#132: detective parker speaks up

"Yes, yes, I know," said the detective, "but that's because you're thinking about your attitude. You want to be consistent, you want to look pretty, you want to swagger debonairly through a comedy of puppets or else to stalk magnificently through a tragedy of human sorrows and things. But that's childish. If you've any duty to society in the way of finding out the truth about murders, you must do it in any attitude that comes handy. You want to be elegant and detached? That's all right, if you find the truth out that way, but it hasn't any value in itself, you know. You want to look dignified and consistent--what's that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, 'Well played--hard luck--you shall have your revenge tomorrow!' Well, you can't do it like that. Life's not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can't be a sportsman. You're a responsible person."

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Stories today:

1. This was the cover. Fairgrounds tax levy. Please contain your excitement. Really, in a person your age, such unseemly rowdiness. It's just a local option tax levy. Sheesh.

2. Commission candidates. This has been my life for the last week and a half.

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Iggy is dreaming on the floor in front of me. Toby is hiding somewhere...hopefully in shame. I caught him eating poop outside. This is a consistent issue. And there goes my gag reflex again.

#131: dogz + wine, wine + dogz

The second we hit 9 p.m., the deputy turned the scanner's volume back up to full. The expo center (host to the annual Crab+Beer+Wine Festival, 25,000 people expected to attend this year) was closing and buses and cars loaded with the loaded adults of both local and faraway lands would start to pour out to the waiting gardeners--municipal, county and state officers--a harvest of DUIs, DUIIs and all sorts of the criminal mischief attached to the drunken, belligerent disturbers of the peace.

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Saturday...

...in which I rode a school bus for the first time in my life.

...in which C. and I embarked on a savage journey to the heart of not the American Dream, but rather the Crab+Alcohol Festival. Our burning question: Why in glory do people come to this thing by the thousands? We questioned shady characters like some guy named Gunner who convinced us we needed to try the "6 tastes of red wine for $5" deal at the Girardet booth. Fortunately, we had brought our own glasses.



After we'd had our fill of wine and crowds--highlights included sitting on the unsanitary expo center floor to share a bowl of crab bisque-y type soup, trying to convince a 13 month old party pooper child that she wanted to dance along to the live music--we went outside to catch a shuttle back to civilization. Over half an hour later, we were still waiting for the Salmon Shuttle. So we settled on something that would get us close (I believe it was the Razor Clam Shuttle, but maybe it was Halibut) and took it back to town.

The journey home involved a little used path, a slide zone where the road rolled and pushed up like an old lava pit, and a previously unknown, secret neighborhood.

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This is what I'm doing until Friday. Taking care of these guys:



There are three of them, but Wally prefers to snake his way under coffee tables, behind couches and under beds so I haven't snapped a decent photo of him yet.

This is Iggy. She is obedient and adoring. Like all good goldens should be.



Next is Toby. Every morning, he gets the dog equivalent of Prozac. As one of his owners told me, "He's the obnoxious one. Unfortunately, he's also the smartest one."

He doesn't know what to do about the camera.



"I must be closer to youuuuuuuuuuuu."

11 steps to buying a green ukulele

Please note: The dog you are watching this week will not be amused.



1. Begin each week with one obsession. Stave off obsession for as long as possible. Until Saturday, say, when the rain is slanting down torrential and tempestuous every 15 minutes and you read in Deuteronomy "...but the land which you cross over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, which drinks water from the rain of heaven, a land for which the Lord your God cares."

2. Take your time Saturday morning. Observe (but do not purchase) the boots your hidden 15-year-old heart once longed for. Try them on even, but (again) do not purchase them. Wander from the thrift store toward the river.

3. Pause in front of the instrument repair shop. Angle your head to catch the price tags hanging on the ukes in the front window. At this moment, the owner will walk up and wipe his boots on the mat outside, unlock the door and turn the closed sign around. The shop bell will ring and somewhere Jimmy Stewart will get his wings.

4. Go inside. Talk with the owner about woods and plastic and composite materials and the 100 year old uke he has hanging in the back of the shop not be parted with for love or gold. You regard the $30 birch wood, plinky. You are taught three chords: C, G7, G. You say you'll consider most dutifully and perhaps come in again later. The owner remains convinced you only wanted a break from the rain.

5. Sit at a coffee shop, drink coffee, write, consider the purchase. Someone of the Delta River Blues congregation wails over the speakers. You are giving yourself time because even though you have a job and are actually not struggling, it's hard for you to make a purchase of $10+ that isn't for the monthly groceries.

6. Head in the direction of the instrument repair shop, fresh with coffee, but stopping first at the corner music store that specializes primarily in ugly electric guitars and teenage males.

7. Enter this store and feel the panic rise as not one but three sloping, skinny, Led Zeppelin-playing teenage power chord worshippers finger picker hair in the face boys look up at you with money-colored eyes. You are the only customer. You want to leave two seconds after entering. No, you're stuck. Make the cursory tour of the shop. Decline any need for assistance. Pray for deliverance in the form of a sudden fire, a sudden death, or another customer. You begin to realize you have an inferiority complex about instruments, especially guitars. However, this is a valid complex for you to have since you can't play anything much except "Blackbird".

8. Continue on your way to the instrument repair shop. You go a different way and discover that there's a whole music shop along the same block as the repair place. The only ukes are some gaudy cheap things hanging in the window. Perhaps there are more inside? You enter.

