Wocka-Wocka-Wocka

I haven't sat down and written a short bloggy note in awhile. Being unemployed fills so much of my time these days.

As I sit here poking at the keyboard, my little neighbor Zoey is playing a game on Cathy's computer (we're minding her while her mother seeks another daycare option). The missus has gone to meet with her doctor, leaving me to look after the munchkin. I'm happy to do this, because she's a little doll, and when not terrorizing my cats and vacuuming my favorite granola crackers into her expanding black hole of a maw, she's quite good company.



There are downsides, though. Well, one at least.

I have a theory as to why many parents bear those ranks of lines on their foreheads and blink quite a bit more often than we normal folk. Maybe some of it is the burden of care, being responsible for the younglings in their charge, but I suspect there is another element involved.

Every toy, every game (digital and analog), and much of the clothing and accessories manufactured for any child under the age of 12, makes a beep-boop-jingle-ringy-ringy-jangle-PING!-woopwoop-wocka-wocka goddamned noise. It's only been a couple of hours so far, but I feel that the chiming, ringing, and zing!ing has somehow coiled around my cerebral cortex and has started a rhythmic squeezing and pulsing. I'm sure there are scores of behaviorists who insist that this aural onslaught aids learning and socialization, but I'm convinced that this is a carefully crafted ruse to ensure that both parents and child will eventually need expensive therapy.

And the therapists will smile to themselves, and consult their appointment schedules and check their bank balances on their PDA devices. Bleep-bloop-bleep.

Home

In the winter of 1991-’92 my wife and I started discussing the idea of moving from the Dallas area.

That’s Dallas, Texas, y’all, in case I need to elucidate seeing as how there’s a Dallas, Oregon. Don’t confuse the two; Dallas, Oregon is a small town a little over 60 miles southwest of Portland, whereas Dallas, Texas is considerably larger and will be the capitol of a future post-apocalyptic petro-nation as soon as somebody green-lights the script.

Anyway. We each had lived in Texas for most of our lives at that point. Our respective families and almost everyone else we knew lived in the Dallas area. My wife Cathy worked as a legal secretary in downtown Dallas while I toiled at a Bizmart (now known as Office Max) in Mesquite as a stock clerk-slash-sales associate. Life was fine but hum-drum. Actually, looking back through mud-encrusted glasses it was boring as Hell, but that image is unfair and untrue, that’s the way things always appear after you’ve made a change you’re happy with. Our lives were perfectly fine in reality.

But we had thoughts of greener grass. We started talking about other places we would like to see, and after awhile we started researching other cities that seemed interesting. My wife mentioned Austin, Denver, Miami. I would put forward my wish to see Kansas City (either one), Chicago, Boston. New Mexico I touched upon several times, as I’d always wanted to revisit Roswell (although not born there I lived eight of my childhood years in that fabled town). We checked out a book titled Places Rated Almanac from the public library and pored over it, learning facts about the cities that attracted our curiosity. Portland (the Oregon one, though we did look at the other one too) soon became one city whose pages we revisited more than once. It sounded nearly ideal, sort of a damp San Francisco with less-ridiculous hills and real estate prices. Photos were pretty. Average temperature in August is 80 degrees! Awesome! (I had not yet learned that averages are simply truthful ways of telling lies.) All of this researching and what-iffing was great fun, a hobby to pursue on idle evenings.

I thought it was a hobby, anyway. It became obvious one day in March of 1992, when I was interrupted in my building of a lamp display at the store by a summons to the telephone, that the missus felt the ennui of life in Dallas a bit more keenly than I did.

She: “We can move to Portland in July.”

Me: “Hi, sweets… what?”

She: “We can move to Portland in July.”

Me: “Uh, heh…what?”

She: “We can!”

Me: “We can what?”

Following this initial exchange were a couple more “what”s and then I lapsed into a few “no”s and “not possible”s and then “sweetheart, really, look…”, and finally into “But…but…” and I had already lost this debate by the time I placed the receiver to my ear, of course, but see if you do better when someone clutches your paradigm by the edge and whisks it out from under you.

