Omigod what a gluttonous last couple of days. Thank you, revered dead, for giving us this annual weekend on which to launch our summers of gluttony and sloth. Hopefully i will make up for it with much traipsing of paradisical alpine ridges. I don't mean make up for it in a moral or karmic sense (and funny isn't it how we conflate the two) but in a simple caloric sense. The blind justice of physics. Eat too much, get flabby. Bike and hike a bunch, keep skinny. Granted we all have our different metabolisms, but one of the welcome lessons of major hiking or biking trips is that with enough excercise you can eat practically any quantity of food and not gain an ounce.
Today at work i had what seemed at the time (whether or not it really was) like a telepathic connection with a 2 year old. I was on the Blue Line MAX handing out Info flyers about Tri-Met service during Rose Fest events. I was also daydreaming a lot, as I often do. Next to me on the train were several people including a mother with her approx. 2 year old napping in a stroller and a couple of her friends. For some reason (don't ask me why, I just daydream in all sorts of directions) I went into this strange and even emotional reverie about what if the apocalypse (or something like it, like marauding barbarians) suddenly happened and I came upon these people and they (along with say 90 percent of everyone else) were all dead except the little boy, and thus I suddenly found myself in the position of having to either leave him helpless and alone, which I couldn't do, or choose to take him with me and be his new father, and I'd pick him up and try to comfort him and from that moment on we'd be a little family thrown together by crazy circumstance. (Okay, a strange daydream I know, but I have a frequently vivid imagination.)
Then about a minute later the child woke up and his mother picked him up out of the stroller, and he looked at me and pointed his chubby fingers and said "is that Poppa? Is that Poppa?" At which the mother and her couple of friends appeared slightly bewildered, and she laughed a bit and said "no, Poppa's not here" and smiled at me a bit apologetically, as if to say "beats me where that came from."
Anyway, it was a very uncanny moment. You can see how it felt as if somehow there was a telegraphing between my overactive daydreaming and the mind of the sleeping child.
Actually I was a bit misleading in the latter part of the previous entry. If I don't talk to someone for 5 months it doesn't necessarily mean I'm mad at them. I actually rarely stay mad at someone more than a little while. It would more likely just be because I'm a flake. I get lazy and inattentive about staying in contact. Part of it is that I am so social anymore that I have more friends (mostly acquaintances of varying degrees, actually) than I have time to keep up with. And even with my best actual friends, I commonly am very bad about keeping in touch. So don't take it personally.
A slightly deeper analysis might determine that this is the product of a mechanism which aims to keep me from getting too close to anyone.
As far as posting comments, you may have had trouble with recent attempts, but go ahead if you wish, it just won't appear until sometime later. I have to individually approve comments now because I get 20 or more a day that are automated Spam.
I got up at 3:45 this morning to be at work by 4:30. Is that crazy or what? But it was beautiful too. To be out in the predawn of a summer day, riding my bike along Tillamook Street just at the moment when the birds start into song, then being down on Macadam Blvd, normally encountered as a noisesome mess, in the almost eery quietude of 5:00 AM, then back and forth on the Line 40 from there to downtown (PSU) watching as the city comes alive into its monstrous cacophany. Every day the pattern repeats. From silence and cool dewy almost nature, thru the waking and rising and internal-combusting commuting of the multitudes. All to do... what? Exactly? I'm not sure. Any more than I was the day i rode the bus from the end of the AT into Boston and I was bewildered and mystified as to what all these rushing swarming cell-phone drones were up to. Something obviously. A project of great importance, directed and carried out with purpose and alacrity and much communicating in urgent tones with unseen comrades.
Anyway... I was going to write about something else. Last Thursday or something. It was fine. Go see my show. Its up thru June at Keystone Mortgage, 22nd and Alberta. They're nice there. They'll let you look without applying for a loan. Buy a painting, 30% of the proceeds go to SCRAP. We can talk on price.
I was mad at some people. I hardly ever let people know it except to be silently sullen. How dumb is that? I actually have had a couple of heated (for me) exchanges in the last couple of days, and black thoughts about a couple of other people who ought to have done such and such and didn't. Don't worry about being that person. If you were you'll just notice in about 5 months that i havn't talked to you ever again. No biggie.
Ah me, if this blog weren't so public it could be a confessional and i could really dish the dirt. But i don't do that anyway, for the most part. I'm too nice. Really I am. Not everyone deserves my niceness. But better to be kind than an asshole.
