F*ck off Barbara, I still love u

For those whose life it dictated by their graveyard-shift work schedule, November is the onset of a four-month continuous, cold, dark night.

I spent my first night off of a three "day" weekend eating cold chicken from a paper box, drinking a lemon squeezed over melting ice, and scrolling through the soggy leftovers of the daytime's immediately forgettable internet news feeds. My dog laid under my chair, not demanding, but suggesting that I drop her a tearing from the bread-battered chunk. And when it was all gone, she abandoned me to slunk off in quiet disappointment to a spot on the living room couch.

In the back of my mind, I was content to let this be my entire night, to let a sore throat and a hard nights work the previous day excuse another wasted night of pouring my half-alive consciousness into all the great issues of the world around me, and to let the time slip by half-unnoticed, and to eventually migrate, half-aware, to a seat beside my dog, and to let the TV coax me into a half-sleep through the oncoming eight hours of sunlight, and to let tomorrow's self figure out what I should do to feel slightly less half-dead in the hours when no one else is awake.

But just before four, a blaring car alarm had burst to life about half-way down my block. I felt the responsibility of most likely being the only person awake enough to throw myself out into the cold to catch any potential car thieves in action, so much so that I jumped from my chair, stepped into the flimsy pair of pink flip flops at the door, and rushed out to the sidewalk before ever asking myself what I would possibly do if I even saw an attempted car theft.

I saw nothing, so thankfully I didn't have to consider my responsibilities for long. And withing a few minutes, the owner woke up to calm his car down.

As I turned around to head back inside, I saw my dog through the open door. She was sitting at the top of the little stairway, glancing between me and her leash on the coat hooks. No longer half-conscious, I recognized the familiar presentation of some low stakes opportunity, the look of my last chance to do the very least bit of a 'something' to justify living through the free-time between the third of my life set aside for accruing vague economic value, and the third set aside for sleep.

I took my dog for a walk on the city's Discovery Trail.

The rain had stopped hours before we left home, but the first person we passed was sopping wet. Her long black hair was dripping down on her red jacket, and she didn't act like she was hurrying to get anywhere that could make her dry. She walked by in a despondent gloom, like there was never a hope of being anything besides damp.

I waved. She sneered back at me, though that could have been because I held a bag of fresh dog shit in the waving hand.

On the way to Discovery Trail, I listened to some podcast about the philosophies underlying many different economic models and pretended to easily understand everything, but I kept losing my train of thought and rewinding over the same thirty seconds again and again. I was too busy watching the traffic lights we passed and thinking about the simple/complex social pact we've all made in assigning the color-coded spot lights to law and order. I kept wondering what an alien would think after observing our planet and seeing the same trends at all hours happening around every busy intersection across all of the developed world. The green light lets us pass. The red convinces us to hold off. The yellow pressures our inner-most self into deciding very quickly whether the rules were made to apply to us.

The last piece of information I really took in before giving up on the podcast was an idea called The Maximin. The host described it something like, "Whatever produces the best possible outcome for the lowest member of society compared to all other models."

As we reached one of the many inlets to the city's Discovery Trail walking path, I closed the podcast and opened a stream of music. Shakey Graves was telling me how one of these days he was gonna pay the road, and not understanding what he meant left me free to think louder than his lyrics.

My dog lead me through thick fog that smelt like equal parts fresh fallen water, rotting leaves, and human feces. Along the trail, one of the many little streams that ends up contributing to the great Columbia wound near and far and underneath and back and in some places grew wide and shallow enough that my dog would step off the trail and march elbow high through the freezing waters.

On a small stone wall beside the trail, I saw a short note of graffiti and stopped to read through it's rain-faded handwriting. It said, 'Fuck off Barbara I hate U,' in soft, white ink. I stared at it for long enough that a slick-suited jogger I hadn't heard up until then had time to reach us, judge the situation, decide not to continue on alone towards what I knew was going to turn into a heavily forested trail with a strange looking man that stares at walls and his largish dog trailing behind her, and turn around to jog back to the well lit streets from which she came.