The thing about me, the stupid and potentially dangerous thing about me, is that you don’t have to really do a lot to get me excited and obsessed about something for which I already have a kernel of desire lurking in my head, ill-advised as it may be. I was once coaxed into jumping off the roof of a garage because the person doing the coaxing knew that I had (and still have) a dreadful fear of heights but was also fascinated by them. Makes zero sense to me, but it’s the truth. So this conversation with my wife set the cogs grinding in my brain probably by the eighth or ninth word out of her mouth even as I exhorted her to understand why it wasn’t possible to pick up and move at almost literally a moment’s notice. For the next four months I lived and breathed planning and organizing and weighing options as to packing and trailer acquisition and funding and in short driving even my spouse absolutely loco with my constant prating about the move.

You think I get all military about moving from one apartment to another? Ratchet that up times a hundred for moving halfway across the country. All I’m missing is the American flag and the riding crop.

We sold or gave away anything we felt we could do without or could easily replace. We made a ten-foot-high pile of what remained and stacked it onto an 8X10 U-Haul trailer, tying it down with ropes and tarps until the thing looked like a small yurt built with tornado debris. On the morning we left we hugged and kissed all of our friends and family goodbye (all except for my wife’s mother, who followed us to Oregon with a few household odds-and-ends and my cherished Curtis Mathes television stuffed into her Hundai), and started off roughly north-westish…

…and stopped a few hours later in Ennis, Texas, where we rented motel rooms and waited out the blistering afternoon rather than suffer in our Plymouth Acclaim, the air-conditioner of which crapped out within the first twenty miles AND for which we had to run the heater at full blast so the damned thing wouldn’t over-heat. At that point we decided to travel by night until we reached cooler climes. We didn’t see the sun again until we crossed into Colorado.

All things (and my mother-in-law) considered, it was a good trip. We love car trips and we managed to have a good time and were awed by the landscapes through which we traveled. Our route nipped a corner of New Mexico, bisected the whole of Colorado, cut a slice of Wyoming (at this point the missus became convinced we’d taken a wrong turn and had wound up on the Moon; she’s not quite as enamored of muted topographies), crossed the lower half of Idaho and then finally drove over the border into Oregon. Driving through the Columbia Gorge, though, was almost more adventure than we could stand, or maybe even survive.

She: “The load is leaning!”

Me: (Tut-tut voice) “Oh, now, no it isn’t… (turning to look behind, changing to we’re-going-to-die-screaming voice) Holy ****!”

The girthsome flapping orange mound that our load had become (we’d lost a tarp or two along the route) was lolling to one side. The wrong side. The trailer was weaving side-to-side in the wind and I was convinced we were going to go sailing off and down into the Columbia River. I reduced speed; the motorists following would have been ticked off had they not all decided to decelerate themselves and keep a safe distance from the suicidal clowns and their Dancing Big Top Wagon careening to and fro in front of them. Fortunately the gradient leveled off in another five miles and the weaving and leaning ceased. We stopped at the first opportunity to check the load (lost: one chair leg) and re-rig where prudent. A few of the motorists that had been trapped behind us roared by waving and screaming encouragement or something, and we continued on the remaining stretch toward our new home.

Crossing the Fremont Bridge, we clasped hands and exclaimed to each other “We’re Home!” Within another 25 feet we were yelling at each other.

“This says 405! Where’s Burnside?”

“Why are they all pointing at our license plate?”

“I don’t care! Where ARE we, you with the map?!”

“YOU MADE A WRONG TURN, YOU WITH THE STEERING WHEEL!!”

Of course we entered downtown precisely at rush hour. Of course we did.