Here's my day today. I got up at 4:15 AM, got to work by 5:00, worked until 10:00, stopped by Office Depot to buy a network driver for the computer i am currently using (Babs' old one,) headed home with a stop by a friend's for tea, finished preparing my pieces for hanging, did some necessary emailing, ate lunch, took a 2 hour nap/siesta, ate some more, loaded 9 paintings into a bike cargo trailer, rode to Keystone Gallery and hung my show with help from Teri of SCRAP, rode to Alberta Park and played frisbee with the tuesday informal "penultimate frisbee" group (which is whoever shows up among a loose grouping of friends,) rode home, ate a late dinner, installed the network driver, and here I am. I'm going to the dentist in the morning for crown work.
Well... it seems like winter and spring got switched around. At any rate the dryest winter ever has no been followed by the rainiest spring ever. And this weather lately in particular... would it just stop raining for more than 5 minutes? Okay, we get these brilliant ten minute stretches of golden sun and warmth, followed instantaneosly by another hurricane/torrential downpour. I love it though.
The first Portland Independent Puppet Night was last night, organized by Bruce Orr/Mudeye Puppets. I wore a sort of clown suit and sang songs between acts. Good turnout, lotta fun. Like Puppetganza except for adults and at a tavern, Acme, which is sort of shaping up as a successor to Nocturnal (since Seann McNeel is doing the booking.) I'm disappointed though that it is not non-smoking. These places gotta get a clue and realize that more people now don't smoke than smoke, even amongst potential bar-goers.
Mark yer calendar: my new art opening is next Thursday, 5/26, at Keystone Gallery (at Keystone Mortgage Company) NE 22nd and Alberta, behind the restaurant that used to be Chez What. 6-9 PM. It'll be lovely to see people there. I'll be there myself. There may be cookies and juice/wine.
I saw the film "The End of Suburbia" tonight. Pretty good. Lots of sharp and sobering observations by James Howard Kunstler, Michael Ruppert, and others. I'm reading Kunstler's new book "The Long Emergency" right now. A long extrapolation on something i've concluded myself just from the experience of witnessing how much we drive and the bloated urban-suburban world we've built: that things have gone as far as they possibly can go in that direction. They can't go any further because to do so would mean a literally paved over earth. One big thousand laned all-directional freeway/parking lot/shopping mall/trophy home cul-de-sac. But it's all based on oil and natural gas, and those are now entering their inevitable, unavoidable, and terminal period of decline in production. The implications are so vast that we can hardly imagine the changes that will take place, and are already underway. Just don't move to Phoenix. Doomed.
1973 study: mice injected with monosodium glutamate (MSG) became automatically obese.
The following is partly fictional.
I have a confession. I am two people. I live in two cities, Portland and Seattle. In Portland I live with a group of hippies surrounded by raised beds bursting with strawberries, arugala, and potatoes. We use a scythe to cut the grass and collect rainwater in barrels to brew vast quantities of wheatgrass and mint-leaf tea. We host folk-music singalongs and take take genuine pleasure in turning the worm-bin compost. We are cultishly rabid bicyclists. The ideal Friday evening would be a squaredance to a live string band at the Missisippi Ballroom, after which we jump, still wearing our ill fitting plaid meets glitter Goodwill-Bins clownsuits, onto our bikes and ride in the midnight drizzle to a railroad underpass and hoot drunkenly around a scrap-wood fire, passing decorative glassware pipes and plunking on banjos as we joyfully murder 20 old standbys from "Rise Up Singing."
