#rwallin

pocket inventory: broken vitamin b, cigarette butt, hairpins, chewbacca lego figurine, dime, receipt, $210, buchu, mini-lighter, old bottom bracket race, right contact, twine, .22 bullet. 

my eyelids are closed, their pale thin skin a curtain between chilly, grey-black now, and a warm, honey-colored then. behind them, i’m roaming.

i’m standing in front of the hall closet in my parent’s house two years ago, pulling out my black arc-teryx coat; the singed one, with all the patches. i’ve been gone a long time, and it’s a short visit--i’m already leaving, or thinking about it at least.

‘hey gimme that.’ my dad holds out his hand for the jacket.

‘what for?’

‘it stinks--your mom’ll throw it in with the jeans.’

‘oh--nah, thanks; it’s fine.’

‘it stinks. you should wash it.’

‘i don’t think it smells bad.’

‘you stink too. where have you been?’

i smile a little now, opening my eyes; i’m still wearing the jacket, and i curl tighter into it, dipping my face into the shoulder, then into the fold of my crossed arms. he’s probably right--it probably does stink, but i don’t want it washed. don’t want the ground in dirt, and the blotchy sheen of old oil worked loose and rinsed away. there’s too much in there. too much time, too many places, too much of me. i’ve never been the kind to miss the past--i’d rather stew in it--rather wear it like a skin.

“you ready yet?”

d’s voice catches me by surprise and pulls me back, back, back. all the way. i cough and nod, blowing my nose into a bandana. it’s a little after 1, and cold now. i hop a little, swinging my hands, my breath a hazy plume in the desert night. 

“how long?” i ask, glancing at him. his back’s to me and he doesn’t answer. i shrug, emptying sand from the cuffs of my jeans before re-lacing my boots. half an hour, maybe less, otherwise he'd have left me to myself. 

the moon’s high and full, painting the rail-bed white as i climb up one side and down the other, staring down the tracks like thin black veins in a pale arm. i listen to the dull grind of gravel under my feet, the hollow clatter of stones rolling over one another in the vast silence. i listen for anything, for the far-off scream of metal on metal, for heat. 

we’re in ocotillo, midwinter, headed for new orleans for no reason. seems like i’ve been doing a lot of that lately--going places, for lack of a better idea. keeping my feet picked up and my back straight. keeping my heart wide open and my mouth closed. maybe it’s getting me someplace; maybe it’s not. i couldn’t tell ya.

so what’s the point? 

getting by, i guess, on as little as possible. building a life the way you’d build a house--if you didn’t know any better--each element painstakingly scavenged and fit with haphazard precision. moving like pack animals; follow the food, follow the money, follow the good weather. 

making yourself something strange and right and real. something outside the window of child-student-worker-parent. 

make don’t let. let. make. 

quit or fight. 2005. 2006. too many times--quitting, and fighting.

it’s there now--that high thin scream in the distance--and i scramble back up and over. my backpack’s shoved under a creosote bush where i left it, and sand hisses down my shoulders as i shrug into the straps. 

To: CMcIntyre, 6/18/12

Fr: RWallin

C

this season’s flying—time passing fast enough right now i don’t really know what to do about it. my life. woah. gone in the time it takes to rinse my clothes and pack. 

i really like jeff; we’re stuck together, so that’s fortunate, and i think it’s also why. i doubt we’d be friends if not for this situation, and maybe we aren’t now, but we’re on the same side. i know he’s in my ‘corner’ just because we’ve got one, if that makes sense. you take us out of here and we’re just as solo and struggling and fucked up as ever—but here in this little micro-community we’re two legs of a ladder—banded together  and so of course we keep standing for, with, and because of each other. 

i’ll make you dinner you do me a favor we rehang a door. 

because thats

team.

spirit.

brother.

nicknames and jokes. 

cigarettes and bubblegum. 

he’s all about chocolate chip cookies and i’m all about dill pickles; he tells me about his love life and i tell him about my lack of a love life while we play cards, crouched in ashes, breathing in dead fish and laughing in despair.

being out here is like being a little kid. guess it’s lucky then, that i am.

