Monday kicked off with the misstep of forgetting my cell phone, so I missed the 08:45 bus by about 15 seconds. Instead, I caught the 09:05 with my bus-stop friend, Jen the social worker. We had to stand amidships at the back door. The row immediately behind the back door was taken by a homeless kid, in grubby clothes, with dirty nails, locs all ratted out, pale and skinny with a few teeth lost in a fight or to meth. I stood right in front of him and after one or two inhalations realized that I was taking in his pungent, gamey aromas. Ah, the city bus.
A moment later, I heard soft tootlings of a harmonica. Oh, here we go, I thought: he's gonna wail and hit us up for a contribution. He's probably not even very good. Just as that thought floated through my brain, he blew a short, intense, perfect phrase that could have come from Springsteen or even, my heavens, Dylan himself. I was so surprised that I turned around. His big, deep brown eyes met mine, and I smiled at him.
A young woman and a young man boarded. The young man was wearing a gray hoodie with a picture of the Pillsbury Doughboy and the words "got dough?" As the hoodie-guy walked the center aisle to the back door, Harmonica Kid said, "Dude, I'm loving your shirt." The hoodie guy smiled. Then Harmonica Kid said, "I've got one, too," and I, unable to resist, turned around again to see that he'd pulled up a grimy T-shirt from the collar up to show off the characters on the front -- Beavis & Butthead.
Sometimes, it's a good thing to forget the cell phone and take the later bus.
30 November 2009
25 November 2009
In the city
As my colleague Maxine Bernstein points out, the Portland police marched yesterday to express solidarity with a cop who was already complicit in the 2006 death in custody of a schizophrenic and now is in dutch for shooting a bean bag one night last week at a violent 12-year-old girl. Two things: That march only further demonstrated to me the wisdom of keeping the paramilitary under civilian control. If the cops were really in charge, they would have engineered a coup de etat on Fourth Avenue. (A "no confidence" vote is, what? A scare tactic? A tantrum?) Cop work is hard, no question. But we've got a crowd in Portland that itself has become hard, and to a dangerous degree.
And then, we have this dandy item from my other colleague Jim Mayer. Far be it from me to tell an old firehouse dog not to jump on the truck. And yet, I think I must. OK, a 25-year career eating smoke does confer some cred. But if you're not really up to speed on your training, doesn't you imperil your boys who are?
And then, we have this dandy item from my other colleague Jim Mayer. Far be it from me to tell an old firehouse dog not to jump on the truck. And yet, I think I must. OK, a 25-year career eating smoke does confer some cred. But if you're not really up to speed on your training, doesn't you imperil your boys who are?
24 November 2009
The root of suffering is desire
Whew, sometimes the depths and viscosity of my bitterness even surprises me, and I'm plumbed this abyss more than once in just the recent year. I have to keep reminding myself: Compassion, compassion, compassion. Even people who I perceive as having "won" need compassion, maybe more than I do. It's just that I know that I'm slowly going crazy in this stewpot of madness, and I can't keep pushing myself down in the boil if I really do want to crawl out for good.
23 November 2009
Phonies
Kicking myself again this morning for getting upset about something that happened more than a year ago. Just got another reminder of the total phoniness of someone I thought was my friend. I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder.
20 November 2009
Day of Frigga
I'm a woman of simple pleasures, one of which is Friday. I like Friday day and Friday night. It's a little prize for slugging it out through the week.
19 November 2009
The 11th commandment
The Republican Party has recently been indulging in immolation of its heretics, which if you're into that sort of thing, asI am, is highly amusing for its ideological inconsistency.
When the Lord High Ronald Reagan arose in the West to spread his cloak across the land, he uttered unto the faithful what he called the party's "11th commandment" -- Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Another Republican.
For much of the past 30 years, the party operated under that cardinal principle, that no matter how idiotic another Republican may seem to another, they were all made men, and the country-club/Kiwanis/model-car-club omerta was in force. It allowed them to make immense progress on their agenda, which was to strangle democracy and capitalism in the cradle while promulgating the fantasy that Anyone Can Succeed in America, no matter who they are or where they were born. What has been most notable about Republicans in the past three decades is that they have taken Reagan's morning-in-America aspiration for a description of real life and concluded that if you got your American Dream by the sweat of your Ivy League brow, then by golly, the urchin in public housing ought to be able to succeed just as handily.
