ON BEARDS
In Seattle

I’ve liked Iron and Wine ever since my friend Danielle and her husband Devin introduced it (along with many other things) to me a few years ago after an evening of stories of Tibetan adventures and Japanese pancakes of potato, onion and cabbage covered with wasabi mayonnaise (I think). Devin mentioned that he liked the sensibility of singers who play their own instruments and do their own harmonies. Individualists, I think now, who treated their vocation like Kierkegaard (one true thing) and wrote like Nietzsche, thinking all the time that existentialism and extreme facial hair was cool. Sam Beam said as much last night about his songs of graffiti on the gates of heaven and sour milk flowing into the mouths of rivers and a general manifesto calling on unity for the “beards of the world.”

Now we live in Seattle and I still like Sam Beam’s Iron and Wine, his singular poetry and voice. He is a cheerful man with a wedding ring, hair split down the middle. A short man with smiling eyes and a small mouth which tilts back for the high notes. His songs and guitar are quiet and dense with precise images and thunked arpeggios. He rings around his words and weaves them, worming into your brain like a true thing you didn’t know. He is an original man.

So now we live in Seattle next to a vegan clothing store, we own a GPS, and bake our own marinated tofu. It’s a good and simple life and we work our endless days into texts, spoken and caligraphied, and housebound invalids who are still valid. We live from farmer’s market to farmer’s market, polish our debts like shackles and chains, and enjoy our occasional creeks and cradles. Once in a while we see a man or woman king, a maker, who makes out new ways of being strong and active and cheerful. It's cherry season, what else can we want?

Here are some music videos said to make tears.

Photos by Oslo in the Summertime and KM Photography

Waqas Ahmed
JEN SAYS
We’re going to live in Port Townsend Someday

About 20 years ago in a little town in the pines 100 miles south of here Kurt Cobain told us where bad folks go when they die. Bad folks “go to a lake of fire and fry, and we don't see them again until the Fourth of July.” Last night we made our own quiet campfire between huckleberry trees right where Juan de Fuca’s Strait meets Puget’s Sound and listened to the rockets and crackers hiss and scream all around us, like devils set free to writhe and wail in their senseless fire. Echoing from Mount Baker to Mount Rainier a succession of loud farts were loosed to roam the woods, suck up the air, and scare the deer.

Jennifer thinks we crawled out of the water right at Discovery Bay in Port Townsend. She thinks the seaweed looks like salad, the driftwood looks like fruit-shaped rocks. We sat on the rocks and collected cobwebs and read fantastic poetry while drinking at Better Life Through (BLT) Coffee – admiring the Amish cheese they advertise on their menu, the perfectly bruised fruit at the Co-op Grocery.

So far we don’t feel like we’re from the Northwest, but we do see lots of things we like and dislike. There are plenty of reasons to produce rage like Kurt Cobain’s: bad folks with no jobs, deep cold like you feel no where else, listlessness, Navy bases, boredom, rusting killing machines, senseless noise at campgrounds, lethargy, tyrannical landlords, dirtbikes, dirty boots, and the list goes on. But we’ve been here long enough to watch the snow melt on the Olympics and apply for memberships at the Seattle Art Museum. We’ve walked the old growth forests in the mist and rode our bikes along bluffs high over the Sound. Its wild country for our tastes and that suits us just fine.

BREMERTON FATHEAD
Or The Things We Liked at the Seattle Art Museum

We were talking, explaining the day: the art museum, the small nosed woman writer.
Talking in level tones about poorly spoken questions,
Andrew Wyeth and his Japanese browns and greens,
writing heart truth and creative facts,
when the lesson in how to build a stone wall happened along.

Why are you so mad? I ask.
The ferry rolls as the Sound pushes in on the lights of Bainbridge Island.
When I say aboriginal it means pulsing auras in weird colors baking under the burning December sun.
Not women weaving baskets away from the prying glances of missionary men hacking totem poles into firewood between grunts, as missionary’s daughters think.
It doesn’t matter and it’s all the same British empire,
But I still must push my point of view: you’re the provincial and I’m the smarty pants.

