Aceyalone - A Book of Human Language

Two things I didn’t yet know:

Where the fuck I was.

That my girlfriend was about to leave. Forever.

I never put it together, until just now, that where I went to see Aceyalone and Abstract Rude that night, in the summer of 1999, was next door to where I would work at a meat distributor seven years later. Where I would spend some of the most miserable months of my life and freeze my nuts off daily.

I also didn’t know that I was in May’s neighborhood. Future mother of my child.

Or, Joshua Cohen’s neighborhood. Soon to be crush who would ask if I ever looked words up that I didn’t know as I came across them as I read. A thing I have done religiously ever since. My vocabulary still shit.

I don’t remember knowing much at all at the time, but I am pretty certain, that at the time I was sure I knew everything.

Carolina had come in from Spokane for her birthday and we were supposed to go see Ani DiFranco at Portland Meadows. Carolina, tired from the train, decided instead to go to bed, and I crossed the Burnside bridge to see Aceyalone. Carolina didn’t go to bed, decided instead to talk with my roommate, and to my surprise, broke up with me as we walked out of Eyes Wide Shut the next afternoon.

In shock we entered a Chinese restaurant that hasn’t been where it was then for over twenty years now. Bright blinding menu boards and fried foods swimming in neon sauces. Happy couples holding hands. The end of youth and an introduction to years of depression waiting on the other side of the EXIT sign to the right of the entrance we had just walked through. Broadway with its options running North and South. Which way to the future? No way back. Can’t live inside a Chinese restaurant forever. So we walked north to my new home in the Pearl. Cashew chicken.

Two dozen years have passed. I’ve lived in many places since. And still, every time the needle hits the first groove of forward, I’m on the patent leather couch I drug out of the trash room of the Pearl Court Apartments and planted happily in the room it would make my living room. I’m on that thing with all of its hard edges and lack of cushion. Ass hurting on the worst seat ever. Face forward to the future. My lung ain’t even collapsed yet.

Cue Untouchable Face.