It’s hard to describe the sense of disorientation we had, but I do remember climbing out of the car in front of our apartment building across SW Morrison Street from Civic Stadium (now Jeld-Wen Field), standing on the curb and gazing west at a big blue Volvo sign that I was momentarily convinced was anchored to a hillside just like the Hollywood sign. No, I am not kidding. Plus, the sun was lower in the sky than I was used to at that time of day, but that hadn’t stopped it from being 102 degrees. We were exhausted, our cats (did I mention we were carrying two cats as well? Cats that had been sedated with some drug a vet said would keep them calm, but what helped keep them calm also rolled their eyes back into their skulls and led them to gnawing my ankles as they huddled on the floorboards?) were ragged out and traumatized (the mother-in-law suggested we leave them on the side of the road in New Mexico – Cathy dissuaded me from voicing a counter-suggestion), and now we faced hauling our worldly possessions up three flights of stairs before we could even think of resting.

We managed it before nightfall, but just. When the last of the boxes were stacked in the apartment (which we had rented sight-unseen; NEVER DO THIS) and we had scrounged supper out of the road food we had left, I left my wife and her mother sitting half-asleep on our futon and descended the stairs to the sidewalk and walked the streets for awhile to cool off in the night air. I walked to 3rd and Burnside, having not been in town long enough for anyone to tell me this was not wise. I was offered stuff I’d not even heard of along the way, but I found I didn’t care and had not one thought about my safety. I even shared cigarettes and talked with a couple of drunk guys, I freely told them it was my first night in town, and felt not a hint of misgiving. The breeze was cool, there were unfamiliar scents and sounds in the air, and I was excited to be here, in Portland, in a new and alien place.

I’m serious when I say that every day has held for me at least a little of that feeling I had that night of nearly twenty years ago. I remember a lot of firsts: first time in a Fred Meyer, first view of Multnomah Falls, first visit to Vista Point, first ride on the MAX, first meal in a “Mexican” restaurant (“Hey, why is there pot roast in my enchilada?”). We’ve lived in several (oh godz several) apartments around town, I’ve had four different jobs, three different cars, three different bicycles. We do all the stuff everyone does everywhere, every day, and yet every day I venture out I remain a bit startled by this cool and interesting city and the beautiful landscape. Even when the economy tanked and we had convinced ourselves that we should live elsewhere for a change, it seemed the city itself determined that we were wrong, and haunted us until we returned.

That’s what Home does to you.

Eat, Play, Loaf

How was your Thanksgiving? Mine was filled with carbohydrates and preteen girls all a-squeal, so it was a triptych of intestinal, aural, and mental degradation. Not that either the food or the young ladies was bad, it's just that my tolerance for both ill-considered self-indulgence and cacaphony was tested to the nigh-breaking point. Our home is cozy in the way someone says when they mean “small”, and at one time there were eight children camped out in the living room watching Disney Channel or playing games or defacing the pictures of loathed teen celebrities in Tiger Beat (a zombie apocalypse pales in comparison to a horde of prepubescent girls armed with scissors and Magic Markers, it's the stuff of nightmares).

The culmination of all this holiday merriment was a birthday party, mercifully staged in the clubhouse of our apartment community. Ever try vacuuming tracked-in pine needles and glitter off of carpet? “Sisyphean” is a word that comes to mind (or does now that I looked it up). Also soft drinks, birthday cake, and ADHD are not good bedfellows, as in I'd suggest burning the bed before any kid gets near it.

I had to have a break, so when the opportunity presented itself, I took the bike out for a ten-mile spin through the neighborhood. Autumn, bar none, is my favorite season in which to ride or walk. The smell of the air in itself intoxicates, and then in turn it's layered by holiday cooking smells as I wheel through the streets. I'm a vehicular cyclist, meaning I use the road as an automobile would because I feel it's the safest way to travel, but when I can I love to roll the side streets, particularly when I have no set destination. Even on a bike, there's a certain tunnel-vision that takes over when commuting to work, so riding just for the fun of it will always be the most rewarding. This was the first ride in three weeks and it felt great. I can't let that much time pass between rides.

