It's gotten to the point now where I can no longer bear to look at any video concerning the Deepwater Horizon spill. The sheer magnitude of this monstrosity is beyond my ability to contemplate. Truly, the word enormity applies.
Here's my problem: For the past, oh, 30 years at least, the oil companies have been all drill-baby-drill, soothing us all with promises that they knew EXACTLY what they were doing, that no catastrophe had gone un-wargamed, that everything was well in hand, so please just fork over the papers that will allow us to despoil habitat legally and go buy that Hummer right now.
Now we come to discover that when the Big One arrives, all the smarties in the oil bidness can do is scratch their asses and guess. Now, look, I get it -- the well's a mile below the surface of the water. It's not like you can just go down there with some Fix-A-Flat and get 'er done. It takes some thought. But . . . didn't you guys think about this one yet? What the hell?
And now, where are the smart people in public life saying: See? See? These people are the most cretinous liars that ever developed opposable thumbs. This is why we've been fighting them all these years! And now we come to find out that they don't even know what they're doing when a crisis arrives. Yeah, these are the people I want in charge of sticking things into Mother Earth.
Further, if the hempsters could put down their bongs long enough, now would be an excellent time to buy some prime-time TV space for an hour or so and make the big appeal that hemp can save the world, etc. etc. George Soros probably has a million dollars lying around waiting for a moral purpose. This would be a good one.
And on an unrelated note, a simple reminder to my old pal GL: Love is a verb, baby.
25 May 2010
20 May 2010
In my native land
All is well. Papa Bear moves much more slowly than ever, and it's difficult to stifle the overwhelming desire to burst into tears, throw myself at his feet and tell him what an amazing human being he is. But he shuts down at talk like that; he's 88 after all, and not especially in the mood for what can only be called a good-bye speech. Mama Bear bustles around with ridiculous energy. I sure hope I'm like that when I'm 83.
15 May 2010
How my cell phone committed suicide
So this morning, Texas time, I'm on my way back to visit my parents in Ohio, which is a journey already heavily fraught with Baggage, Oh So Much Baggage, and I'm not thinking right. Gotta change planes in Houston (hey, it was a $300 ticket, so you take what they give you). I find the women's bathroom on the B concourse. I whip out my cell phone to text J-man that I'm wheels down. I snap the phone shut just as a woman comes out of a stall. I approach. The toilet is in mid-flush; the waste already carried away and nice fresh water sweeping everything away . . . including my cell phone, which for reasons I cannot discover leaped from my right hand (all five fingers wrapped around it even!), jumped into the toilet and disappeared with the last of the swirling waters. It took less than a second. It was in my hand . . . and then it was down the hatch. Gone. Completely gone. I couldn't even get angry -- wait, a minute: my cell phone just went down a toilet in Houston's airport. What could I do? The only thing I could . . . I assumed the position and made my own delivery, both species. How often do you get to shit on your cell phone?
Verizon, never missing an opportunity to squeeze more cash out of me, is willing to supply me with a "certified pre-owned" piece of Samsung weirdness for the pittance of $99.99. What could I do? ...
Fortunately, since I'm home with the parental units, the cell phone is not a requirement. But I sure do feel naked without it. An experiment begins ...
12 May 2010
Weight loss follies
Look, I know it doesn't get any easier. But bouncing up and down across a five-pound range for the past year is damn frustrating. Why can't I have a chocolate chip cookie as medicine? Seems reasonable to me.
10 May 2010
Someone to watch over me
Lena Horne, owner and trainer of one of the most expressive, colorful voices that ever took on the American songbook, went to sing to the angels yesterday. The link will give you a pop-up with a typically gorgeous, plush, delicious, untouchable cover of a standard you will ever hear. Just the sound of her name put her voice in my head. An original. How we'll miss her.
06 May 2010
My new book
My bun-in-the-oven is between my ears. I've decided to write a book about Jack Herer, father of the modern marijuana movement. This is truly an American saga, a great American story with power and money and greed and sex and drugs and The Grateful Dead -- which are many of my favorite things. I'm looking for people who knew him, especially in the early days. Ping me.
