large table in the front that I’ve always thought of as the group table, or the community table. Maybe that’s a wrong assumption on my part, but it’s larger than all the other tables and it’s rectangular rather than round. Once, one guy told me in a rather condescending tone that he was “sort of, um,” waiting for a couple of friends to join him and that the seating at that table is, “you know, first come, first served.” And I just kind of glared and said oh, okay, and sat down, and after a few minutes he packed his shit and left. I think that’s what got me started.

Recently, I was at Ikea and I stopped at the cafeteria for the meatballs, mashed potatoes and chocolate cake. In Portland, the cafeteria faces west, and there’s something quite nice about gazing out on a silvery winter afternoon at the fields and the hills off in the distance and the airport, watching the planes come and go. I sat at the end of one of the long, narrow tables that has eight chairs on each side. I want to say that one more time: It has eight chairs on each side. Although the cafeteria was pretty busy that afternoon, I had that table all to myself. I felt slightly guilty as people scurried about with the trays, their worried looks, their merchandise, but only slightly. Of the 16 chairs at the table where I sat, only one was taken. When I got up to leave two groups – one of three, the other four – raced, and I mean raced, toward the table I was leaving. One group got there first, as often happens, and so a woman from the group that reached the finish line second said “Oh, I’m sorry” and stepped back a bit and looked at the members of the victorious party with an awkward expression on her face. “My God,” I said as I walked away with my tray, “there are sixteen chairs.”

I have no idea what it is that infuriates me so much about all of this. People not being able to share space might strike me as a little bit too solid a metaphor for what is either an increasing inability to connect with new people or an increasingly alarmed reaction to my ongoing inability to connect with new people. Or maybe it just underscores what I think is the general self-centeredness of people, which seems to me to be on the rise. Or maybe it scares me deep down inside because it causes me to think: Shit, what are we going to do when we really need to help each other? By that, I mean, how will the seat savers and public space hoarders behave when the water and power get turned off, or shut down? You know as well as I do how they’ll behave: Badly.

Anyhow, the other day I met a friend for lunch over in an area of Portland called the Pearl. If you don’t live in Portland, the Pearl is what happens when a lot of mostly white people with a lot of money decide that it would be cool to acquire an urban lifestyle and, in the course of less than a decade, take over a neighborhood that was previously one sketchy block after another of warehouses, loading docks, broken windows and railroad tracks. I’m developing a bit of affection for the people who live over there, I must say, and here is why. They paid their million dollars or more for their view of the city and the mountains and then demanded that the post office alter its schedule and the trains reduce the pitch of their whistle. And their demands, of course, were met. They have enough money to build a new skyline so why shouldn’t the noises that were there long before they were be reduced? There’s a wonderful honesty about it, I think. We get what we want, the streets and boutiques and hybrid Toyotas over there whisper, because we pay for it.

The cathedral of the Pearl District, I think, is the Whole Foods store sitting there on West Burnside, a swirl of moneyed, mostly white folks coming and going, carrying the Whole Foods bags and wearing expressions of earnest urgency on their faces. It’s important business down there, getting the purest of the pure, the most organic of the organic. Because the grocery store in my neighborhood does not carry it, I go to Whole Foods to buy brown sugar in bulk, which I use for my oatmeal. This friend of mine who I had lunch with the other day – she’s my former boss, actually – has a thing for late lunches, and I do get hungry, so after I filled the plastic baggie (God forbid) with brown sugar I went over to the bakery section, which I had never visited before, and got myself a ham and cheese croissant. I figured I’d take it over to Powell’s with me and order a cup of coffee, but as I came through the checkout line I noticed the strangest thing: There are long, narrow tables with chairs that are more like bar stools on the Couch Street side of Whole Foods, and although it’s in one of the snottiest neighborhoods in Portland, the tables there are shared without questions, explanations or apologies. I couldn’t believe it.

Smoke

It was the last Thursday afternoon of 2011. I was sitting at my desk and in the course of one hour I experienced the transformation of what had begun as a weird little tickle on the rear roof of my mouth into a full-fledged cold, or flu, or some sort of malady that fits into that category. I woke up Friday morning and realized I was, in fact, good and sick, so I went ahead and met a friend for coffee, as we’d planned to do, and then I got on the train and went out to do a bit of shopping and have some lunch. It was gray, and cold, and rainy and windy, but I didn’t really feel ill. Not exactly.

I got home before dark, and that’s when my nose began to bleed. At first I was surprised. Then I was annoyed. Then I was terrified. I am going to bleed to death in this goddamn house, I thought. I leaned over the kitchen sink as what I thought was a massive amount of blood splattered into the sink and splashed, as I would discover soon enough, up onto the black and white tile. My neighbor did me up an ice pack, which worked for quite a while. I had a really nice bath and then, around 10:45, woke from a deep sleep and noticed that my face was wet. Once the lights were on, I discovered an ungodly mess. Later, toward 3 o’clock in the morning, I fell asleep briefly in the living room, where I’d laid down on the rug but made sure my head was resting on the wood floor, figuring that if the bleeding started again, wood – unlike pillows or sheets or blankets or couch cushions or the rug – could be easily washed.

I think New Year’s Eve, a Saturday, was probably the worst of it. My face would feel so hot I feared combustion. Then, moments later, it was like ice. I cancelled my lunch plans and laid down on the floor again. At noon I got up and read a little and then laid down again. And then a little before five I walked to a potluck gathering, which I stayed at for an hour or so. I walked back to my house and went out to the little enclosed back porch out back, where I lit a cigarette and heaved and hacked my way through two drags. I had a cold that entailed some kind of respiratory issue, so as my chest got heavier the act of breathing became more difficult. And so there I stood, smoking. After two drags I put the cigarette out. An hour later I broke all the cigarettes I had in the house into at least three pieces, drenched them in water and then drained them into an empty coffee can. The coffee can, and the one remaining ashtray, were in the garbage before the beginning of 2012.

For me, smoking fell out of the social realm many years ago. I do recall (fondly, I have to say) going out to bars and cafes and restaurants and smoking with other people. There was something very reassuring, I thought, about lighting a cigarette right after the after-dinner coffee was poured. There was a time when I could smoke my way through most of a pack in a single sitting – or standing – at a bar. I also thought that smoking was one of the very few pleasant aspects of driving. Cigarettes somehow added a fleck of civility to the depravity of sitting in traffic on the outskirts of a city famous for incorporating public transportation into its urban planning.

The act of smoking changed so much in a relatively brief period of time. For me, it became very private, and very confined to one particular space. And not long after I quit drinking, I started trying to figure out what it was exactly that would prompt me to light a cigarette. Almost every cigarette I smoked, I figured out, I smoked in order to avoid doing something else. They weren’t relaxing. They weren’t pleasant. They certainly weren’t a whimsical ending to a tasty sexual escapade, and from the vantage point of the fifth full day without one, I don’t exactly miss them, I don’t exactly want one, but I cannot honestly say that their absence has gone unnoticed.