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You know what's the enemy of writing? Twitter. I just sidetracked myself for ten minutes, scrolling through my feed instead of working on this post. I'll have to find the discipline to avoid distractions like that, but these Internets, they are succubi. I'll be unsure of the usage of a word, or be looking for an apt analogy (see “sisyphean”), and off I am to Wikipedia, where likely as not I'll become mired in a side link and end up reading about HMS Tantalus, yeah I kid you not, I went from Greek mythology to a British submarine in one click. See what I'm up against? I've very recently entertained the notion of doing some copy-writing for “mad money” ('cause I'm mad I ain't gots no money), and if I give that a serious go I'm just going to have to put blinders on, or better yet write it out long-hand before committing it to the pixels.

Yeah, I'll let y'all know how it works out.

Shadow and Light

Happy Halloween, kids! May your costumes be original and hand-made and your frights bedevil in only the most wholesome of ways. Cavort in your whimsical finery, or out of it, I don't judge. Occupy Your Sidewalks, hang upside-down from the trees and chant “Nine Nine Nine!” (yeah, it's stupid, Michelle Bachmann might be the only one to get it, and that's not exactly a “win”). Whatever. ENJOY, is what I'm saying.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. Not for trick-or-treating (you won't see me answering the door with a bucket of candy in hand with which to treat adorable scamps because there haven't been “adorable scamps” since Our Gang comedies were brand-new; curmudgeons, however, are perpetual and eternal), but because I've always been attracted to the night side of nature ever since I was a kid. It's not really that I believe in ghosts or devils or monsters, and I'm not drawn necessarily to brutality and acts of cruelty so prevalent in horror films (although I have a few favorites). I'm thrilled by the concept – however unsupported by modern science -- of realities close but unseen. Masked bogeymen lunging through doorways with power tools and that kind of thoughtless mayhem don't give me the frisson that a whispered name in an empty room delivers, the sense of not being alone; of quiet, not-quite-silent, presence.

During my childhood I had numerous episodes of what I just recently learned is called hypnagogia. In bed at night I would perceive sounds and shadows in my peripheral vision, and on several occasions experienced loud shouts and sudden blows across my back. I would leap out of bed, certain that my brother was playing pranks or that my father was trying to wake me by shouting and shaking me, only to find myself alone. I went so far as to search under the bed, sure that I would find someone hiding there. Nothing. No one.

I also suffered sleep paralysis quite often. THAT'S fun. Waking up in the night not being able to move or breathe. I recommend you try it at least once.

These episodes gradually came less frequently as I matured, and as an adult I rarely have them. One of the most powerful experiences, however, actually happened in my mid-twenties, in Abilene Texas, during an afternoon nap (I had called in sick that day, but of course I wasn't really). Lying on my back on my bed I became aware of a shimmering presence standing near, and I found I couldn't move. The apparition was blinding, I couldn't look directly at it, but I perceived that it meant to touch me with a flat, rectangular or square object it held. I remember thinking that my brother had entered my apartment and was showing me a record album he'd bought (my brain scrabbling desperately to make sense of it all), and then I remember thinking that I was fucked (excuse me, when you're lying paralyzed on your back with a glaring ghostly form hovering over you, you aren't likely to assume the best scenario for an outcome, gnome sane?) I was only able to turn my head away and moan...

...and no shimmering, no apparition, sunlight slanting through the window, birds outside chirping their happy little un-haunted asses off. I found I could move, and I did. Within seconds I was on my way down the stairs, one empty leg of my jeans flapping behind. I spent the rest of the day in Sambo's, regaling disbelieving yet mostly kindly indulgent friends with my tale of terror. Toward sundown I had a friend drive me home (this still strikes me as stupid – why go back as it's getting dark?), and we sat in his truck staring up at the window of my third-floor apartment. He declined to go up with me; he said it was better that I faced it alone and that I'd have to sooner or later. I've always preferred to view this as wisdom on his part rather than cowardice, because hey, that's the kind of friend I am.

Since it was the second floor landing's turn to have the lightbulb I had to ascend to my apartment in darkness, whereupon I pushed the door open (it had been unlocked since my abrupt departure) and felt around for the light switch while still standing outside. Once inside all the way, I crept around all two of the rooms (three if you count the bathroom, which I also inspected, drawing back the shower curtain so fast and hard I had to re-hook it to the rod) and then sat on the bed and just...looked around. For about half an hour. Without blinking. It was during one of the slow-motion sweeps of the eyes that a bath towel I'd left hanging over the back of an old naugahyde recliner near the foot of the bed chose to slip down into the seat. I am not exaggerating when I say I was halfway down the stairs still clutching the bed cover before I came to some dim shade of my senses.

