Russell the Poet

I'm in Bellingham, Washington today! And yesterday. And the night before. And tomorrow. 

People here are surprisingly more friendly than in New York. Well. Not really surprising, actually. They're just surprisingly friendly in general. I've had a lot of little interactions with humans here. 

Today two girls in a car honked at me from the road as I was walking to the grocery store and I turned around and they pulled along side me (the light was red) and they said something like, "Hey! I love your glasses!" And I said, "Hey, thanks!" And they said, "Where did you get them?" And I said, "Well, I'm from New York." Easy explanation. They asked where I got them specifically, and I couldn't tell them, but suggested they look online. 

People have just generally been very talkative here. 

What I was planning on writing about, though was my interaction with Russell (remembered his name!), a poet I met on some wooden slats. 

My friend Coltan, who I'm visiting at Western Washington University, plays the bassoon. A lot. Very diligently. The other night, he was practicing for a very long time in a small room at the bottom of the Performing Arts Center. I filtered in and out, waiting for him to be done and exploring the area around the PAC. I went to the Underground Coffeehouse, a university run café that has a nice view of the Puget Sound and comfy chairs. There's a stage, and bands play. I was reading Dubliners in one of the comfy chairs when a band came onstage. They were loud, and it's hard enough to concentrate on James Joyce already, without there being a rock band playing nearby. So I watched. They were alright. After their set, I left and went back to see if Coltan was done practicing. I sat there for a while, but then left to go sit in a place he had suggested I check out.

So, I wandered down to these wooden platforms overlooking the Puget Sound, where a reddish sun is nestled in between green toothbrush firs and ripples across the slice of ocean that is the Bellingham Harbor. It's very nice. So I'm lying on the slats, listening to floaty, dreamy Desolation Wilderness, and enjoying the sunset. Suddenly, I felt weight at the other end of the platform. I turn my head backward to see who it is. It's the drummer from the band I have just seen. He's smoking a cigarette, and notices me looking at him. He gets up and starts saying something, walking toward me. I take my headphones off, surprised. 

"Sorry! Sorry," He begins. What? "I didn't realize I was downwind from you!" Oh yeah, cigarette smoke bothers other people.

"Oh, oh no, it's cool. No, don't worry, I -" Wow, this is articulate. "No, it's fine. Cigarette smoke doesn't bother me.

Regardless, he sits down on the other side of me. 

"Oh," he says, "Okay." I nod my head. "I'm Russell, by the way." He extends his hand.

"I'm Colleen." I shake it.

He asks me if I go to Western, which is an odd question to ask someone right away, I suppose and I explain that no, I go to Sarah Lawrence and I'm visiting my friend Coltan.

"Coltan?" He asks.

"Yeah, Coltan Foster?"

"Does he work at Red Robin?"

"I don't think so..."

"Oh, okay. I don't know him then."

I laugh. He asks me what I'm studying. I vaguely tell him creative writing. His jaw literally drops! His mouth hangs open for a moment in an expression of mock or real surprise, I'm not entirely sure. 

"Me too!" He spits out. "You don't meet many people who are doing creative writing!"

I agree. He asks what I'm doing in creative writing. 

"Like, poetry? Or fiction..? Or something?"

"Fiction," I reply. Obviously he hasn't seen my tattoo yet!

He explains that he's a poet and that, as a senior in college, is focusing mainly on getting published. 

"That's cool. And scary," I comment. "I just never know exactly how to submit, you know? I wish someone would just sit me down sometime and be like, 'Colleen. This is how you submit something. Here's what you do.'" He nodded.

"Actually," he said, "Do you have an e-mail address?"

"Yeah," I chuckle. 

He smiles. "Okay, well I have this thing that's basically what you were talking about. I can e-mail it to you if you want."

"Okay!" I say, "That'd be great!" 

He types my e-mail address onto his iPhone and explains that he has to leave. I wave goodbye. 

What a friendly interaction! Too bad this was like two days ago and he still hasn't e-mailed me. 

I'm not sure how this qualifies as a weird or particularly interesting encounter, but it's my blog and I can do what I want, I suppose. I just felt like this should be documented somewhere, since you don't meet a lot of poets in real life, I guess.

Oh! Also, I recently ran across this great website: Overlooked New York. 

Right up my alley.

Hypnotherapist?

Today I met a hypnotherapist. 

My mother forced me to accompany her to a gathering of Exchange Students on a farm about an hour south of where we live. She is a coordinator for the ten or so foreign teenagers who come to live in our area every school year. It's nearing the end of their stay, so they like to get together one last time and laugh it up. Their host families come too. Now that I'm officially "a college student," I'm not expected to mingle with the high school aged exchange students. I feel like now I don't have to sit at the kids' table at Thanksgiving. 

While I was lounging in the shade on a lawnchair by some of the host parents, a conversation struck up between myself and the fellow next to me. We had already talked briefly in the kitchen. Where do you go to college? What's your major? Huh, that's odd. Well, what are you studying?  etc. etc. 

Sitting next to me in another lawnchair, he leans over and says, "So who's your favorite author?"

"Jonathan Safran Foer?" I always ask this in a question. Just like my response to "Where do you go to college?" is always "Sarah Lawrence....?"

As I thought, he hasn't heard of him. I go for a more old school favorite. "I also really like JD Salinger." He nods. Glances at my tattoo.

"So I can assume you're a fiction writer," he says. I look down at my arm.

"Yeah."

"I'm a hypnotherapist." Random.

"Oh," I say. "Does that actually work?" Oops. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. "What do you hypnotize people about?"