Perhaps the 11th commandment was a joke, Reagan's Screen-Actors-Guild way of keeping the troops in line. For sure, it rested entirely on his personality, and both Bushes attached themselves to him; so did Clinton, for that matter. But eventually, as with everything on the planet, entropy sets in, and today, people who have liberated themselves from the Reagan rules of engagement are swinging away, seeing conspiracies everywhere, even in their own house.
So, all you Reagan-lovers, please explain.
When the Lord High Ronald Reagan arose in the West to spread his cloak across the land, he uttered unto the faithful what he called the party's "11th commandment" -- Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Another Republican.
For much of the past 30 years, the party operated under that cardinal principle, that no matter how idiotic another Republican may seem to another, they were all made men, and the country-club/Kiwanis/model-car-club omerta was in force. It allowed them to make immense progress on their agenda, which was to strangle democracy and capitalism in the cradle while promulgating the fantasy that Anyone Can Succeed in America, no matter who they are or where they were born. What has been most notable about Republicans in the past three decades is that they have taken Reagan's morning-in-America aspiration for a description of real life and concluded that if you got your American Dream by the sweat of your Ivy League brow, then by golly, the urchin in public housing ought to be able to succeed just as handily.
Perhaps the 11th commandment was a joke, Reagan's Screen-Actors-Guild way of keeping the troops in line. For sure, it rested entirely on his personality, and both Bushes attached themselves to him; so did Clinton, for that matter. But eventually, as with everything on the planet, entropy sets in, and today, people who have liberated themselves from the Reagan rules of engagement are swinging away, seeing conspiracies everywhere, even in their own house.
So, all you Reagan-lovers, please explain.
18 November 2009
An assortment today
* Just got off the phone not long ago with Madeline Martinez, the "wise Latina" who runs OR NORML. She's already interviewed with the Times of India and USA TODAY; the Times of London and al-Jazeera are coming later this week about the Cannabis Cafe.
* J-man is campaigning for us to change cell-phone plans. We ditched one plan earlier this summer when my employer dumped all our cell phone expenses on us and consolidated with the plan that we got for Princess Kitty. It's with a big, evil, Republican-money-donating company -- but we get unlimited texts and Web access. I'd love to vote with my pocketbook, but right now, the bad guys have the good deal.
* O Days: About 40+ people have signed the papers to take the newspaper's buyout. All we've done at the end of each of the past three years is say good-bye to some of the best in the business. And somehow, we must carry forward. Grim scene.
* J-man is campaigning for us to change cell-phone plans. We ditched one plan earlier this summer when my employer dumped all our cell phone expenses on us and consolidated with the plan that we got for Princess Kitty. It's with a big, evil, Republican-money-donating company -- but we get unlimited texts and Web access. I'd love to vote with my pocketbook, but right now, the bad guys have the good deal.
* O Days: About 40+ people have signed the papers to take the newspaper's buyout. All we've done at the end of each of the past three years is say good-bye to some of the best in the business. And somehow, we must carry forward. Grim scene.
17 November 2009
A reason for despair
Last week, I covered the opening of Portland's Cannabis Cafe, the first in the nation. The story went viral, and all kinds of people read it from our Web site. Others, however, abided by the rule of the Internet, which is that there are no rules. If you want something, take it. And a blogger from a "progressive" Web site did that with my story last week. Our Internet king wrote a scathing cease-and-desist. This was the smug worm's response:
We have removed the material, but I can't imagine for the world why you
would want us to do so. We are a noncommercial operation published by a
nonprofit corporation and nobody is gaining financially from the use of this
material.
Most of what we publish is original but we do repost some information from
other sites that we believe would be of interest to our readers and that we
feel deserves wider dissemination. In the two years I have edited The Rag
Blog I can remember only one other such request to remove something we have
posted, and that concerned a photograph.
We ran a portion of the article from the Oregonian as a sidebar to another
piece. We credited it and included a link to the original piece. It would
seem to me that could only result in wider visibility for you and, in any
event, I cannot imagine in what way you would feel harmed by this use.
But many things in this world remain a mystery to me!
Regards,
Does anyone else see a problem here? Theft remains a mystery to him. And there's no stopping him and his kind.
We have removed the material, but I can't imagine for the world why you
would want us to do so. We are a noncommercial operation published by a
nonprofit corporation and nobody is gaining financially from the use of this
material.
Most of what we publish is original but we do repost some information from
other sites that we believe would be of interest to our readers and that we
feel deserves wider dissemination. In the two years I have edited The Rag
Blog I can remember only one other such request to remove something we have
posted, and that concerned a photograph.