Of course I’m captive to your moods, and like Philip Lopate I try to gentle you out of them.
He says this is done out of laziness: “it saves me the trouble of having to initiate emotions on my own.”
In my bones I am a laconic Amishman avoiding conflict, building the peace through avoidance.
So I say I also liked the bulging suits made out of thrift store sweaters
and you smile and start to meet my eyes again
to rescue a perfect day from my heavy elbows.

The fat girls of Bremerton say loudly that it is against the Amish religion for Amish people to use soap.
We smile down at the floor between us
for no reason since these girls have no knowledge of anything other than their own cheap fatness.
I think Philip Lopate is right about the laziness of placation.
but sometimes your moods point to my own unapologetic thickness
my lack of graciousness and true humour.
I give you my shirt as we walk off the boat together into the shivering cold of the rest of our lives.

Andrew Wyeth. Aboriginal Art. Space Suit made of thrift store sweaters by Nick Cage. Seattle Ferry by Hillary H.

PICTURES
Mostly by Dallas
Of tall little boys, dapper mennonites, becoming good ol boys in Chattanooga, and how we look at them, so bright and shiny armed with knives and chock full of new powers.

GENERAL CAPTION
Victoria, British Columbia

Last weekend we crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca under low clouds with a sharp eye for whales. Only 3 or 4 showed us their breath and none of them were too close. J and I went to Victoria hoping to break out of a bad case of active boredom and headaches or the monotony of social planning: where to live, what to eat, what movie to watch, how to fight off the crush of domestic banality. Unaccustomed to spending money, Victoria turned out to be a pretty but uninteresting town for us: tightfisted edgy weekenders. There was much ado about the culture and architecture of the British Empire: high tea, steep roofed hotels. We were saved only by the street performances, the coffee shops, the spongy lawns and park benches which were good for heated discussions and sprawled out reading, and the lacerating wind on the ferry ride back home.

SITTING
Cheerfully

I left the ring of trees only to swim across the lake.
After a few days of watching the sun,
thinking about nothing in particular,
everything in general,
I started to guess at the birds that called.
It feels good to string food from a tree that has claw marks in it.
A doctor’s son feels proud to make a fire for comfort
and listen to the coyotes howl to each other like it’s music.

I decided that rather than despair at the meaning of existence,
look for wonder on the far side of tragedy;
cast my dice for infatuation on the other side of boredom,
hope for new worlds beyond this one.
This is the risk, this is the shuffle:

Reading existentialism for the past few months has forced me
Awkwardly, to slink into this position:
Bald eagles gliding over glassy lakes make a spot feel right.
Also, bullfrogs and raccoons are fine company at night.
No need to wait to be dissatisfied to start in a new direction,
but being unhappy (tragedy, what else?) does make action appealing.
Re-action even more so;
So, start from burning joy.

The sky was forty shades of blue where the trees met the water
and our sun slowly fragmented.

COMMUNAL
Walks with Richard

Richard from #7 came over a few days after we moved here and asked us if we wanted to go on a walk with him. We were eating and tired right then so we said maybe another time. Richard sort of snorted, dismissed us with a drop of his hand, and stomped off toward Belfair State Park.

The next time Richard asked me I was in the middle of a chirpy pilates video. Eager not to disappoint I answered the door right away, asked him to wait a second while I ran upstairs and put on some pants and away we went. We talked over what he calls the “dismal science” (economics) as we slowly ambled down the road. Turns out that Richard, who is a fierce supporter of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of salvation by free markets and invisible hands, blames the Chinese for selling off $700 billion of American treasury bonds in 2007 in a mad scramble to buy up oil companies and the like and dominate the world system. He thinks our currency will soon be worthless. Richard is a MIT physicist who worked most of his life at Boeing – the big employer around the Sound before Bill Gates invented Microsoft and after the big trees were all cut up and shipped out. He walks for his health and to see the birds, the shifting alluvial deltas at the end of Mission Creek, and the quiet ponds which reflect the big clouds. We talk of salmon, and floods, and boy scout sing-a-longs in the Olympics in the 1950s.

Since his retirement Richard has been receiving visions which have given him the answers to all the major problems which Einstein and Hawkings couldn’t solve: things to do with quantum mechanics, string theory and the like. He’s writing up these new theses and submitting them to refereed journals. So far, like most physics papers, none have been published. A surprise storm rained on us the last time we walked, and we got pretty wet. Richard gave me a high-five when we got back.