September 25, 2003 (place)

{on watching the California Gubernational 2003 Recall Debates}

I don't watch a lot of television. In some ways, it's like an alcoholic avoiding bars. I know there is something inside my television. A world that lazily kreeps and transforms into a key, opening a door into my childhood passion: Nick at Night, trashy movies, and wild life documentaries.

Tonight I saw the best thing since Most Extreme Challenge. I saw candidates arguing and interjecting their thoughts. The bronze big man slurry stuttering his words and spitting them over the others. And then, this rider coming out of myst. His words struck like thunder, I felt emotional all over, and I wanted him to take California back.

I left California almost two years ago and moved on up here to Portland, OR, not really knowing what muse I was following, but it was green mist. I wanted the trees, the fog, the rain —and maybe I even like the moss best. But I'm still a Californian, and in some ways I feel more invested in interest in it than when I had still lived there. I left for a number of reasons from San Francisco. My entire life felt like this heavy clamp, metallic tasting and suffocating was surrounding me. Homeless everywhere. Living costs: incredible. In some ways I was looking for somehow to have a place to run away from all that to. There was an insanity inside of me.

I'll probably go back there some day. As I get older, and I think more about what may be happening in my life, I know I'm on some kind of trajectory. Unless chaos herself comes down from the clouds, or up from the earth, or just squeezing into reality through the very atoms of existence! There was a life I once thought I was going to get to live. And then I got lazy. Complacent. Emotionally distant, mindwarp crumbling. Hopes abandoned, and the words stop coming through my fingers.

But the debate, is something different. I wandered. I felt moved when I heard him speak.

I want my              back.