We ran a portion of the article from the Oregonian as a sidebar to another
piece. We credited it and included a link to the original piece. It would
seem to me that could only result in wider visibility for you and, in any
event, I cannot imagine in what way you would feel harmed by this use.
But many things in this world remain a mystery to me!
Regards,
Does anyone else see a problem here? Theft remains a mystery to him. And there's no stopping him and his kind.
16 November 2009
The greatest gift
I will admit that on the afternoon of 11 September 2001 itself, I was all for a short, persuasive drop of tactical nuclear weapons somewhere over North Waziristan.
By the next day, though, I came back to my senses and have ever since believed that the very best way that this country can respond to terrorism is not with weapons but with words -- specifically, the words of the U.S. Constitution that guarantee due process. It is, as Nat Hentoff once observed, the greatest gift that American democracy has given to humankind. It prevents the government from doing whatever it wants with you whenever it wants to. Had a lawyer like, oh, I don't know, Al Gore, been president on 9/11, the United States would have sent in the Marines to round up all the bad guys we could find in Afghanistan, brought them back to the delightful confines of Sing Sing and held them until trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan (where my good buddy Larry Neumeister will keep an eye on everything).
A lawyer-president would have taken a beating from the extra-chromasome set. But she would have known that we can prove to the world that in America, we rely not on bombs, the U.S. Army or even God to settle our differences. We rely on the laws of men and women. We are now more than seven years out from that cursed day. If we had had treated 9/11 as a crime and not as an act of war, the trials would have been over two years ago, and the bad guys would be facing execution -- they might have even gone ahead of John Muhammad in Virginia last week. We wouldn't be spending any more blood and/or treasure on two wars. And the world would have been grateful to us for behaving like grown-ups.
Now that we're finally gonna put KSM on trial in Manhattan (have fun, Larry!), we're finally getting there. A trial will be a slammin' success, it'll be on TV all day long, and the howlers will be shown to be the fools, knaves and idiots that they are. I find it amazing that these sunshine patriots are convinced that American laws can't deal with criminals.
But then, you can't steal the world's second-largest oil field if you're tied up in court, right?
By the next day, though, I came back to my senses and have ever since believed that the very best way that this country can respond to terrorism is not with weapons but with words -- specifically, the words of the U.S. Constitution that guarantee due process. It is, as Nat Hentoff once observed, the greatest gift that American democracy has given to humankind. It prevents the government from doing whatever it wants with you whenever it wants to. Had a lawyer like, oh, I don't know, Al Gore, been president on 9/11, the United States would have sent in the Marines to round up all the bad guys we could find in Afghanistan, brought them back to the delightful confines of Sing Sing and held them until trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan (where my good buddy Larry Neumeister will keep an eye on everything).
A lawyer-president would have taken a beating from the extra-chromasome set. But she would have known that we can prove to the world that in America, we rely not on bombs, the U.S. Army or even God to settle our differences. We rely on the laws of men and women. We are now more than seven years out from that cursed day. If we had had treated 9/11 as a crime and not as an act of war, the trials would have been over two years ago, and the bad guys would be facing execution -- they might have even gone ahead of John Muhammad in Virginia last week. We wouldn't be spending any more blood and/or treasure on two wars. And the world would have been grateful to us for behaving like grown-ups.
Now that we're finally gonna put KSM on trial in Manhattan (have fun, Larry!), we're finally getting there. A trial will be a slammin' success, it'll be on TV all day long, and the howlers will be shown to be the fools, knaves and idiots that they are. I find it amazing that these sunshine patriots are convinced that American laws can't deal with criminals.
But then, you can't steal the world's second-largest oil field if you're tied up in court, right?
12 November 2009
The No. 4
I have always loved public transit. The Washington system was terrific. The Raleigh system was dreadful. The Portland system is ... wonderful. I love my No. 4 bus as it runs Southeast Division Street. This morning, the driver, a youngish woman with a very nice orange manicure, ran a patter that would have made an airline pilot proud: "This is the No. 4 to the city center of Portland. It will become the No. 4 Fessenden when we cross Burnside. We will run north on Sixth Avenue hitting the Y stops at Taylor and Stark ... " It's comforting when the operator of a large piece of machinery is aware of her surroundings.
11 November 2009
Again on the soap box
One of the tiny headaches of my soon-to-disappear profession has been working weekends. It's necessary, it's important, it has to be done ... and I always hated it. At least in Raleigh, there usually was a story or two, some car accident after a football game or a robbery. In nearly five years in Portland, though, I have found our little Shangri-la to be, in general, a pretty sleepy place. The reason may simply be the difference in population sizes. But I don't think so. I have found Portland to exude a very peaceful ethos, much more so than Bible-loving North Carolina. It's amusing to me how much nicer human beings are to each other when you drain god from the equation.