That day and night have never left me. In these later years I haven't suffered anything even remotely that terrifying, although I still have dreams vivid enough to follow me out of my bed before I realize the events in the dreams aren't actually happening. Those dreams are usually of the unpleasant sort, yet I've always loved all of my dreams in hindsight if not while experiencing them.


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Portland and surrounds lend to a certain eerie atmosphere. The mist, the rain, and the architecture all conspire to suggest an other-worldly watchfulness. I don't think my description does it justice, really, but Portland is a spooky town. It's certainly had monsters in residence (look up Jerry Brudos sometime if you have the stomach for it), and there are many reputedly haunted locations – even a downtown Burger King (really, if I'm lucky enough to come back and haunt some place, my sights will aim just a tad higher...but wait, ghosts can't gain weight, right? SCORE!) So while watching the premier episode of “Grimm” last night I couldn't help but feel that Portland itself, as a character in its own right, gave the best performance. And honestly, I wouldn't blame my city for having a fit, flouncing back to its trailer, and holding out for better conditions. “Grimm” simply isn't up to Portland's potential, it really isn't. We need a better showcase along the lines of “An American Horror Story” rather than this lazy excuse to sell cars and dish soap. This is of course only my opinion, and I'll concede that at least it's better than that flaccid “Life Unexpected” – which I've just discovered via Wikipedia was set in Portland but filmed in Vancouver. Guh. You win pretty much by default, “Portlandia”.

Get out and embrace the strange.

Cold

Terrific. I have my first cold of the season.

Colds are in a way worse than influenza (to my mind) because I can't justify staying home from work just because I'm annoyed. Flu takes me down hard and I don't feel badly at all staying home bundled up in my Snuggie sipping home remedies and watching what I like to call “unemployed TV” (which back in the day featured “ChiPS” and “Love Boat” interlaced with truck-driving school commercials but now has expanded to include cooking shows, DIY shows, QVC, and a few dozen true-crime channels with a scattering of “You Have Mesothelioma! Lawyer up!” ads; life used to be so simple). With a cold I just feel like crap but also feel ridiculous whimpering about it. So I go to work and give everyone with whom I work something ELSE for which they can be annoyed with me.

Health, namely my own, has been on my mind lately due mostly to the fact that my insurance through my place of work has changed. This means that I have to go soon to meet with a new physician, and really, I would rather not. I'm okay going to a doctor when I have a specific malady to address (that is a lie, but I would rather go to a doctor than hear the missus ASK me to go to a doctor fifty-two times a day, because who has that kind of stamina?), but a meet-and-greet just to give a stranger the opportunity to point out flaws in my lifestyle is offensive and it makes me want to not co-operate. Several years ago a doctor with whom I hadn't been in the room two minutes actually reached out his scrawny underweight finger and POKED me.

See, I have this thing I call my sphere. It's a personal bubble of influence. It's MINE. It has an event horizon, detectable via the furrow-ness of my brow. The more furrowed, the worse for everyone involved. It doesn't promise violence, but it does mean feelings are liable to be singed. I can't help it, it was there at birth, I think. I actually don't even like to have people stand too close to me but it's forgivable if it's inadvertent, but if you POKE me, or touch my shoulders, suddenly I don't care if you might suddenly burst into flame. Blame it on personal issues, problems with trust, misanthropy, what have you, but it is what it is. Anyway, the poking doctor, that was the first and last consultation he and I shared, and whenever I made appointments at that clinic afterward I would state loudly “I have an appointment with any doctor here EXCEPT DR. POKEY.” I would state this while leaning over the counter, my voice directed down the hallway behind the (cringing) receptionist. I never saw that physician again, or at least not his whole face. I think I saw half of it once, one eye tracking my progress past his door and down the hall, but when I turned to look the door had closed. I don't care. Muhfuh POKED me.

