Hello! Thanks so much for your letter!
I appreciate the effort it takes to reach out, across time and space. I'm glad these last few years have done so much good for you. It's daunting to realize the thickening currents of change that have pushed these years through us both.
I was startled to realize, as I opened my trusty old PO Box, that it's actually been some years since we've exchanged letters, much less seen one another. It amazes me, frankly, that such time has passed, looking even just at myself. 2005-2007, for me, was an entire epoch, and yet the distance of time since 2007 feels like just a short season, certainly nowhere near as long as 'five years' sounds. I think of the debilitating, inexpressibly long and tumultuous stretches of time just six months represented, when I was in high school, and I'm at a loss to understand how this happens.
I'm doing alright, all things considered. I'm writing from the tail end of an awful, busy 12 hour overnight shift... The last 4 shifts in a row that I've worked here, I've had to send residents to the hospital, 4 different residents for 4 different reasons...
This job is better than my last, which was similar but working with juvenile sex offenders in a different residential program. Consistently for the last 5 years, and off-and-on for 5 years prior to that, I've worked these 'line staff' positions at a depressingly comprehensive number of Portland's social services agencies...
I struggle with feeling trapped in this world. I can do this work well--and, in crisis, particularly well. But it's a false idol. My adrenaline and my courage and my blood all get up, I feel the surge of emotion at DOING SOMETHING, being somehow engaged, in the profound, unending dispute with the voices of hopelessness and rage at large in the world. But this DOING is only illusory, or transient at best--rather like performance. Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost. Or gained. Except that, over the course of these long and terribly busy shifts, and years, I know that my emotional body grows knotted and scarred, and fraying the way paper frays after being creased over so many times that the fibers start to part.
Tonight I had a heroin addict who had relapsed and was OD'ing, curse and kick at me for calling him an ambulance, because he thought that meant that the police were coming to revoke his parole. Yesterday, as I was about to start teaching with PlayWrite, one of my writers picked a fight with another street youth, on the sidewalk immediately outside the building we were working in. I came out and split them up, which worked only long enough for them to mutually agree to meet up again two blocks away (the perimeter of staff competence, an utterly arbitrary perimeter), and continue the fight then. They refused medical attention repeatedly, though I could see already that they both needed it. After they strutted off, I had to go back inside to check in with my colleagues and document details for the all-important Incident Report. Too late, I was then sent off to find the writer and maybe bring him back to the workshop, in which quest I utterly failed...
...But I succeeded in finding about half a dozen other current and former writers, clients, residents, etc., of this and other programs I've worked, all the way back to a homeless man I recognized, in precisely the same apparent condition as when I first met him 20 years ago...
As I wandered the downtown core, soaking in the arm rain, footsore and tense, visited by all these ghosts of my recent past, it struck me that this is what Homer must have felt, and Virgil, and Ovid, on their lonely, unfinished, endless journeys...
...so conceited am I, that not only did I just compare myself to those three, but I am furthermore creating a solo piece built of my long experience with the Iliad, incident reports, sacrifices, and the aftermath of trauma and sex crimes. Dates and a venue have been secured at the end of July and the beginning of August...
Between now and then, I'm rehearsing and then performing in NW Children's Theater's production of "El Zorrito: The Legend of the Boy Zorro," a bilingual musical opening on 4 May. I play El Berserker, who is basically the matador/Mexican wrestler version of Tybalt. I'm so stoked.
I'm also in the running to join the staff at a wilderness/rehab/outdoor school for at-risk and recovering teens in central Oregon. They're hiring youth counselors who can tutor during the week, lead hikes and mountain climb on the weekends, and live in the cabin onsite with the students. Their schedule runs 8 days on, 6 days off. For the first time since when I worked for the Library, the pay scale is nominally enough for my expenses, plus medical coverage, too. In all this, and more, I live in hope...
best,
paulmonster-Lucretius
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