My dog dragged me on down the trail, and as we sunk deeper into the valley of the stream, surrounded by towering Douglas-fir and Hemlock, protected from the dense and slow drifting mist that turned the rest of the sleeping city into a silent hill, we found a nice wide stretch of the stream's coasting dirt trail where a man and a dog on a long walk could stop to piss without judgement.

It was nice. Pissing directly into the stream felt somehow much closer to nature than if I were to piss on the ground a few feet away. I didn't think too hard on why.

On the beautiful, dimly lit walk through the forest path, I didn't think hard on anything besides keeping my dog from attacking every squirrel to cross out path. As we walked beneath a highway overpass, I watched a man roll out of his sleeping bag tucked under the high cement corner, carefully descend the dirt slope, then brush himself off and walk past us towards the city streets. He reminded me that Discovery Trail is not remotely the same to everyone that walks this time of night/morning.

On the last late night walk that my dog took me through this city, we went in the opposite direction, towards downtown, and ended up on the cable-stayed pier that overhangs the Columbia, and we watched an infinite number of train cars pass over Hayden Island on the unnamed bridge to the west. On our way back home, a homeless man on an Esther Short park bench called to us asking for help, something about needing police or needing to be saved from the police, but whatever it was, when we came over to see what he needed, he made it obvious that he didn't actually expect my help, that he just wanted someone to notice him.

The walk was long, and I was tired, and so I sat down next to him and gave him the spare attention I had on hand. He told me about the awful year he'd had on the streets, his drug addiction, his children, his childhood neighborhood friends who were his children in another time, his troubles overcoming a speech impediment, his past interactions with angels and demons and monsters who walk in human skin, and all the evils that download and upload through the matrix fabric we call existence, including the man in the black suit whose legs were stuck in a loading glitch as he walked across a mall parking lot.

He showed me his hands, yellow and brown and torn in many places, smelling like a campsite outhouse. He tells me how over the past many weeks he's been popping into all the bars and shops that flood downtown and begging for someone to let him wash his goddamn hands.

On the entire walk through Discovery Trail this morning, about half of it was within reach of the freezing but fresh stream water. After the man from the overpass started his day, I started keeping an eye out for all the hanging tarps and hidden tents and sleeping bags along the way. I thought I'd count, and through counting, find some evidence or meaningful perspective to show me that my strange, continuous night-life for the next four months without sunlight would mean . . . something, but I'd given up the count about half-way home.

There was another early-riser besides the overpass man. Past the wooden bridge, a lanky, old man with glasses rolled his bicycle through the tall weeds out of what looked like a swamp. He wore tall rubber boots and a large rain coat. We said hello to each other, then he put on a Burgerville hat and biked away. If he had on a name tag, it was hidden in the coat.

Near the outlet of the trail that connects back to our street home, I passed a little ranch house with two horses out grazing. The horses had a clearing of flat grassy lawn big enough to play soccer. (Not with horses, but big enough for people, at least.)

I wouldn't have guessed there'd be a horse living anywhere near this city, but here were two, and besides the feild, they had their own little house to share that was about as big as the one I lived in. My dog and I looked at them, and one lazily turned towards us, and all of us could hear the light traffic from a road that I regularly use just up the hill. I could hear as the drivers were breaking for the red light, passing under the green, and putting action to moral decisions delivered straight from their inner-beings to the glows of the yellow. We couldn't see the cars from this far down the hill, but tucked up against this side of the barrier, I could see the top of another make shift campsite, and I asked myself where I'd lost count, then remembered that I stopped counted about a dozen camps earlier.

The mist was settling in from the mouth of the trail, and my dog was panting from exhaustion after a walk long enough to pass two bags of shit. We left the horses and turned the corner of Discovery Trail that let off below another underpass of Highway 500.

Just at the end of the trail, written across the width of the walking path, was another note of graffiti. This one was written in the same hand as the first, only much larger, and with a yellow spray paint that, because it had been aimed down, left some of the letter half-unwritten.

It said, 'Barbara I'm sorry,' and below that, 'I still love u.'

When we finally got home, and the sun was rising colorless behind the grey sky, the first thing I did was wash my hands.