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

Like an obscure band that high school kids you once mocked now call their god, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about purple entering the pedestrian American fashion lexicon. In an attempt to spur myself to introduce myself to strange women and simultaneously spare myself inevitable humiliation, I’ve made it a point to approach women wearing aubergine overcoats.

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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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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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As the Broadway stagehand strike closed and I rushed the box office for a ticket to “Cyrano de Bergerac” last weekend (and will do the same for “Rock ‘n’ Roll” before too long), I was reminded—as I was more consistently my last weekend in California than even I have recently allowed my introspection to persist—the extent to which my life is a bento box.

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Upon describing my apartment to my mother during a phone conversation (rather recently, already months after I’d moved in), annotating from my punch list—paint, halogen, cabinet hardware, and so on—she succinctly restated my bloviating with the phrase, “you’re living in a before.” One of the constants in my life is asymmetry, and I find myself applying this imbalance I once disdained as a lens of optimism to separate the apex of my existence from, more or less where I am now, its midpoint, with an ambition to set a median greater than the mean. What that ambition comprises, however, I have yet to cohere into a uniform and quantifiable after.

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If you’re looking through a newspaper for either an apartment or a soulmate, chances are you’re not going to find much worthwhile.

I lost a third apartment yesterday to “an earlier application” (though I admit this time I actually believe it) and let another promising lead evaporate today. What’s strange is that as I am more deeply in the market for rentals, I’m finding that the pursuit for a decent apartment and a significant other are fraught with similar pitfalls—problematic conformity, lowered expectations, and of course, dealbreakers.

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