I know it's been a long time since I've been on this dear ol' blog of mine... And this won't be a real post either. But I think this thing is a cute idea
Now I'm on the run again, but sometime soon I'll sit down and really try to make a go of writing something. Sometime. Soon.
New things and old stuff and random business:
The Girl Effect:
OK Great:
Happy Days blog (at NYT).
Looking Into the Past Flickr pool:
A Time to Get:
The Disposable Memory Project:
And then just some silly things:
Janine Rewell tanned a man...
(what kills me is the precision of the line...)
Allison Manch embroiders with a sense of humor...
Rik Lee does drawings that may usually not really be my style, but I really like 'em, so there.
I am no mystery, though they know me not.
My insomnia seeks but solemnity,
indiscretions covet clemency
and sins seek absolution
or expect retribution
of a potency yet unseen.
My isolation begets admiration
for the centers of great celebration,
but regrets to be introduced
to the limitations
of my socialization.
My yet unmet expectations
for the scale of my achievements
recognizes the vindication
of my detractors, deniers,
and my inner nay-sayers.
The exaltation of my song
betrays the enthusiasm of my joy,
the catharsis of my rage,
the melancholy of my defeat
and the meteoric scope of my ultimate renewal.
The relaxation of my kinetic fumbles
and abdication of my cognitive jumbles
and the unfortunate application of my
untimely impulse to apoplexy
allow somnambulist ascension.
And I am gone, though I sleep not.
A weekend full of the PDX lovelinesses (ie great food, the noticeable lack of sales tax, friendlies, naked hippies, gay pride, bikes and well-staffed strip clubs).
This weekend, as it happens, was Gay Pride in Portland, so our visit coincided with some fun extracurriculars, like a seemingly endless parade of naked bikers. Highlights of this:
* An especially precocious (and fearless) man standing on his seat with his hands on handlebars (yep, ass in the air like a yoga pose. The song "Don't it Make my Brown Eye(s) Blue" occurs. ::cringe::)
* A man with his name and phone number written on his back (I bet he had takers. There is something to be said for being able to shop the merchandise before you buy, as it were)
* A man yelling "Nudity is a participant sport. Everyone, let's get naked!" as he rode past wearing a helmet and a smile.
* Nude joggers.
* The stragglers who were at the very end, far enough back that they were just riding naked through traffic without an apparent context.
* Nude bikers circling back and riding home through downtown, no longer part of a parade, surprising pedestrians and traffic alike.
* A conversation later, on the street outside a Taco Bell, where a hipster exhaled a plume of smoke and then, gesturing excitedly, explained to a friend "Maaaaaan, there was, like, an OCEAN of NAKED!"
Other niceness:
I bought some books (1,2,3) and a pair of jeans (tax free, what?!), had several great meals (the lamb burger with tzatsiki and feta and sweet potato fries is heaven), a sort of rough sleep in an alternately muggy-sweaty and A/C-frozen hotel room with 3 snoring boys and a coughing girl (I myself both snored and coughed, as I am advanced ::eyeroll::) and lots of fun vintage shopping and walking around.
Other adventures:
* Watched someone set fire to a bar while trying to take a bomb (as yet unnamed) that consisted of an oyster-shooter topped with flaming 151 dropped into a glass of beer and triple sec. After extinguishing the bar and trying again, the kid drank everything EXCEPT the oyster shooter, then prepared his friend a shot that was half tequila and half tabasco. Beth and I lifted our glasses and scooted back, awaiting the impending vomit, but were relieved to see the bartender secretly switch it out for a shot of tomato juice at the last minute. Pretty sure the would-be hurler tipped him a $20 for that little favor. Well-deserved.
* At the same bar, where Beth and I ducked in for a drink while the boys were at a strip club, we also watched someone throw (not drop, but THROW, mind you) a full glass, which shattered all over the bar. The bartender apologized at one point for us catching "amateur hour at the bar" and I responded that it was ok because (a) it was entertaining and (b) I had become convinced that we were somehow causing it with our presence, as all the bad things happened within three feet of us, despite the VASTNESS of the bar. Cursed, perhaps. Hilarious? Yes.
* Same night, Beth and I had to turn down an offer of a shot at the bar and the invitation to "follow us to our hotel room" yelled from a carload of drunken guys. Some other set of bros screamed something at us from a car with a back door slightly ajar (while moving), but I didn't catch that one.
* We got out of the car and ran through stopped traffic and nude cyclists to get to the hotel to pee. At this point, I would like to thank the Silvercloud Inn for hallway bathrooms. Cheers, guys. Cheers.
As usual, Frisco has once again placed itself at the forefront of progressive environmental policy and practice. The city's Board of Directors voted to pass a directive that will require residents and businesses to dispose of food waste separately from recycling and non-degradable trash, vowing to first warn and then fine non-compliance. Further information in articles at NYTimes and CommonDreams. I'm proud of you, SF. Good work. I've thought many times about asking my apartment building for the right to have a compost bin out front (or back) for food waste; this may be the thing that finally prods me to move forward. Until then, I'm certainly going to purchase some of these BioBags and a separate trash can for food waste to keep in my kitchen. We all have to be honest with ourselves about the responsibility we each hold for our world. More ideas for how to keep food and food-soiled waste out of the trash here.
In additional news of note, happy 22nd anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Just sayin'. I hate and resist Reagen-worship as much as the next guy (probably much much more, really), but this still seems noteworthy.