9. Meet a Hawaiian ex-pat in mismatching clothes who only has to shrug his shoulders and break out his own delightful uke playing and mention "While my guitar gently weeps" to convince you to buy the green ukulele.

10. Converse with this individual so that it is not immediately obvious the green ukulele is sold. Nobody wants to be obvious.

11. Purchase the green ukulele. Walk home with it tucked under your arm in a cardboard box and let the first song you figure out how to play be Tom Waits' "Rains on Me"

#129: court and other people's houses

Question: Who steals $22,000+ from a charitable, non-profit organization that occasionally is called upon to put out fires?

Answer: This guy

Question: Who conducts underground experiments on whales?

Answer: Not these people

Question: ?

Answer: Apparently this

#128

The people on the porches opposite my house never stop smoking. Ever. Their ankles are chained to the plastic garden chairs and the slowly rusting grills. Moss has begun to grow underneath their feet and bean plants are sending out feelers wondering if the human leg makes a good anchoring point.

Meanwhile, this was Monday's story: Everday People featuring Photographer Don Frank. If the link doesn't work, a Google search should bring it right up: "Don Frank Daily Astorian"

Last week was:

Something on Monday which I can't remember anymore, but it brought me to this story for Tuesday's edition...

1.More DUII, more Muni: "DA offers to prosecute DUII cases...

and then I was off to courts and meetings for all of Tuesday.

I ended Tuesday at an empty bar, sipping a whiskey sour and frantically scribbling out my notes and making outlines. Finally. True journalism.

Wednesday...

1. I can't track down the link, but it was about LNG. I had a crash course in this ridiculously complex and argued subject and then was saved by C.

2. The other story was about how people are trying to get some of the north coast designated as a National Heritage Area: read this. It's only by the divine grace of God and all the prophets of Israel this story was not riddled with errors since I was half delusional with lack of sleep, too much work and my body not taking kindly to nourishment.

I think this was the day I went home as soon as I could and cried myself to sleep into a two hour nap--kind of like a six month old infant.

And then there was the wedding which contained so much joy, five houses in the greater Portland area burst into song while all the plastic bags on the entire Park Blocks strip went dancing into the wind and declaring us blessed.

Liz is married

We have emerged on the right side of the Wedding. Liz is married and we are recovering. Everyone in the greater Oregon City/Portland area collapsed today into the loving and maternal arms of an afternoon nap. We will be sorting out our tangled up possessions for the next week and will discover that maybe, after all, we did leave the left foot shoe at the reception, but our feet have new calluses from all the dancing--I personally danced until I thought I was going to throw up--and there are other shoes in the wide world. What we have gained is something joyful.

We have toasted and we have proclaimed the Rare Red label the best. We have ascended and descended the same flights of stairs more times than the angels of God trotted up and down Jacob's ladder. Our steps were less prophetic, carrying boxes and implements of wedding preparation, but I would argue just as hallowed. Those of us who still have stomachs will self-medicate on coffee. The rest will drink tea.

There is nothing like a wedding.

Or, to be clear, nothing like the wedding of a dearly beloved (gathered here today) blood brother with whom you have eleven significant summer driving songs, with whom you have scaled cliffs and slept on hard-faced futons in strange cities and familiar houses, with whom you have wandered streets and cigarettes in crowds and out of crowds, concealed great secrets from and told everything to, who shares a host of witnesses with you--all of us born together and falling apart to come back together again in a new way that resembles the old way but is better. While we have always been sad, we have always been happy and there is a glory in that which takes years to turn over. It has to be handled and examined and put aside, picked up again, run away from and returned to.

The wedding itself is a photograph. What makes it something vital and alive is everything that has come before--the buying of toothpicks, the larger commitments--and what we hope comes after. A photograph is a sort of lying truth and it is beautiful, but it is just a piece. We have all practiced the wedding a hundred times before we perform it and when it comes, we are all improvising. "Hannah and I have decided that even if someone dies, we're not going to cancel the wedding," Abbs said. "We've all put too much work into it." The next day, the president of Poland went down in a plane.

T.S.Eliot's "Four Quartets" will always be Liz's poem. We recite it to her out of habit because we know it is her poem.

Sean quoted in his toast: "In my beginning is my end..." I said to her twice every few days these last two weeks: "All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." And the first lines I ever heard of this poem, she read to me over the phone five years ago:

"You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

Go with God, all God's children, and let your spirits be at ease.

pdx

His next favorite thing after playing with my camera was when I would blow on the back of his head and make his hair move around.

But now he wants the camera back. Even though I flicked the rear overhead light off and on (another big hit during the ride home), he will not be distracted.

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It's a busy week we have:

Five days until Liz's wedding.

Three and a half days until I head back to Portland for the blessed event.

And a week's-worth of work to accomplish.

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Tuesday will be my three-month mark. It's strange to think I've been here that long. I feel fresh and brand-new and mostly clueless. If I looked back over this blog and the first news stories, I'm sure I could chart out how much I've learned. That would probably be a useful exercise. I can already feel the days when I remember how nervous I was. Now I realize I should have been nervous about other things.

I like to mark my time by ceremony and dates. One month marks, three month marks, the first time this happened or the second day in a row featuring a black lab named Brody. Maybe it's a need for symbolism, an effort at importance and meaning. Anyway, I light a lot of candles and tend to read the same books at the same times every other year.

A three-month mark gives me the permission to indulge in the symbolic or ceremonial or semi-official meeting of the Katie Board of Directors. It's time to re-evaluate, recharge, throw stuff out, acquire new objects.