05 May 2010
Confessions of a reluctant grandmother
I had my first child when she was 17.
Shivering like a wet kitten, she arrived on a midnight flight out of the smoking ruin that had been an escalating war of wills with her custodial parent in Florida. The time had come for Taylor to move to Portland and live with her father. And her father’s wife. Me.
Motherhood, as far as I have been able to eyeball it, is just fine for other people. Siblings and friends have long delivered tales of parenthood’s countless pleasures and countless headaches, and I’m happy for all of you, really. Not my slice of whole wheat, that’s all.
I chose the companionship of a childless marriage, to a gentle man who ached constantly for his two daughters who lived far away. I found them a delightful summer diversion that, mercifully, went home after a month.
The elder daughter went out on her own, but the younger landed in our house, where my beautifully appointed guest bedroom quickly became Taylor’s Room, acquiring that overheated, aromatic, lived-in essence of a Superfund site.
Now she was our responsibility, our worry . . . our daughter. We got along pretty well, for the most part, but when she turned 18, we realized that simply living with two parents didn’t bestow in any child the necessary common sense in matters of the heart - and body. So one Saturday morning, I rousted her from bed and took her to Planned Parenthood.
On 9 May 1960, an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration approved an oral contraceptive, the first reliable tool for a woman to put a brake on a force as unbending as gravity - the drive to procreate. Not surprisingly, blowback was considerable. Not every state legalized The Pill, which led the Supreme Court to rule in 1965 that forbidding contraception to married women was a violation of marital privacy. In 1972, the court said states could not ban contraceptives to unmarried women. The Roman Catholic Church did ban its use among the faithful, a 1968 prohibition that stands today.
The birth-control pill shifted the economic paradigm, by conferring the power to put off having that first child. In Oregon, the average age of a first-time mother in 1970 was 21.4 years; in 2006, it was 25.4.
So the Pill bought precious time, to earn a degree, to begin a career or an artistic path, to go hiking in Tibet, to devote that rich, wonderful, all-too-fleeting time to crafting an individual definition of womanhood that didn’t automatically include motherhood.
A long time ago, I used the Pill for three months, and I quit because I didn’t like how I felt on them. But it seemed like magic, that good ol’ American ingenuity had created this tool that lay down a small bit of level on the playing field.
“It’s reasonable to be afraid of something new,” I told Taylor outside Planned Parenthood, as she held a small brown paper bag with a three-month supply. “But this is part of taking care of yourself. You have a lot of things to do before you have a baby.”
“I know. It’s OK,” she said.
“There’s school and work, and you’ll want to travel, and there’s so much in the world for you to do. You just do not need a baby right now, honey.”
“Yeah. I know."
She got a job, did well at it. She went Portland Community College and loved the psychology courses, but she aimed for the veterinary-technician program - maybe, she said, she might even become a zoo vet. She met a nice boy, name of Kyle, only a year older than she.
She was rolling. Earlier this year, her father and Taylor and I agreed that it was time for her to make her way into the world. She leaped at the freedom, spending days and nights in the suburbs looking for housing and employment. In six weeks, she moved in with a friend and got a full-time job at a nearby drug store. She’d picked the area, she said, because it was close to the PCC campus. When we took her and Kyle out for dinner on her 21st birthday last month, she was mature, self-aware, launched into her life.
Then, a week ago, her father hung up the phone, took a deep breath and said Kyle had just called to say Taylor is pregnant.
They came over last night, looking so damn cute sitting together on the couch. I struggled not to go all Betty Friedan on her - opportunities lost! paths not taken! people not met! What are you doing?
But there she was, glowing and happy, her fingers laced with Kyle’s. They would get married as soon as possible and rear the baby. They wanted a family. They were young and excited. Not a shiver, not a faint moment in the eyes, nothing but that crazy courage that you have only when you are 21.
“I’m ready to do this,” Taylor said. “This was meant to be.”