It seems like there was something else I was going to send out like a loving epistle into the great void of cyberspace... But now I can't think what it was. Maybe it'll occur to me later. Until then, I guess, happy Friday and Fonz be with you.
//EDIT: One thing I wanted to mention is that the school district for which I toil is having a surplus sale that is open to the public on June 25th at Puyallup High School. Apparently there will be tools and other items from the metal, wood and automotive shops, as well as office furniture and other ephemera. I will have a preview at the district-use holdings several days before, so I'll have a better idea then, but if anyone is hankering for an arc-welder or plasma cutter (I don't know if these will really be for sale, but how EFFING cool would that be?!?!) - or if you're in the market for desks, filing cabinets, drill presses or air compressors, you just let me know and I'll try to scout the pool for ya'! If there's a hot-head torch, I call dibs. I just do.
I suppose it should have been no surprise that circumspect little Joan, whom I had taken to calling Polly years before, for long forgotten reasons, should have a collection of spectacles. Still, as I packed her personal effects, carrying piles of folded linens and painted canvases into the dusty little living room, I was overcome when I found them. This wasn't the treasury of a collector, but the accidental accumulation, through evolution, of a life's worth of incrementally worsening prescriptions. It was like seeing a snake's discarded skins, all lined up in order. Polly never bothered with the cases, for what was the point if she needed them on whenever she was awake (and many times when she fell asleep still hungrily reading the New Yorker), so there in a shoebox in the back of the bathroom linen closet they sat, all lined up and staring, bright and wide-eyed, puppies in a pet shop window. In chronological order, more by coincidence than design, the pair third from the front collected my attention immediately. It was these she had worn the first time I met her and for years thereafter. The lenses were thick enough to impart a slight blue color, like a pool of clear water whose depth gives it hue, and as I thought of how this tinge intensified the stalwart gray of her eyes, I realized I was crying.
A Tuesday morning.
"There really isn't an easy solution, sweetheart," she swirled her coffee (two sugars, two creams), holding the mug in both hands, and stared into it as though divining my future from tea leaves.
"Well, yeah, I hadn't expected an answer, I guess. But you're always so clever about these things."
There was a long pause, each of us staring into our chipped mugs. Hers was the burnt orange one with the ludicrous chartreuse daisy, hand-painted in Guatemala or somewhere; I always used the robin's egg blue one, big as a soup-bowl and stone heavy, whether I was drinking black coffee (just a bit of honey) or Merlot.
"I'm not so clever, little girl. Just old," she smiled, sadly, "Old and honest. When you've been talking and watching for enough years, you start to see the patterns to things... even a broken clock is right twice a day."
There was something about Polly's living room, a little space nested between high walls of bookshelves and framed photographs, couches and curtains, that felt as though it had been orchestrated too perfectly, too consciously, to suit her. This, she once explained in conspiratorial, chuckling whispers, was the great secret of being alone: one becomes not only the director and character writer of her own story, but her own sole set designer as well.
Objet d'art of every style and stripe somehow found utopian congress in the little flat, Quichole beaded bowls became vessels for Dutch wooden buttons, crystals from dismantled French chandeliers dangled from iron curtain rods gleaned from a Tuscan farmhouse and a stuffy English highboy sat tidily cluttered with found arrowheads and beautiful, mysterious pebbles. This woman had lived like a tireless little raven, taking flight to all corners of the world, observing and discerning, and then returning to her nest with whatever sparkling quarry was light enough to carry home. Even in distilling and packing these wares, after all the years of our friendship, I found countless objects in plain view in the room that I had never noticed before.
New additions to my repertoire, a weekend in review:
(2) 
(4) 
(6) 
Weird things to meditate on just before going out to get drunk on this, a Friday night:
J.D. Salinger is suing to stop a man who calls himself J.D.California from publishing a book he penned mimicking the style and premise of Catcher in the Rye, set 60 years later and following the retirement home escape of a character named "Mr. C".
(story at Baltimore Sun and CNN.com)
David Carradine was found dangling naked from a noose in his Bangkok, Thailand hotel room (The third in the celeb-u-death trifecta begun by Dom Delouise and Bea Arthur).
(story at King5)
President Obama visits Buchenwald with Elie Wiesel and Angela Merkel and speaks about American relations with the "Muslim World" in Cairo.
(photographs of the former at AP Images and text of the latter at The New York Times)
First off, here's some pictures I took on a walk this week:
Pretty.
Secondly, here is my evidence that there is an upside to having been awake until 2am (for no discernible reason) for the last 5 or more days (despite being exhausted and getting up at 6am every day):
That upside, my friends, is that last night I built myself a shoe shelf. Woot. This is just my 'dress' shoes and sandals, but I improvised a little shelf on the other side to hold my tennis shoes and boots. I need a nap, but damn does my closet look cute.
No one will be surprised to hear that I'm stoked about it being sandal season. Here's a little round-up. Each image is a link to the given shoe's site, with the exception of the third pair... These silvery wonders, while cute, are not post worthy on their own, but because they are completely changable; a click on the image will take you to the site for mohop.com, the Chicago-based craftsman responsible for the wooden soles with eyelets so that you can lace them however you please with whatever you please. Innovative design, cute shoes, can't lose. (Note: The last sentence there is proof that back episodes of Friday Night Lights on Netflix Instant may be damaging my brain. Another bit of evidence occurred to me when, last night while tending bar, I found myself speaking with a bit of a drawl. ::concerned::)
