Having no computer at home right now means i check my email about every 3 to 5 days. I'm finding this to be a good thing. It makes me realize how much of the quick back-and-forth email deluge we normally participate in is unnecessary. I don't really feel like I'm missing anything. Soon I'll have a functioning computer again and it'll be back to the normal immersion in it. But for the moment i have shaken the habit. And i've found that by not participating daily/hourly in the email stream, i get fewer emails and thus have fewer to respond to. Those that i do get are actually important or useful.
I wish Portland had Dick's Drive In. It is so much better than Burgerville. Dick's is the basics. As at Burgerville they buy only regional ingredients, but are quicker, tastier, AND cheaper. Their fries are actually the best of any "fast-food" burger joint anywhere. They cut them fresh on site, unpeeled, flavored only with salt. The "Deluxe" (i.e 2 pattie) burger is 2 dollars and is at least the equal of any others of its type. Dick's uses their own "special" sauce, that type of burger. They've been around for about 50 years. There are only 4 locations, only one of which you can sit down at. The rest are outside walk-ups (not truly drive-ins in the sense of having carside service.) Their employees are amazingly quick and cheerful for a fast-food place. This is probably something to do with the fact that they actually get paid decently compared to most other such places. They start at over 10 dollars an hour, and give scholarship assistance. They've done this for a long time. They serve real scoop ice cream in three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Some of my earliest memories are of going to the Dick's on Broadway for ice cream when I was very very young. Thus I am not an objective judge of them. They have not changed their menu in any way whatever in the past 40 years. They are a rock. They give an anchored continuity to my experience of the otherwise highly changeable city in which i was born.
I recently opened up a trunk full of old papers and writings from elementary school through about 1990. There's some pretty entertaining stuff. I'll provide a few excerpts from time to time. There is a notebook called "Writathon Book" which is a weekly writing journal from 7th grade Language Arts class. I was 12 (1979-80), we had just moved from southern West Germany to Colorado. It was a tough adjustment for me. I wrote some funny things though.
"I think school is as useless as a fur coffee pot. I hate SCHOOL! I HATE SCHOOL! School is as dumb as Mark Belyan and as stupid as Brad Sinn and Paul Molnar combined [my perceived enemies, i later came to think they were all right]. When this *#%^!* darned school year ends I think I'll set fire to the place...I'm so _______ mad [i wrote a blank space like that, didn't want the teacher see any bad words y'know] I could kill every ________up nerd in this whole school."
"Dead people kill grizzly bears in haunted houses down the street on a pink and purple and red and blue and green weird dumb flower. Dead but alive weirdos scoop sand in buckets on the fourth of July."
[a lot of it is just accounts of trips, living in Germany, little stories, and other miscellanea. ]
"Once a computer that ran the whole city of Mackadoo broke down and all the power went off, buses stopped, appliances stopped. Everyone went to the utilities department trying to find out what was going on. The T.V. stations couldn't report it because the cameras couldn't go on. The newspapers couldn't report it because the computer ran the presses. The radio couldn't even report it. After that the city threw away the computer and everybody was happy. Computer, Computer, Computers are neat and Super Duper!!"
"Reagan is an ______________. He's an old rotted bag head. Anderson is the best. Kennedy is the worst. Bush and Carter are okay. I love pizza and cheeseburgers!! I hate cooked spinach."
some geopolitical prophecy:
"The United States will make Russia which will have shrunk to a few states look like a crummy little good for nothing nation. By then it won't have a big army anymore. It will have a 30% inflation rate, will depend entirely on other nations for food, fuel, technology, and everything else. They will have one of the smallest under armed armies in the world. Do you know which girl I hate most in the school? It's Tammy G______. That stupid prissy little fairy."
Shoot, gotta run, i lost track of time. I'll write again.
Lotta sun shining. Chilly. I like this kind of weather up to a point. Combats the seasonal mood slump if nothing else.