Yes, she said, she wouldn’t be traveling the world now. But the world was always out there, waiting, and one day, she and Kyle and their child will go out and see it.
Shivering like a wet kitten, she arrived on a midnight flight out of the smoking ruin that had been an escalating war of wills with her custodial parent in Florida. The time had come for Taylor to move to Portland and live with her father. And her father’s wife. Me.
Motherhood, as far as I have been able to eyeball it, is just fine for other people. Siblings and friends have long delivered tales of parenthood’s countless pleasures and countless headaches, and I’m happy for all of you, really. Not my slice of whole wheat, that’s all.
I chose the companionship of a childless marriage, to a gentle man who ached constantly for his two daughters who lived far away. I found them a delightful summer diversion that, mercifully, went home after a month.
The elder daughter went out on her own, but the younger landed in our house, where my beautifully appointed guest bedroom quickly became Taylor’s Room, acquiring that overheated, aromatic, lived-in essence of a Superfund site.
Now she was our responsibility, our worry . . . our daughter. We got along pretty well, for the most part, but when she turned 18, we realized that simply living with two parents didn’t bestow in any child the necessary common sense in matters of the heart - and body. So one Saturday morning, I rousted her from bed and took her to Planned Parenthood.
On 9 May 1960, an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration approved an oral contraceptive, the first reliable tool for a woman to put a brake on a force as unbending as gravity - the drive to procreate. Not surprisingly, blowback was considerable. Not every state legalized The Pill, which led the Supreme Court to rule in 1965 that forbidding contraception to married women was a violation of marital privacy. In 1972, the court said states could not ban contraceptives to unmarried women. The Roman Catholic Church did ban its use among the faithful, a 1968 prohibition that stands today.
The birth-control pill shifted the economic paradigm, by conferring the power to put off having that first child. In Oregon, the average age of a first-time mother in 1970 was 21.4 years; in 2006, it was 25.4.
So the Pill bought precious time, to earn a degree, to begin a career or an artistic path, to go hiking in Tibet, to devote that rich, wonderful, all-too-fleeting time to crafting an individual definition of womanhood that didn’t automatically include motherhood.
A long time ago, I used the Pill for three months, and I quit because I didn’t like how I felt on them. But it seemed like magic, that good ol’ American ingenuity had created this tool that lay down a small bit of level on the playing field.
“It’s reasonable to be afraid of something new,” I told Taylor outside Planned Parenthood, as she held a small brown paper bag with a three-month supply. “But this is part of taking care of yourself. You have a lot of things to do before you have a baby.”
“I know. It’s OK,” she said.
“There’s school and work, and you’ll want to travel, and there’s so much in the world for you to do. You just do not need a baby right now, honey.”
“Yeah. I know."
She got a job, did well at it. She went Portland Community College and loved the psychology courses, but she aimed for the veterinary-technician program - maybe, she said, she might even become a zoo vet. She met a nice boy, name of Kyle, only a year older than she.
She was rolling. Earlier this year, her father and Taylor and I agreed that it was time for her to make her way into the world. She leaped at the freedom, spending days and nights in the suburbs looking for housing and employment. In six weeks, she moved in with a friend and got a full-time job at a nearby drug store. She’d picked the area, she said, because it was close to the PCC campus. When we took her and Kyle out for dinner on her 21st birthday last month, she was mature, self-aware, launched into her life.
Then, a week ago, her father hung up the phone, took a deep breath and said Kyle had just called to say Taylor is pregnant.
They came over last night, looking so damn cute sitting together on the couch. I struggled not to go all Betty Friedan on her - opportunities lost! paths not taken! people not met! What are you doing?
But there she was, glowing and happy, her fingers laced with Kyle’s. They would get married as soon as possible and rear the baby. They wanted a family. They were young and excited. Not a shiver, not a faint moment in the eyes, nothing but that crazy courage that you have only when you are 21.
“I’m ready to do this,” Taylor said. “This was meant to be.”
Yes, she said, she wouldn’t be traveling the world now. But the world was always out there, waiting, and one day, she and Kyle and their child will go out and see it.
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