To: CMcIntyre, 6/18/12

Fr: RWallin

C

this season’s flying--time passing fast enough right now i don’t really know what to do about it. my life. woah. gone in the time it takes to rinse my clothes and pack. 

i really like jeff; we’re stuck together, so that’s fortunate, and i think it’s also why. i doubt we’d be friends if not for this situation, and maybe we aren’t now, but we’re on the same side. i know he’s in my ‘corner’ just because we’ve got one, if that makes sense. you take us out of here and we’re just as solo and struggling and fucked up as ever--but here in this little micro-community we’re two legs of a ladder--banded together  and so of course we keep standing for, with, and because of each other. 

i’ll make you dinner you do me a favor we rehang a door. 

because thats

team.

spirit.

brother.

nicknames and jokes. 

cigarettes and bubblegum. 

he’s all about chocolate chip cookies and i’m all about dill pickles; he tells me about his love life and i tell him about my lack of a love life while we play cards, crouched in ashes, breathing in dead fish and laughing in despair.

being out here is like being a little kid. guess it's lucky then, that i am.

moon’s hanging sliver-bellied, silver and thin through the spring leaves and heat, and we walk, boots scuffing in the dark, swaying more than we might. 1.75, 2 miles. talking, and not talking, sweat-slick with our minds quiet, tired, but not. 

you remember?

and yes,

halfway.

who said that?

in two years, or five, is this something i’ll think about?

sure it is. i think about it all. 

i read a while ago that memories deteriorate with use--kinda like VHS tapes; the integrity breaks down, the corners get softer. the more i want to remember, the more often i think about things--tell myself the story--the more it becomes a story. not a memory, but an invention; an un-memory. 

i wonder how much i believe that. 

there’s some things i think about, maybe not every day anymore, but i did for so long...and they’ve never gone dull. denim blue eyes. pale gray sand. pain.

some faces that swim up in my mind, flawless as ever, and i still taste bile and i still flinch and it burns me; and i remember dancing in the dust and mud, waking up in cars--waking up on a shotgun. waking up wrong.

early evening, me watching a feather twitch against a deerskin, taunted by wind. trace the stitches in my boots with a pin, scarring up the dust there, wonder how it is that i’m here, sucking cloudy liquid from nopales, sucking my chili-stained fingers, smoking, crouched in dirt and glass.

i’m waiting.

for what?

i’ve been waiting so long i don’t remember.

i remember when they wanted to arrest me in the phoenix airport for waiting. waiting with my green nylon tarp spread on the floor, not huge, just enough for a body, just to keep the greasy white dust from marking me up. waiting for my mother.

the cop was old and black in the used up way that gets you stationed at an airport. he was angry at life more than me, i’m sure, but i was a dirty, sprawled excuse--sweat-stained in the AC--and he wanted me gone. 

i was angry. 

wouldn’t give an inch. 

wouldn’t even stand up to talk to him--i just shrugged, sprawled indolently with my feet up on my messenger bag, and a wad of hash, fat like a roman coin or a squished reeses’,  stuffed in the pocket of my cut-offs. 

why not? i had a right to be there. i was waiting. 

i’m still waiting; shoulders back, breathing easy--heel-toe, heel-toe through the humid night. through our tires humming down quiet streets and our long hellos and quick goodbyes. waiting to be somewhere, to be someone. 

waiting to leave. 

waiting to stay.

Fun-House Mirror. 

A friend took these photos almost ten years ago--long enough that looking at them now feels like looking at a complete stranger. I remember it, of course, vividly; me changing clothes behind a file cabinet and standing where he asked me to and staring awkwardly at nothing. And I remember seeing the photos after he took them--he was thrilled and thought I’d want copies. I was embarrassed; disappointed and exposed. I could find nothing in them but my own flaws. 

I thought, but didn’t say: “My mouth looks disgusting--like an eel’s. My features are so crude, my forehead is too small, one of my eyelids hangs lower than the other.... The angle of my neck is awful--look at that fat wrinkle, I look like Miss Piggy. I have trailer park tits. My legs belong on some grotesque German governess. God, what the fuck am I doing with my fingers? That hand position is so unnatural.”

Instead, I mumbled thanks, stuffed the CD he gave me into my leather bowling bag, and forgot about it for years. 

I found it cleaning out a mildewed corner of my own past in my parents’ house. 

I still see the stiff, awkward splay of my fingers and my too-straight back and too-big calves. I also see the strange, cold beauty he saw then, because somehow, after this long, it’s no longer me I’m looking at. 

More than either though, I see crippling, gut-wrenching self-hatred and fear. 

I see something cold and blank and terrified squatting in me--naked and sullen; worthless. I see it in the photos, but more disgustingly, more insidiously, I see it in the mirror every day; I see my nasty teeth and my bashed-in cheekbone and the dark circles under my tired eyes and the flat spot in my too-big nose. See my too-curvy-to-be-stylish, ugly, milk-cow body, and my too-weathered-to-be-sexy hands. 

Is any of that real? It must be; I can see it--I stay away from people because of it. But what if I take a picture and wait ten years? What then? Will I have been wrong? Will I have been ok, have been fit for human consumption all along?

I don’t know. 

I wonder how it is that we hide so well from ourselves--or if we do. Maybe I see myself through a microscope--through a fun-house mirror, and the rest of the world through that hazy veil of optimistic middle-distance, like tinted glass. Maybe we all do that.