I took a nice walk in Forest Park today and (for some reason) got to thinking about New Orleans. It's a big subject. Here's a momentary 2 cents. What happened to New Orleans is a preview of coming attractions. People debate whether the city will be rebuilt into what it was or into theme-park version of its former self. It may, in the short to mid term. But what happened and is continuing to happen there is the first instance in modern America of a story that has repeated many times: the destruction, and re-constitution at a much smaller scale, of a (now former) Imperial city. New Orleans would become a theme-park if our world were continuing in its bloated, over-moneyed status quo. But it is not. We are in the early stages of a major civilizational melt-down. Think Rome circa 4th century C.E. , only faster paced.
New Orleans will be whatever it will be. Given its precarious location and the total failure of the Imperial leadership and bureaucracy to secure the city's protective infrastructure, it will probably soon enough be nothing but a swamp.
where
where
where is the crazy nog man?
pushing his cart
scarves wrapped high around his collar
breath steaming
banging his ladle.
What would Christmas be without him?
But nothing exciting actually did come up, i mean if it did then you could use something related to the excitement as the title. Like "Naked Garden Party" or "Bag of Unmarked Greenbacks." Damn. The American dream, y'know? Although the former is not too far off the mark of what sometimes happens around here, if you substitute with the words "badly dressed" and "under the railroad bridge."
But seriously, i mean for real this time, meta-seriously. Umm... I dig this weather. I really do, i love that it is snowing like 5 feet in the mountains right now. If it had been 3 degrees colder here in town we would have gotten about 2 feet, for real. It's happened before, it'll happen again. My last experience with that depth of snow in the western Cascadian sea-level lowlands was early January of 1996 in Seattle when, on top of 8 inches that had already fallen and stuck around in sub-freezing coldness from several days earlier, it started in again and didn't quit until there was 30 inches. It was pretty stupendous. The city was most definitely shut down. The ensuing slush when it warmed back up shortly therafter was almost surreal. Like you would step off a (buried) curb into ice-water/slush up past your knees around the clogged storm drain. It was so great! Weather makes me happy.
Like, what if you had two entries on the same day, because something exciting came up, or you had too much free time? Then you'd have two entries with the same title.
I guess it's kind of boring to just use the date as the title for the entry. Oh well.
My life is very mundane lately. Not in a bad way really, just ordinary like a regular person's life, mostly going to work, coming home, not completing any magnum opuses or exploring far horizons. Actually my life is richer in the ways that matter than it has ever been, living in this community, it seems like two days doesn't go by without a game night or shared meal or something. But i've been doing an awful lot of reading too. Oh, and songwriting too, that's my main creative channel these days. I really want to get back to painting or other visual art, and have been at least sketching nearly every day, but have been otherwise uninspired in that realm. I've been here before. The feeling that i've done everything i have to do. It's a lie, i know, an unconscious sabotage of the creative universe that seeks expression through me. I don't claim unique access to it, everyone is a particular expression of it. But for some strange reason I often believe the self-created fiction that I am done, that other people are the real artists, that it doesn't matter anyway.
But the song/lyric writing, right now that is really pouring through, even though i am not performing publicly. I have a gig coming up in February, but in the meantime i may go to some open mics and/or do a "house show" to "practice" my 30-40 minute set in front of willing victims. If i had had more self-promotional bent over the years, i suppose i would have been a rock star in about 1996. As it was i always piqued a certain amount of interest with my songs, sometimes created small bases of fans that i essentially abandoned in my moves to new creative and geographical territory (as from Seattle to Reno in 1999; even though every time a played a gig I was always offered another, i let myself be swallowed whole by the hypnosis of "work" in the dot.com boom.) A giant unwillingness in my past to accept my own acceptability. This in a time when semi-regularly i was stopped on the street by apparently total strangers who said they recognized me from a performance at somewhere like the old Cafe Paradiso or the Penny University or Pioneer Square Saloon, and that they loved my songs, especially that ONE or that other one. But it was for the best to leave because like so many in our culture I had a warped sense of the meaning of success and "stardom." Now in this Portland life i feel, with no exaggeration, that almost my whole circle of friends and acquaintances are rock stars in a very true sense, and while some of them may become "famous" in some conventionally measured way, what i'm talking about is just that they ROCK. They do wonderful stuff, creative and innovative and brilliant, just for the sheer joy of it, and that's why i do the stuff i do now too. Thank GOD. It's such a relief to not have to worry about success.