THIS CITY WAS MADE FOR LIVING!

This City Was Made For Living


This city was made for living. This city is made for lovers in love, for walkers to walk and riders to ride. This city lets homeless people sleep in store fronts. There are few things like bouncing down the streets of Portland at 2 am with Rufus Wainright blaring through your headphones and into the solace of your mind while you walk and dance through the streets you know in the daylight. At night things are different. I passed things I’d passed so many times and saw things I’d never seen.

The stoop where a girl basked in the sun hours earlier as I walked my girl to her car and kissed her goodbye knowing that the girl on the porch was probably burning with envy over me and mine, because we are a beautiful thing. Love does not boast and I am not doing such, simply stating a fact. It is truly majestic to bounce through streets, lights’ changing in time with my footsteps, crossing streets is in my favor, and the cars stop for me.

A good friend of mine taught me something a long time ago. He didn’t mean to teach me this but I watched and I learned. When your life is whatever it is the answer may simply be to put on headphones and walk, regardless of the weather. There’s tons of corny sayings about dancing when nobody’s watching and all that bullshit so don’t dance, move, dance sounds intimidating. Freedom is in headphones and moving feet. Freedom is in smoke when you want it, not when you need it. Life has been the most indescribable blur as of late. I can’t see or comprehend anything, I simply move and hope that I don’t forget to breathe as I do so. The only bits of clarity anymore are the glimpses of Jesus’ face and Laura’s hands, her hugs. I know nothing but at least I know that. I know a lot.

Oh! The night. I saw a tree tonight somewhere off of Belmont, it was swollen in the middle and since my ears were deaf to anything past my headphones I had to stop for a second because I thought the tree was actually a tree, and a man leaning against a tree. I continued to walk toward “him” and quickly realized my misconception so when we finally got face to face I looked him square in the eye and threw up a peace sign as hard as I knew how. It’s late. I’m gonna wake up in the morning with my unwashed hair and put on my blue jeans, the same pair I’ve worn thirty other times since I last washed them and I’m gonna live my motha fuckin’ life.

I hate sin it makes me so mad cause’ it’s so stupid and God made us so smart. Sin is a cycle and we choose to be stupid so we fall into it and then we feel bad about it so we sin some more to make ourselves forget but we only forget long enough to sin and then we wake up and realized we sinned, again, and then we feel guilty until the next time we sin and find some ignorant solace. We should stop sinning, peace is not there.

I got too much on my mind to write it. I feel like the last two weeks of my life happened in one day, one damn day. I let all this stuff happen but I forgot to let it out, now my blue jeans stick to the back of my knees while I sit here and try to write it out, my blue jeans are distracting me, sometimes distractions are so nice, this is not one of those times.

Today I walked. I’ve been sinning a lot lately, probably because I tried to get rid of all of my sin at one time and that is hard. The thing is in the midst of all of this I may have found my favorite form of abstention, my new habit. I’ve found that despite what I used to think, I really like to walk. Today I drank some beer during the Super Bowl and felt half bad about it for various reasons that some of you don’t deserve to know and so I went home and when I did I started to get depressed, I almost went to bed at six o’clock. Instead I thought I would just sin some more and then I said, “this sucks!” and I put on my blue jeans and my cowboy boots and walked to Burnside St. to ride the bus to Powell’s City of Books. After I left Powell’s, which is downtown, I walked. I walked for miles and miles and my feet hurt. I was looking for peace. I ended up walking “for what must have been days but could find no relief.” I ended up going back to the bus and coming home but since then I’ve walked three more times, all over the place, places near where I live that I’ve never laid eyes on that are truly glorious. I just want Jesus to talk to me. I just want to shut up long enough to hear him. I just want to push me away long enough to obey him. I want to love.