By now I know better than to think I can change what I see, but maybe I can learn to stop looking so hard.

To: JBarton, 6/19/2013

Fr: RWallin

yo blind molasses barton, 

“…i wish i could quit you!”

so, i grounded a boat yesterday..staring into the sun, couldn’t see shit, blah blah…all that. but it made me think of you instantly. us leaving camp last year in that desperation shit-show and shoving the 90 off a bar inch by inch, running out of gas and paddling the damned thing down the slough to the village. 

knew i was gonna miss you quite a bit but i guess i’m a little shocked at how much. just doesn’t seem right to be out here staring at a river and listening to nothin but wind without you to crack me up. 

aside from that though, it’s pretty cool out here. dunno if you’ve been to this project or not—george weir? seems like fish n gay’s kinda short-staffed this year and shuffling folks around…cara and i are here filling in for two weeks before we move on to our own actual project in platinum. i like counting here better than sonar—although i’m sure it’s kinda shitty when the weather sucks. 

had kind of an apocalypse prep-drill yesterday—wildfire upriver had us pretty much choking on smoke, and a 30mph wind straight at camp had things looking ominous. would’ve been a lot less nervous but our only boat was en route to sleetmute so we were kinda stuck and tossing shit into ‘i think i can carry this down the middle of the river if i need to’ piles. fire service water-bombed though, and the wind shifted so everything died back and calmed down. 

did leave me kind of laughing at my selection of “oh shit” essentials…and made me curious what other people’d bring under similar circumstances. 

i think i feel out here kinda like you did the first year i worked with you. probly not quite that nuts/bummed…but i’m having a hard time getting my head in the game/making things happen. weird. part of it’s definitely that i’ve never been here before, and nobody’s really in charge (the tech III quit, i think, and the kugruguluk crew was down here for install but they took off yesterday). i don’t wanna be a dick…but at the same time it feels like if i don’t just kind of announce ‘i’m doing this now,’ nothing’s gonna happen. oh well…working for the state, chapter 17.

how’re you? how’s maui? you still with michelle? been recording anything? 

i’ve been writing a little music in austin, but not a ton…mostly hanging out outside, doing a lot of rock climbing. kinda had the best year of my life, actually…or at least i found the best friend i’ve had in a really long time. i love him. love in the kind of sense that slices right through my bullshit. he’s the kind of person i thought didn’t exist—or at least, if they did, wouldn’t talk to me. we’re so similar it’s crazy. react to things the same way, have the same daydreams. i’ve never been more honest/felt more like myself with anyone. it’s awesome. dunno if it’ll turn into anything but best buddies…maybe we shouldn’t be. i dunno. part of me wants that, part of me’s not sure. i’ve never been serious about anybody, but i would be this time and i know it and i guess that’s got me kinda…scared is the wrong word, but i can’t think of a better one. more like i just don’t know what to do. i don’t know how to have a relationship other than a friendship…because all i really do is have good friends and occasional fuck-buddies. i’m no a sociopath exactly, but i guess maybe i’m close and it’s finally a problem. unless it isn’t. ugh. i’m confused and it sucks. 

anyway. keep ya chin up! i’ma go dig an outhouse ;)

To: JVerduzco, 7/7/13

Fr: RWallin/CaraWynn

  “we don’t exist right now…kinda nice, isn’t it?” the words drift back over her shoulder on a cold blast of steam and i smile in the dark. half because she’s right, half because i’m not sure i want her to be. 4am and we’re ghosting around a loading dock, dirty and tired at the end of the world—an end of the world.

a desolate spur of western alaska. salmon and shorebirds and the “just add money” armature of industry. this is where things come to disappear.

the place itself is a paradox—a less glamorous version of that giant hand sculpture protruding from the chilean desert; an inexplicable, sprawling thing sulking here in the tundra, square angles harsh and conspicuous against the hazy flatness of moss and sea. color is a whole new animal. sound and fury.

sharp green—needles behind your eyes and the scent of ginger.

smoke blue— a dry breeze, heaving lungs, dust shaken from hair.

rust orange and ochre-- bitter and mechanical like chewing the side of your thumb after an oil change.

flowers are everywhere, low and tiny. an explosion of pink/white/yellow/violet. the air faint but heady with the faded  honey/lavender of a quilt washed 800 times. sweat. sun. rain

the sun sustains life and will eventually kill us all if humans make it that long. if we don’t self-destruct. it’s refreshing to know the sun is already middle-aged. half way through its life cycle. we got about 2 billion years. makes the fact i missed that boat today almost inconsequential. makes other stars less important cause they are. how many stars can support this much bullshit?

