Portland

Another trip, another post where I feel blindly for any subject that can sate the aimless longing I have to express the condition I am in... But, instead of trying to tease some tortured, abstracted concept into the open, I am simply going to get down on paper what has actually been happening:

1. Merry is almost five months pregnant with our daughter - words which are as strange to type as they are to subsequently read. Always the master of understatement, I told her today that I feel like we are awaking from a period that we may look back on as having been a bit static and unexciting, by comparison.
2. I have been taking advantage of my ability to travel, knowing that this new constraint puts a sort of deadline on it. What my work commitment (or Merry's, for that matter) will look like afterwards remains to be seen. I believe I have worked hard lately to prove myself at work, but to what end? There is scarcely a price at which I would accept increased responsibility, if it meant any additional intrusion into my work/life "balance", or ability to insulate the one from the other, selectively, as I can currently do to a generous degree. We do not need two full-time incomes; at the moment I suspect we could live comfortably on half of one without drawing a penny of our substantial savings.
3. After two days in Seattle and another three traveling between more rural destinations, the last few days in Portland have given me an opportunity to clear my head to a rare degree. What have I thought about? A lot of things, which I could classify collectively as: the condition of my own life. Call it a sanity check, for which I have given myself neither an A, nor an F.
4. I've eaten some donuts - probably too many.
5. What art has been important to me lately?
1. A number of New Yorker Fiction podcasts - most particularly Dybek's "Paper Lanterns," Updike's "Playing with Dynamite," and Oz's "The King of Norway."
2. Music that functions in the background (the way Eno initially described "Discrete Music"), but with some degree of melody which only gradually / occasionally rises to the surface:
1. Everything I've listened to by William Basinski
2. Tim Hecker
3. Animal Collective's "Campfire Songs"
4. Basic Channel & Gas
3. Radiohead's "A Moon-Shaped Pool," if for no other reason than because it is one of the most organic digital records I've ever encountered.
4. Aphex Twin, for which I will attempt no phony justification after-the-fact.
6. I appear to be in a reading fast - there are periods of time when I simply can't make myself do it. Lately, it has been Podcast or nothing.