"Oh yes," he says. "All kinds of things. Smoking, drugs, fears." He goes on about it. "Did you know that there are as many connections in your brain as there are connections on the internet?"

"No!" I say. Ask some stupid question about using ten percent of your brain versus using ten percent of the internet. He goes on to tell me about past lives. 

"How does that even work?" I ask, incredulous. 

"Well, you're sitting on a pyramid of dead people right now." I instinctively look down. Look up quickly.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Your parents, their parents, on and on until whenever." He continues, "You have all their DNA inside you. Enough to stretch to the moon. A double helix, you know?" I nod. I am aware of this fact. "So any aversion to something, any phobia, might come from their DNA. Sometimes you don't know where it comes from. Maybe a past life. Some people are afraid of the dark, of being alone. That might be because that's how they died in a past life. Maybe they're afraid of being strangled, and that's how they died. Umbilical cord wrapped around their neck or something." I cringe. 

"Huh. That's really interesting," I lie. What a fucking weirdo. "So what does that have to do with hypnotherapy?"

"Well, my job is to get them to figure out where that fear came from." That makes sense... I guess. 

"So it's sort of Freudian?" I know about Freud. Let's talk about Freud. 

He ignores me.

We chat for a little while longer, but I can't handle it anymore, turn to the woman on the other side of me. She turns out to be a math teacher at a Christian High School - three of my main aversions. Maybe I died on the cross in a high school after I couldn't solve a math problem or something.

Strange, wonderful man in Yelm

Do you ever find that the instant someone tells you his or her name you forget it? Like the hand shake that is supposed to transfer information in fact does the opposite? When I shake someone's hand, it seems as though my brain slides out through my fingertips. I will forget everything they have just told me. Maybe it's because I'm concentrating too hard on the handshake itself, trying to get the perfect firm grip, the perfect range of motion. I don't know.

But for whatever reason, I can't, for the life of me, remember the name of the guy I met today at the thrift store by my new house. 

I am home for the summer. Sort of. My mother is moving to the United Arab Emirates in July. She has rented out my childhood home, and now is renting a room in a friend's house on the other side of town. I sleep in the spare room, where a treadmill is folded against the wall. I have hung my Nikki McClure calendar, to keep me inspired. It doesn't really work. I don't have a car anymore. I had to sell it to fund my overpriced education at a pretentious liberal arts school that I incidentally, am very proud of. Every day, I sit here, on my computer. I go on Facebook. I take quizzes. I do nothing. 

Down the street from "my house" is a thrift store. Again, the name escapes me. It is one of two in my town. The other one was down the street from my real house. Odd. 

I can't sit here all day, I tell myself after another perusing of Facebook. I'm looking for an amp for my guitar. Preferably used since I don't have any money. Also I owe my mother about $1,300 for a computer. I put on my clothes that are too weird for my small town but not weird enough for New York and lock the door. Hop on my mother's bike, which is a bitch to ride, and pedal down the gravel driveway, past the barking dog and the horses, and turn out onto the main road. 

When I get into the store, the guy (let's call him Mike. That seems right) is vacuuming. He's probably in his forties, bald. Glasses. I am unimpressed with the store at first. Seems pretty typical, nothing special. Just a bunch of old 90s clothes on racks, a small room to the side with books and a bunch of beanie babies (which are 25% off!!!!). He strikes up a conversation, as I suppose he must to keep himself entertained at a thrift store in the middle of nowhere. I nod and smile. Polite as ever. He tells me there's more "tops and jeans" in the back, if I'm interested. Sure, I say. Wander into the back. There is a much larger room, full of bizarre artifacts, and I am now impressed. I'm inspecting a $5 transistor radio and imagining how angry my mother would be if I bought it when Mike appears on the other side of the table. 

"You like retro things?" He asks. I am wearing nothing but thrift-store items. 

"Yeah," I say. He nods. 

"You ever read steampunk?" He says. Did he really just bring up steampunk? In Yelm? In a thrift store? What?

"I've never read any, but I know about it." Sort of.

"I really like it. I have all these bicycles at home that I want to turn into something, you know, Victorian."

"Like a flying machine?"

He laughs, "Yeah, something like that." Pause. "I'm not into wearing the goggles or anything. But, you know, the idea is neat." I nod. What is this guy doing here?

I poke around the store a bit more. The typical questions come up. Where are you from? Is this your first time in the store? What are you studying in college?

I am looking through a pile of books stacked at an odd angle when I come across The Anarchist Cookbook. What? What?! I grab it, delighted. It is $1.50. I try on a shirt, which I also end up purchasing. At the counter, Mike smiles at me. 

"The Anarchist Cookbook!" He chuckles. He's from Yelm. He can't know what it contains. 

"It's not really a cookbook," I humor him.

"Oh, I know," he says, a twinkle in his eye. Seriously - who the fuck is this guy? "I recently bought a domain called disobedientchild.com. I haven't put anything on it yet, but I want to supply tools for civil disobedience." 

Oh. My. God.

"That's awesome!" I say.

"Yeah, but nothing illegal. I don't want to get arrested for having a website."

I nod. Dig out money from my coin purse.

"Where did you say you went to college again?"

"Oh. Sarah Lawrence. It's in New York."

"New York!" His eyebrows reach a height I didn't know was physically possible.

"Yeah. It's pretty cool."

"A lot different than here!"

"No kidding. I went as far away as possible."

"Any excuse to get out of Yelm..." he said.

"Is a good excuse," I finished for him. "Definitely."

I stuffed the shirt and the Anarchist Cookbook into my bag. 

"See ya later!"