“I just want to bury my dog and go home.”

it’s an off-center scrawl, pages from anything else in my notebook—means i heard it somewhere and liked it enough to write it down. i remember the voice—a man’s, older, quiet and frayed—and maybe what he was wearing…that he held something in his hands, that the place was too brightly lit. not much more. it’s unusual—having to search for a memory. usually i can’t avoid them.

a handful of sparse, folky chords and that out-of-style, balls in a vise, justin vernon indie whine and i’ll be in portland, 2008 maybe, sardined into a window ledge at holocene with jess and travis (still in love at the time). skinny love. and pin-drop silence. they talked about it for hours, for years, stoned and laying on the rug while it rained and i paced over creaky floorboards trying to decide when i’d be leaving, and to where.

i remember one time traveling rose and i were trying to decide where to go next. back to el salvador so she could re-unite with the gum salesman (chiclets to be exact—chiclets on chicken buses) or advance north to the mountains of guatemala. we made a list—where next. we wound up going forward, north, but i will always have this nagging feeling of what would’ve happened if we went back to Santa Ana? it would’ve only taken a few days travel time, it could’ve been true love. instead we followed the ex-professional soccer player to antigua where i self-destructed slightly and drank all the whiskey and made up regrets for the year. follow your guts. next time maybe the pro-con list would get us closer to mexico and eventually reunited with friends, but following your traveling partner’s instinct may have been worth the adventure of going back the way we came. it doesn’t always have to be a new city, a new volcano, a new country. maybe familiar, same street corner, same chicken stand, returning home, isn’t failure if you wanna be there.

in the end it doesn’t much matter—what you want, where you are…nature doesn’t care, right? isn’t that our tag-line this season? we’ll say it laughing, picking at piles of bleached bones, at spilled coffee and rotting vegetables. you are “here” (map of ak). you leave footprints that disappear, you have a shadow no one sees. fucking revel in it.

sometimes i used to look at my life, at my lack of responsibility, and i’d get this tight cottony feeling in my throat/chest—the kind where my head starts pounding and my stomach turns and all i can taste is blood and time. i’d feel like i fucked up and almost wish i were a little dumber, so i could stop wondering if i’d missed the bus to adulthood.

“…what’s in that tupperware container? you’re decomposing a bird, aren’t you?” i did miss the bus. I’m not, incidentally—i’m rehydrating some shiitake mushrooms for soup, but i give it a longish pause anyway. ‘would that bother you?” i ask casually and she shrugs. “no, i’d just be jealous.” at least i’m in good company.  “are you drinking lemon juice?” “you know…sometimes you just want to feel different.”

sometimes you just want a kick in the ribs. a reminder you’re human. this is the point at which i usually begin making bad decisions. actually, i wouldn’t even call it that, because i don’t tend to regret things. maybe i’m not human after all. oddly enough it doesn’t concern me, just means i don’t have to worry much about desire or failure, i can assume they’re both relative, situational and at least 1/2 bullshit. i’m okay with that. is it apathy? is it dangerous? maybe. i dunno. kinda doubt it. sometimes you’d just rather dance to prince than attend you own graduation.

“i love you yoga mat.” that is the story of my college graduation. i was 28, my hand was infected because after my last final, Probability 301, I just had to go out downtown, get blacked out drunk with my buddy Stephen, and decide to race him to the next bar (the polar)…but all i did was run as fast as i could right into the pavement, landing all 160 drunk lbs on my hand….and i refused to wash it.

i woke up late for my graduation party, bloodshot eyes, bloody hand stuck to the nightdress i'd attempted to take off, one boot on, half in my bed. fucking classy. i called my friend to come clean me up and to bring cocaine. the only way to bounce back. i got to the bar i’d spent the last 3 years working at, slinging bud lite to pay tuition, books, also a good way to get free drinks.

anyway, the party was a success, drunk speeches were made, i stayed high partly to numb the pain and to drown my spite for my boyfriend who wasn’t there, people like me don’t go to actual graduation—i just spent 4 years paying for a BS, last thing i’m gonna do is spend more money on a cap & gown or stand in another line. no more lines, hoops, or inspirational academic speeches.

so anyway, my absent boyfriend bought me a yoga mat in celebration of my success. he told me had boughten me an ipad but returned it. i’d been demoted from ipad to yoga mat. he was in medical school so perhaps my undergrad was only deserving of a plastic mat to sweat on. i’ll never know. we broke up shortly after i graduated. i’d spent years waiting to have one day to myself to appreciate my ability to think still, and hand in papers on time, but felt robbed somehow of closure.

next time i wanna celebrate an achievement i’ll crawl into a cave and sit in silence.

….so pretty much what we’re doing right now? …cellblock 4, platinum pen.

RW