The Work of Matthew T. Marco and the Spazowham Design Group

I’d never torn out a page of a Green Apple notebook before this trip, but if you come across two volumes in my archives missing pages, know that they are neither notes on an assassination nor the map to the holy grail, but leaves burned in service of a fire at Kalaloch, WA, the evening of 8 June 2008, cabin #15 overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I wondered briefly what ideas and sketches were supposed to fill those pages, now given to burn. In a way, I’d burned a lot of good ideas and better judgment to arrive at that cabin that night. Before I left for Portland, she told me that if I lived in LA, things might have been different. Of course.

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I didn’t really mean to take this picture. I was on the plane at O’Hare browsing through shots from my trip to the Pacific Northwest, and I wanted to start again at the most recent shot and didn’t feel like scrolling through more than 300 pictures to get there. The easiest way to get there was to shoot a new picture, put it back into playback mode, and browse from there. So I held my lens against the window and shot this.

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Hardly five days back from Port-au-Prince and I’m moving the one-quart plastic bag of liquids and aerosols from my rolling suitcase to my duffle bag and filling the rest of the space with clothes appropriate to the current Portland weather—a mild peak of 57 from a low of 52, intermittent rain. And when I return on Wednesday, I’ll have a mere 36 hours before I receive Eric for a two-week stay.

And this seems to be the prevailing pattern for 2008: travel somewhere new, host an old friend.

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Chris: “I love sailing, but some people say it’s a way of going nowhere slowly at great expense.”
Me: “I work for the federal government. I could get used to sailing.”

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