Another reason I'm not thrilled to see a doctor this time around is that I have to schedule THAT appointment soon. Yeah, THAT one. The “let's all trot up the down escalator” one. The “let us all climb up the water-slide, shall we?” appointment. In the age of diagnostic beds and iPads a la Star Trek, why must we still revert to this barbarism? It MUST be unpleasant for everyone in the room and not just the patient/victim, right? I know that the reason the consulting-room probes with the glove take place so fast is because the doctor doesn't trust him-or herself not to throw up, so actually feeding a hose through someone and then taking PICTURES must be some kind of special Hell for all involved, surely. Dr. McCoy never had to do that shit, so medical profession, get with the program! So, no, I don't look forward to this procedure at all, family history be damned.

It just occurred to me that I may have written about making an appointment before. Like, two years ago. Yeah, I put it off.

Cold or no cold, I'm taking a walk today after the household chores. Nothing beats a relatively dry autumn day in Portland. I would take a ride on the bike, but I've learned that biking, for me anyway, just invites more respiratory grief. I wish it wasn't so. I only got to ride one day this week for one reason or another. Speaking of which, I got a reminder this last week that locking your bike wherever you are is a very good thing. Some miscreant actually walked INTO the warehouse at work and stole a work-mate's bike during business hours. So no more parking my bicycle in sight of the docks, and I secure it with the two locks I'll always be carrying from now on.

That's it and that's all. L8s.

Wet and Dry

Summer is over, the wet hath arrived. No matter the Equinox hasn't officially thrown it's veil, this is as abrupt a change as I've ever seen. Oh, I know it'll warm up again, and perhaps even flirt with 80 degrees over the next two or three weeks, but the leaf has fallen.

I haz a haiku!

Summer's fading light;
Colors in the Great Wheel turn
To Winter shadows

Three years ago I had convinced myself that I was bored with the gray and the rain here, and so I set out for drier climes. Eighteen months spent in the desert of the southwest (glorious as that landscape is, and I would recommend at least a visit to anyone!) wasn't the fix I had imagined, at least not a permanent one. New Mexico's rainstorms are wonders, at times blinding sheets obscuring the far side of the road and rushing through suddenly seething arroyos, but they tend only to taunt and then fly away, their footprints left to dry within minutes in the aridity. Rarely are such tempests seen in the Willamette Valley; our rain tends to hang around like an amiable deadbeat. It should be included as a character in the credits of Portlandia, should they ever bother to show it actually raining. Have they ever shown it raining? If they haven't, they are omitting a rather essential facet of authenticity. Anyway, the rain needs an agent.

Soon the time will change and I'll be riding the bike from work in the dark. I always look forward to this. For one thing, “Bike Town” notwithstanding, the number of cyclists (and pedestrians too) braving the paths and lanes tends to drop fairly significantly, and call me selfish but I mind that not at all. For another, night riding just simply has an added element of intrigue and an enhanced sense of adventure. Most adult Americans haven't ridden a bicycle since childhood (and this is sad but it's not my point this time around) and so can't fathom the idea of themselves commuting via bicycle, and doing so after dark?? Madness! I enjoy being a member of a minority, especially one perceived as dangerous (even if only to himself). And honestly, riding a bicycle on the city streets at night is more dangerous – just not overwhelmingly so – and so there's an element of derring-do. “You rode your bike in this??” is a phrase I used to hear quite a lot, and I would have to keep myself from placing my hands on my hips and throwing my head back in a heroic guffaw. Well, yes, once or twice I failed to keep myself from doing this, but I found that it ruined the effect, people seeming to prefer humble bravery. Bah. What's the point, then?

Approaching the rainy dark riding season, I'll have to visit the bike shop to replenish a few items. This year I'm buying a pair of shoe covers, because wet shoes suck. Also a helmet cover. Maybe a new rain jacket. Uh-oh, this is what always happens. Book stores and bike shops = bad juju for a light wallet. Damned economy. The missus instead wants me to spend money on work clothes. It's this sort of pragmatism that's the bane of the modern American marriage. Perhaps it's even proof of an indifferent Universe; if The Intelligence(s) truly wanted mortals to do the logical thing all the time, wouldn't s/he/they have made it more fun? Fuh.


