The Narrative Image

4. And the Lord said unto Moses, “This is the land I promised you, but you shall not enter. Psych.” 5. And Moses died. DEUTERONOMY  (as paraphrased by Shalom Auslander in The Foreskin’s Lament) I wanted to talk to God the other day. I thought it should be possible because on any given Sunday, if I go to my church, the respectable people of my community are gathered there addressing God as ‘father’ and there’s a kind of script they hand out that even gives you appropriate words to pray. Sometimes there is even a collective petition – they all kind of do this choral speaking thing - usually to ask for health related things. So it isn’t just some isolated crazies carrying on one-sided conversations on the sidewalks of downtown Portland who talk to God…it’s all those adults who watched you grow up and who made you go to Sunday school and who otherwise seem completely rational. What I wanted to talk about was the way people you love eventually get old, and t...

Inauspicious signs for the beginning of a journey. At the beginning of July, I gained access to the Portland Harbor area via the Swan Island boat ramp. It didn’t seem very intuitive to me that there might be a recreational launching point in the middle of what I always perceived to be a heavy industrial area, but there it was, a long non-descript boat ramp angling into the water at the tail end of long rectangular un-natural looking bay, a body of water perhaps designed to provide comprehensive access to Port of Portland dry docks or perhaps merely the ex-channel that once, presumably, gave Swan Island the right to be defined as an island. At the tiny beach end of the rectangle in a dirty crescent of sand, pregnant women cast their fishing lines into the water as they lounged in cheap folding chairs and watched their young children splashing in the water, and playing with plastic detritus. Editors note: In response to reader commentary, we are providing the alternate se...