But these are strange times in Portland, Oregon. Yesterday, at almost exactly the same time, fire destroyed a beautiful old elementary school in Southeast, then a man who didn't want the divorce his wife filed last week went into her Tualatin workplace and shot her dead, injured two others than killed himself. They have two kids. ... Layer this on top of the woman who cut a fetus from another woman back in June and the kid who went downtown one February night and started shooting, killing two, injuring a bunch more and then killing himself.
The dogs of war do not stay locked up in their pens of the battlefield. When we unleash them, they run across the earth on the winds of their howlings. The sad and the sick and the desperate hear that call as license to join the pack and spread their own personal form of havoc. Oregon has sent the highest per-capita number of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan of any other state in the country. Should we be surprised that we are seeing such blowback?
It's got to say something when the LEAST horrible thing that happened in Portland yesterday was that 435 kids lost their school building. It's got to say something that no matter what we do, we can't seem to stop a distraught, troubled man from imagining that his only measure of control in his world is to buy a gun and kill his wife. It's got to say something that two teenagers now are scarred for life by the madness of the man who gave them life.
The fire was one thing; eventually, we'll find out that it was an electrical short, or something like that. But the shooting is something else. Here's what it says: We are willing to do anything as a society except deal with mental illness in a comprehensive, intelligent, compassionate, universal manner. We don't listen to the people who actually take care of the mentally ill; we just do whatever we please, which usually means cutting off whatever meager sources of money mental-health care gets. It's an absolute sin on the soul of Portland, Oregon, that the best mental-health facility in the county is the jail. As we gain more knowledge about the human brain and the human psyche, the more urgent the problem becomes. We ought to be screening every kid for mental illness three or four times during her primary and secondary schooling. Businesses ought to find a way to pass employees through some sort of check-up. The Oregonian has been requiring us to get physical checkups every year. I can't see why we wouldn't do something similar for mental health.
I'm not looking for more work on weekends, to be sure. I don't mind it when Portland passes a quiet day. I wish we had more of them now.
But these are strange times in Portland, Oregon. Yesterday, at almost exactly the same time, fire destroyed a beautiful old elementary school in Southeast, then a man who didn't want the divorce his wife filed last week went into her Tualatin workplace and shot her dead, injured two others than killed himself. They have two kids. ... Layer this on top of the woman who cut a fetus from another woman back in June and the kid who went downtown one February night and started shooting, killing two, injuring a bunch more and then killing himself.
The dogs of war do not stay locked up in their pens of the battlefield. When we unleash them, they run across the earth on the winds of their howlings. The sad and the sick and the desperate hear that call as license to join the pack and spread their own personal form of havoc. Oregon has sent the highest per-capita number of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan of any other state in the country. Should we be surprised that we are seeing such blowback?
It's got to say something when the LEAST horrible thing that happened in Portland yesterday was that 435 kids lost their school building. It's got to say something that no matter what we do, we can't seem to stop a distraught, troubled man from imagining that his only measure of control in his world is to buy a gun and kill his wife. It's got to say something that two teenagers now are scarred for life by the madness of the man who gave them life.
The fire was one thing; eventually, we'll find out that it was an electrical short, or something like that. But the shooting is something else. Here's what it says: We are willing to do anything as a society except deal with mental illness in a comprehensive, intelligent, compassionate, universal manner. We don't listen to the people who actually take care of the mentally ill; we just do whatever we please, which usually means cutting off whatever meager sources of money mental-health care gets. It's an absolute sin on the soul of Portland, Oregon, that the best mental-health facility in the county is the jail. As we gain more knowledge about the human brain and the human psyche, the more urgent the problem becomes. We ought to be screening every kid for mental illness three or four times during her primary and secondary schooling. Businesses ought to find a way to pass employees through some sort of check-up. The Oregonian has been requiring us to get physical checkups every year. I can't see why we wouldn't do something similar for mental health.
I'm not looking for more work on weekends, to be sure. I don't mind it when Portland passes a quiet day. I wish we had more of them now.
