i will stay with the coffee for now. i need a tank top.
the volunteers,the assistants, the renters, the fundraisers, and the homeless are there. they are the same as they are everyday. they are eager to please and they have hope.  some linger from it and have wasted themselves. they believe in the non profit white male’s visionary’s great idea. i’m not here to save anyone, he said. i’m not here to heal anyone. the white male visionary has even been known to say i don’t know what i want. i have a great idea.
the volunteer who had once thought about giving her life to god goes by in her overalls and baseball cap. the blond volunteer is winsome in a blue jumpsuit.
the volunteers are both wearing red. they are problem solving. they are talking about the war. the war is not  unlike any of the small wars we have had for decades. it is a cyber war. brown and black women and children are killed every day at a very high number in cyberspace. it is a simulation of war. he looked at me first looking at him. she looked at me second looking at her. she has large healthy teeth.
why is she crazy, he said.
she can’t deal with the death count, she said.
it has increased, he said.
nothing happens for real, she said.
they left the room to go to another meeting. at the meetings they discuss and review. they go from room to room and sometimes from building to building. one of the buildings has a court in it where they hang terrorists.
the volunteer has on a blue bandana and pigtails. she went in the bathroom where she can get away for a few minutes and look at herself in the mirror, at what is familiar.
it’s scary how easy it is to love something you hate if you force yourself. it’s scary how easy it is to love someone you hate when you have to survive. what this means for terror and humanity i can’t say.
do i remember the rooms i have slept in?
do i remember the saline tight faces of volunteers and donors.
i think i’m the volunteer’s age. she is thirty. i’m forty five.
i don’t tell people where i drink, the volunteer said. it’s my safe space.
the volunteer seems appropriate. she doesn’t feel intensely. read warhol’s diary and you can tell what these blank idiots are thinking.
you don’t care for convention, i said.
i cared about them until my husband asked me to move out, she said.
the volunteer’s boyfriend has a wife. they are going to the river tomorrow. it is a good idea. the heat has been intense. she wants to see how it does with another boy she slept with  last night before she meets me. i want to be her friend. she has an interesting ugly face and a squat body.
i want to be in the same room with the volunteer and walk into another room she has to walk in to get to another room.
i want to see what the volunteer does next: where she places her elbow, how she completes her thought, how the thought is incomplete because she can’t remember what she was thinking.
volunteers, suicides, the homeless, the addicts, and the neuroscientists, portland oregon’s eleven bridges, and mount hood wait for the next great idea.