16 July 1997 – Portland, Oregon

The New Crystal Café

I woke up in a coma at the beginning of a movie—missed the first scene, but I believe that’s all—which I later came to find was the movie Three Lives and Only One Death, a title that means —what the hell?—probably out of whack in translation. A Raúl Ruiz film, the first of his I’ve ever seen, even though he’s made like a hundred—it explained to me possibly what happened to me recently. Time has passed, and you turn up somewhere else. It doesn’t explain it, actually, but it acknowledges it, and that is helpful, to know that you’re not alone. I’ve come to realize that staying in one place and in one time takes constant, heavy maintenance. You virtually have to remind yourself who you are each day, and this gets worse and worse as you get older. You start to spend all your time reviewing aspects of the past you want to remember. If you don’t, you forget—and it gets worse—you have to spend entire days just remembering who you are and where you are and what the date is.