Sounds paradisical, I know. But sometimes it gets to be too much and I head to my other city, Seattle. In Seattle I run with the smart-set. I roll into town and head for Chez Sung, my Jet City loftominium Pioneer Square crash pad, and change into my post dot.com retro chic uniform. After martinis, we hop onto Vespas and motor up to Capitol Hill for an early evening literary soiree at Richard Hugo House. But the night's main attraction awaits south in a huge old warehouse. A strictly unsanctioned (illegal) event, but everyone who's anyone is here. It's actually a fundraiser for the West Coast's best radical marching band, Infernal Noise Brigade. INB sets the standard, and this party is a sendoff for their European tour, as well as paying off the last of their legal expenses from the arrests of several members at the 2004 Republican Convention. Tonight is also an underground casino night. The members of INB are dealing blackjack, craps and roulette. I shouldn't probably be mentioning this. But it's for a good cause. And the perfect way to interface with the pocketbooks of those who are here to imbibe a vicarious shot of INB's celebrity and radical mystique. The crowd is wildly diverse. 50 or more bikes are pigpiled together along the outside wall. Sharp suits and vintage dresses abound. Cuban cigars for 5 dollars each. Gambling chips in 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 dollar denominations. A klezmer brass band (except for the clarinet) takes the stage. The crowd sways a bit. The clarinetist plays with a wild, keening abandon. Some punks and hippies start to dance. A tuxedo even starts to dance. The set ends and the gaming tables fill up again. Next to them are giant oil drums and hunks of greasy machinery. An old dog wanders through. The INB members suddenly leave their posts and head to the "green room" (the former warehouse office.) The mass is now electric in anticipation. It's not just me, I can sense it all around. The thump of a drum. Then two, then eight. Two flag dancers appear, and now the whole band, in a riot of horns and drums, marching/ambling up to the stage. But in typical INB manner they never really take the stage. Other than a sufficient sphere of space around their dancers, this is a band that nearly always plays in and amongst the crowd. They move, they swing this way and that, they play to the people who are right there next to them. Watch out, you might get smacked by a trombone. Now the dancing is unrestrained. Musically, to describe it to a Portlander, think March Fourth but with more drums, more martial while still being completely booty shaking, and wild pentatonic vocals sung through a bull-horn. Their last number is a 10 minute brass-band meets Samba free-for all. An explosion of pure aural/kinetic joy. The sound of the revolution.
After, the sharp-suit bunch wander over to First Ave to get cabs, the bicyclists unlock and ride off into the early morning chill, the musicians collapse for a brief rest before dismantling the home-made blackjack tables and the bar, and counting the proceeds. The work goes on. The funding comes from the constituency. The constituency has many motives, but the brightest of the artists, like INB, know how to bring them all together and leverage every motive into the next step on the great road.
I love both cities. One is where I was born, one is where i spend most of my time now. But I don't choose one over the other.
I've had this bad tooth and I finally went in to the dentist yesterday to have it and the rest of my teeth x-rayed and checked out. The long and short of it is that I have $4,000 worth of work that needs to get done, and that's *after* insurance pays its part. One (and possibly two) root canals, one extraction, three crowns (which cost over $900 each) and 3 regular fillings or filling repairs (a mere $169 each.) Wow. Ouch five ways to tuesday. That's what happens when you don't go to the dentist for 5 years, plus in recent years i started grinding my teeth at night, which absolutely wreaks havoc on them.
So, jeez. My current job probably ends at the end of June, I was hoping to travel and hike a bit this summer before jumping into the next day job, but I'll just have to figure it out. The teeth are kind of a basic priority. Sort of a reality check.
In other and funner news, my paintings are coming along nicely for my opening on the 26th, and I just wrote a new song for the "Adult" puppet night Bruce is putting on at Acme on May 19. This song requires that I construct a puppet of a blue bird. Not a bluebird as such, necessarily, but a bird of some kind that is blue. Someone (hopefully either Bruce or Carla) will manipulate Blue Bird while I sing the song. It's not really a funny type song, but has a nice melancholic melody, which is why i'm doing it for drunk bohemians rather than A.D.D. kids.
It's been a few days now, but the Pretty Dress Bike Ride (organized by Carye Bye) was last Sunday and was a soooper fun time. A good third of the riders were guys, and though we went for the sheer fun of it, I can tell you that wearing a short satin dress in a festive public group is a surefire way to get dozens of complimentary comments from women. It's my new secret. Ha!
There's pictures that Sang Park took here: http://www.digitalsang.org/events/prettydressride_050105/index.html
Hmm... what else. I'm going to Seattle this weekend to attend a big tour send-off party/show for Infernal Noise Brigade, plus stop by the Folks' for Ma's Day. Infernal Noise Brigade is similiar to March Fourth Marching Band but more overtly political. Their stock-in-trade is playing at things like anti-WTO protests, or marching full bore through a downtown shopping mall to disrupt the consumer robot-trance (they did this last time they were in Portland, Halloween of 2002, at Pioneer Place Mall, and several of them got arrested.) But they are also just plain joyously booty-shakin'. Like March Fourth, when you hear them kicking into gear you know you're in for a good time.