Lates!

Imagine-ish (Un-Lennon-y)

I know a lot of Portlanders will disagree, but I don't mind this kind of summer at all. Overcast and cool in the morning and sun breaks in the late afternoon suits me just fine. We haven't hit 90 degrees yet, while seemingly the rest of the nation suffers under The Magnifying Glass O' The Godz. As I type this it's 63 degrees at 10 a.m. and a high of 82 or so expected for the entire week. Nice. The weird thing is that under overcast skies the greenery is more radiant than in sunlight. I'm sure there's a scientific explanation for that, or maybe it's my imagination. Regardless, it's cool.

Know what I wish? What I really, really wish? I'll tell you what I wish, what I really, really wish. (This is blatant blog entry padding; sue me, I'm a bit rusty). I would like a law requiring that all political ads be relegated to ONE television channel and ONE radio station. This way those who believe that political ads provide the tools needed for thoughtful political discourse may have a station or channel on which they may listen to or watch all the microphone-gnawing and feces-throwing they could want, while the rest of us are spared. Out of necessity and in the spirit of fairness, these outlets would be immune to Neilsen ratings and public outcry so that no charges of bias may be entertained. The only requirement I would dictate is that the one station and one channel serve ALL parties. You want mud-slinging and fear-mongering, be prepared for a two/three/more-the-merrier-way street. Equal time for everyone, but out of earshot of the rest of us who actually realize political ads are NOT reliable avenues to the truth. The Discover Nought Channel. Have at it.

Pardon the rant. Blame it on my recent re-reading of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which, unlike Paul Verhoeven's entertaining (yet so loosely adapted from the source material that it's kind of like that Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror”, where it's Opposite Day and Spock has a goatee so you know he's bad...but not REALLY that bad after all) movie of the same name, is a novel of socio-political philosophy all dressed up in battle-rattle. Let me be honest, I read this book for the first time at 14 years of age, and after reading the last page I flung it across the room. My spoiled American teenage mind was appalled with what seemed at the time to be a jingoistic rant (plus not enough bug shooting!), and the world that the author limned struck me as a sort of totalitarian Hell where individual freedoms weren't tolerated. All the stuff about discipline, and duty, and responsibility for one's actions went right over my head at the time. I found the idea insulting and even scary because I knew that there was no room in that kind of society for the likes of me.

Man, what a difference age and experience makes. Heinlein's Starship Troopers Earth is a stern one and doesn't suffer fools or the selfish gladly, but it's orderly and efficient and the citizens and civilians (the privilege of citizenship is bestowed only upon those who have served in the military or in some capacity of public service, and wins them the right to vote and hold public office, whereas simple civilians cannot) know their place within it. There are some analogues in the modern world. Singapore comes to mind, with it's government's insistence on public standards and cleanliness.

Don't get me wrong, I think individual liberties are important. My objection is that they're too often taken for granted, and too few of us exercise the discipline it takes to wield those liberties judiciously, to bear in mind the greater good. It's a bit like juxtaposing the Wiccan exhortation “An it harm none, do as thy wilt” with Aleister Crowley's more base “Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law”.

Am I boring? No, I'm not running for office. What Groucho said.




The Bike Commute Challenge is coming up. I'll probably do it this year, but no one at my place of employment rides regularly so I won't have a team per se. I participated a few years ago, but can't for the life of me recall why I didn't in subsequent years until now (well, I do know about two of them; I was in Albuquerque). Anyway, if anyone in Portland and surrounds reads this thing, please consider dusting off your bike (or buying one, or borrowing one), and get out on the streets. Usher in the Autumnal Equinox by doing something excellent for yourself and for the Earth.


The "kingdom of Heaven" is a condition of the heart - not something that comes "upon the earth" or "after death."
-Friedrich Nietzsche