Author: zornog

problem was, kurt and i had very different lifestyles. kurt was outgoing and i wasn’t, and so once i moved here, he had already collected friends while i had not. this changed after i went to grad school, but for the time being, i ended up becoming homesick and lonely a lot of the time. didn’t help that kurt’s friends were all incredibly beautiful, interesting people, all dressed well and physical fit. meanwhile i would order pizza for delivery from a pizza hut that was literally three blocks away. i moved into kurt’s apartment for about eight months and during that time i was fraught with frustration about my life and my progress. (more…)

4

i had the first “falling woman” nightmare that night. it was an amalgam of her death and 9/11, thanks to kurt’s story. the buildings were already on fire and the woman was standing at the edge of the roof, surrounded by flames. she wasn’t the suicide woman, though, she was kelsey, though she felt like the suicide woman, if that makes any sense. i never saw the suicide woman’s face so perhaps i was just projecting. she was at the top of the world trade center with the smoke and flames and i was the security guard, and i was running toward her but my feet were like molasses, i just kept trudging forward but gaining no momentum. i never even got near her. then the bottom gave out from under me as the building collapsed, and at the same time kelsey fell backwards, and i was running alone in the air like wile e coyote before he realizes he’s not on the earth. i looked down at the plumes of dust and debris and smoke billowing out over the city of new york. then i started falling, and that’s when i woke up.

++

i’ve spent roughly the entirety of my life feeling like i’m not worth a woman’s time. i think this stemmed from grade school, when i not-so-gradually ballooned into a chubby kid before growing six inches over a summer between seventh and eighth grade. my body was preparing me for my growth spurt but in that time i somehow got the sense that women weren’t attracted to me. i wish i could pinpoint how that result came about and i also wish i could travel back in time to tell my younger self that i’m actually not a bad looking dude. somehow, my self-esteem was whacked in the knees very early on in my life, leaving me rushing to catch up with all the other, more confident men.

kelsey was the second girl i met in portland. the first will probably never know how much she changed my life here. i moved here after graduating from boise state. i was looking for a new place to hang my hat; i had spent my entire life in boise up until that moment. kurt had moved here a year before me, as he did not take an extra year to graduate, and so after i did he offered to pick me up and move me out there. i took him up on it.

every fiber of my being at that point just wanted to stay home and pretend i didn’t exist. i felt awash with an uneasy sadness that desperately wanted to topple me over into existential anguish and i remember my hand gripping the banister of the staircase so hard my knuckles were white, as if letting go would make me tumble off into ennuic infinity. i averted my eyes from kurt, staring at the ground. it felt like hours but was probably only a few seconds before i squeaked out, “yeah. okay. is that okay with ellen?”

kurt smiled. “yeah, let me text her, i’m sure she’ll be fine with it. we go on enough trips on our own, plus she hasn’t seen you in a while, i’m sure she’d love to catch up.” he pulled out his phone and started to text as i spun around and walked back up the stairs to shower and put on deodorant. (more…)

my room consisted of a queen sized bed, a dresser, and a table on which my computer sat. it was essentially my bedroom, living room, and writing space, and once i was up there, i only came downstairs to feed my cat or buy more junk from the corner store. my cat, schuster, used to be one of two cats i owned, simon and schuster, brother and sister, but simon had some weird cat bone disease and died on my bed almost a year before this story began. schuster has been a husk of a cat since then, very depressed, very missing of her brother. hell, i’ve missed simon too. he was a loud, obnoxious son of a bitch who would always pee in the various corners of my house, never stopped eating the plants, and would always wake me up in the morning but sitting on my face so his butthole was over my eye, but he was a good cat. schuster was very timid comparatively, and spent most of her time napping or patting at me for food. she was really depressed after simon died and would just sleep constantly, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t stare at the birds outside. she got better as time went on but it was really sad to see an animal acting like it had no agency anymore. she really loved her brother. (more…)

after a couple of drinks i left b-side and my nearly passed out drunken companion and caught the bus back to my house. the bus is a fantastic conduit for keeping you humble, because no matter how arrogant or self-centered you might feel, if you get on a bus that feeling will disappear. for a moment you are trapped in a giant steel box with a variety of people, and somebody in this new group will stand out like a sore thumb. for this bus ride it was a drunk or high guy arguing with the driver, or rather, he wasn’t arguing so much as agreeing with her, but she seemed to have had enough of his bullshit and kept telling him to mind his own business. the bus was about half-full and everyone was tired due to getting out of work. people were silent, scrolling through their smartphones and listening to music through their earbuds and, for some insane reason, not listening to this bus driver give the business to this guy. i’ve had this driver before, she’s kind of butch looking, maybe in her 50s, white hair, tough as nails but always willing to shoot the shit with you on the bus. she once gave me and my roommates day passes just because. that was back when bus passes were on what looked like newspaper and every day had a different code. the drivers would stamp the code onto each ticket with a hole puncher. one of my roommates was a nanny for a trimet driver and he would give her a big stack of unstamped tickets, and whoever left for work first would buy a day pass, get the code, text the other roommates, and we would either make a new day pass or just keep the old ones. we even made a board with little pockets on it to keep all of our day passes. it was great. i really miss scamming the system like that; nowadays it’s all computers and it prints a pass with the date and time on it. (more…)

[it’s a long one]

so, the office. i don’t like to brag but i spent my adult life in dorm rooms and a cold farmhouse so let me brag for a bit. it’s not a corner office but it faces two parks with a gorgeous canopy of trees that are beginning to turn all types of colors for fall. these parks used to be segregated for men and women back in the 40s. not entirely sure why, but at least it wasn’t segregated by color. now they serve as a little respite for people who don’t mind eating their jimmy johns sandwiches around homeless and destitute people. (more…)