10 November 2009
That pain in my neck
For the past two-plus years, I've had a nagging pain in my neck, on the right, in the back. The acute agony passed after a few weeks, leaving me with a constant tension and strain. I've tried all kinds of treatment: PT, chiro, acupuncture, massage, naproxen 2x daily for two months. Nothing, I mean nothing worked. Finally got an X-ray last week; I am fortunately not afflicted in the actual apparatus of the cervical spine.
Not long ago, CJ Of The Magic Hands theorized: "When you figure out what's bothering you, it will go away." I wrote that off as so much woo-woo hooey.
But about a week ago, I was complaining to someone about my current employer then pointed to my neck and said, "And that's where (my current employer) lives." Ha ha ha, very amusing at the time. But this morning, I noticed that my neck is ... well, not healed. But certainly, I'm not having the cripping, distracting, tortuous stress on the structure back there.
What's interesting to me about this is that it reinforces my fresh belief in the reality that the mind-body duality doesn't exist. What afflicts the mind affects the body and vicey versy. The more attention I pay to the sorrow and worry and anxiety that I feel every day going to the newsroom, the less the neck bothers me. Perhaps I'm starting to face the real pain in my life. Or at least one slice of it. In the meantime, I'll take my usual 800mg of ibu and move forward.
Now if I could just figure out how to treat my chronic inertia...
Not long ago, CJ Of The Magic Hands theorized: "When you figure out what's bothering you, it will go away." I wrote that off as so much woo-woo hooey.
But about a week ago, I was complaining to someone about my current employer then pointed to my neck and said, "And that's where (my current employer) lives." Ha ha ha, very amusing at the time. But this morning, I noticed that my neck is ... well, not healed. But certainly, I'm not having the cripping, distracting, tortuous stress on the structure back there.
What's interesting to me about this is that it reinforces my fresh belief in the reality that the mind-body duality doesn't exist. What afflicts the mind affects the body and vicey versy. The more attention I pay to the sorrow and worry and anxiety that I feel every day going to the newsroom, the less the neck bothers me. Perhaps I'm starting to face the real pain in my life. Or at least one slice of it. In the meantime, I'll take my usual 800mg of ibu and move forward.
Now if I could just figure out how to treat my chronic inertia...
06 November 2009
What's really going on here?
Fort Hood, Orlando . . . That's just today's roll call of places now streaked with blood because someone lost it, pulled a gun and just started shooting. Has anyone else noticed that these mass deaths are increasing in number? Has anyone else noticed that the less-than-mass deaths -- like the Portland man who lured his ex and her 4-year-old son back to the place they once shared then plugged them and himself -- are occurring more often? What is going on?
Blaming our gun laws is, frankly, the easy way out. The real problem, the far more significant problem is, in my view, that everyone is slowly going crazy. And, sadly, going crazy is a perfectly normal response to the stresses of our environment.
We've got two wars going. When a country goes to war, it brings the war back home -- with the damaged men and women who we dump out of the military and leave them to fend for themselves. When a nation gives itself permission to inflict massive, mind-bending damage on another country, well, then, it's perfectly reasonable for human beings to give themselves that same permission. So using violence in reaction to events becomes normal, even in some cases preferable. It's in our DNA, people.
Then you layer on this brutal economy with even fewer jobs now than since 1983, and you have a fine, old-fashioned recipe for chaos on the hand-to-hand level.
Is there a solution? Sure. But it's the most difficult solution of all: treat everybody's mental illness, instead of pretending it exists only in "the other." People can withstand immense stress -- homo sapiens wouldn't have survived otherwise -- but it's clear that a lot of us need a lot of help. The dithering over this earthquake makes me unutterably sad.
Blaming our gun laws is, frankly, the easy way out. The real problem, the far more significant problem is, in my view, that everyone is slowly going crazy. And, sadly, going crazy is a perfectly normal response to the stresses of our environment.
We've got two wars going. When a country goes to war, it brings the war back home -- with the damaged men and women who we dump out of the military and leave them to fend for themselves. When a nation gives itself permission to inflict massive, mind-bending damage on another country, well, then, it's perfectly reasonable for human beings to give themselves that same permission. So using violence in reaction to events becomes normal, even in some cases preferable. It's in our DNA, people.
Then you layer on this brutal economy with even fewer jobs now than since 1983, and you have a fine, old-fashioned recipe for chaos on the hand-to-hand level.
Is there a solution? Sure. But it's the most difficult solution of all: treat everybody's mental illness, instead of pretending it exists only in "the other." People can withstand immense stress -- homo sapiens wouldn't have survived otherwise -- but it's clear that a lot of us need a lot of help. The dithering over this earthquake makes me unutterably sad.
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