Portland: Three Months In
- Izaak David Diggs
- Jun 27, 2024
- 4 min read
I’ve been back in Portland three months now, I will be here until at least next April. My post at the distribution center ended Monday so now I do security at a high end hotel Downtown: Half my time I stand by the front door, acknowledge guests as they pass, and push a button to open the door for them. Half the time I am “on patrol.” On patrol, you walk around the hotel and scan barcodes that are hidden like Easter eggs using a phone. The hotel is like a maze, a thirty plus level labyrinth. It is still intimidating but I could see enjoying that, just miles of lost hallways away from the busy door, marginally functional button, and bellboys who yell at you when the button doesn’t work. Your feet get sore and there is monotony, but I like the people I work with and get paid over three dollars an hour more than I did at the last post. Money. It always goes back to money, doesn’t it? Either we have bills or something we want to buy or we are preparing for some great escape as we move through our last year in the world.
My Last Year in the World is the possible title of the fourth American Outback book. At first the notes I’ve been taking were for a book about being security guard. And then, the concept expanded to include Portland. Now…it’s grown into this monster about wealth disparity, how we treat those who can’t help themselves, how we allow our humanity to be devalued and how our status as human beings is second to the accumlation of wealth. Wait, wait, don’t run away—see, that is the challenge, not to write some huge depressing, negative book. Honestly, I’m not ready to write it just yet but I’ve been taking enough notes that when the time comes there is enough source material. Even at this advanced age I still wring my hands from time to time and wail my first world lament: Why do I still have to work these normal jobs? Why can’t I make a living off the art shit I do?
Well, maybe I had to see what I’ve been seeing and have these experiences to write this fourth American Outback book.
Money. This afternoon I go to work for the twelvth day in a row (out of fourteen). My new site lead is always offering more shifts. He is young but you can see the exhaustion: Being the boss it’s you who has to step in when a flaky employee calls out. I could up more shifts, save more money towards my own Project 2025. I love my apartment, it really is home to me, but on a practical level $1000 is a lot to lay out for housing every month. I miss the edges of the map, where you see the stars at night and hear nothing but the wind through the trees. I miss driving down ghost highways where ten minutes pass before you see another car. I miss Quartzsite though it’s insanely hot down there right now—
But I also love my apartment. I enjoy being able to meet up with my best friend for beers or just walk to my local bar to read and have two or three drinks. I don’t keep alcohol at the apartment. It’s a lot more expensive to drink in a bar, but at least it’s not just you sitting in a room alone pouring glass after glass after glass of whatever…and that’s what used to happen with me. Now, I go to the Lowbrow, have a beer or two and a tequila or whiskey, and that’s it. Now that I am swing shift that isn’t an option five days a week; I get off work and all i want to do is walk straight home, soak my feet, and read myself to sleep.
I call this book The Last Year in the World because it is partially set fifteen years in the future. I am living on some remote beach town, maybe in Vietnam or somewhere else in Asia. As can only happen in fiction, the tourists haven’t discovered it aside from me and a handful of Austrailians and Kiwis. One day, I spot a luxury boat moored a quarter mile off shore and I understand what is coming, that our little hideway is about to be discovered. This leads into me telling the story of my last year leading a normal life back in Portland fifteen years earlier. In the background are the locals who work at the bar and the other places the Aussies, Kiwis, and myself frequent. We consider ourselves inobtrusive, but we still have an impact on their lives, we are still outsiders in their area…we take them for granted, we violate their customs even through we try not to—all this will be worked into the book—
See, this is what keeps me from working on it; I see the scope of it, not just the scope but how to make it enjoyable to read while saying everything the project is telling me that has to be said.
And now it is eleven. I need to go to the grocery store before work in four hours. There is no tidy ending to this, no clean summation to repeats the opening idea like a chorus in a song that leaves you humming in your car; those times when you feel like humming, when you are pulling out of the parking lot after another hard day of work. In life, there are no simple solutions, no Hollywood endings, just us messy, complicated human beings struggling and battling to live in between moments of joy and fulfillment…
Thank you for being here and, uhm, please check out the books I have for sale on Amazon:
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