downer

#204 king of stuff, perhaps limbs

Adventures with Jackie:





Afternoon. Almost evening. A good time (whenever I've written the word "good" this week, I think of Hemingway and how I think "good" was his favorite word: It was a good cafe where I could sit and write all morning and then George would bring a bottle of white wine. She had good strong legs for skiing. It was good beer/wine/whiskey. We went to the races... it was a good day. And so on. Also the word "nice," often applied to legs. Female legs.)

This is a good time for me to

- finish drinking a latte (double-shot) prepared for me by Lovely L. We've got ordering down to completely non-verbal all-action explosion: she raises one hand, thumb out, pointer finger up, forming a cup (not a loser sign...we discussed this), and I raise two fingers (behind the backs of people in line in front of me), signaling a double-shot and we're off sprinting. Result: I have my coffee by the time I make it through the line. It's good to be local... Lovely L and her crew lead very professional service-oriented coffee lives, catering to one and all, but some places in this town, you only get things promptly and with a smile because the bartender, etc knows you. It makes one feel quite smug sometimes.

- give the new Radiohead album a good listen. This is difficult for me. I hate new things because they're uncomfortable (like new jeans, new shoes, new people) and I fear change as if change is something with claws and anger-management issues. Yet I love Radiohead ever so passionately. So I'm just going to let it play on repeat for a couple of days before I start even thinking about how it makes me feel. Gonna let it ooze its way in, became a new normal.

- write a bit. Got some ideas I want to kick around.

- prepare to meet C. at a restaurant in Cannon Beach I've been resisting going to all week. Now I get to go. So excited. And so hungry.

Cleaned the apartment earlier while "It Might Get Loud" played on Netflix in the background. Kind of a rad documentary-type thing and I enjoyed it more than just putting on some music. The Edge, James Page and JACK WHITE would play music and sometimes they would talk and so it wasn't like I was alone in my apartment being...alone... listening to music from the CD player.

Best part: Jack White, being driven to the artsy fartsy abandoned warehouse in a black car, glances out the window and sees a guy walking by talking on a cellphone.

"That looks like an accident between a suit and a cell phone," he says to the camera. "He's probably in the middle of saying the words 'totally organic.'"

#203 is Friday

I wasn't tired this week until midweek when I remembered daylight savings time had kicked in. Then suddenly I was very tired and I've been walking around feeling like I'm always losing an hour.

Reading: "True Grit" by Charles Portis. Just saw the new movie and spent the last 20 minutes curled in an armchair, all alone in the children's section of the second-run theater, sobbing into my paper popcorn container. A beautiful movie and it hit something I had only just started thinking about that same day: telling stories and telling what is real. Not "realism" necessarily. But getting to the bottom and the truth. I love the "True Grit" dialogue, the lack of contractions, the abides and credences, a sort of windiness, like a wide landscape and you have reached the hill with it all laid out below you. I read the book a long time ago. Second time is better.

"In Our Time" by Ernest Hemingway. Love/hate him. Read some story about an American woman in a foreign nation state desiring a cat. Husband reading a book. Detail of two pillows. Adjectives shot on sight.

Listening: "Sigh No More" Mumford and Sons. Over and over and over and over. They seem trustworthy.

I wrote a story that took me four days to write and in the end it was only an OK story. It wasn't good. But the day I wrote it, I had this lyric running through my head:

There will come a time you'll see
with no more tears
and love will not break your heart

I don't know if it helped or hindered me or both. Either way, it made me sad to think about love and all the forms it takes and what it does or doesn't do and people are raised by wolves half the time, or eaten by them. Here's the story. They put the wrong photo of her in.

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On a lighter note: HUMAN FOOT? In a DUMP?! Maybe...

tsunami

"Alright don't worry
even if things end up a bit too heavy,
we'll all float on.
Alright. Already.
We'll all float on"

Modest Mouse is the only way to survive a non-tsunami event in Oregon.

So (IRONY) that's the exact part of the song that was playing when I turned my car on to drive to work after being awoken at dawn by my editor telling me: "I need you to come into work right now. There's a tsunami warning. This isn't a drill."

Given that for the massive waterfront fire in December, he said (after waking me from a dead sleep in the middle of the night), "Hey, hope I'm not catching you at a bad time. I heard there might be a bit of a fire at the pier. Could you just go take a peek?" I figured we were all going to die. This was It. The Tsunami. The one city and county consultants have been telling us dourly for years, "The question is not IF but WHEN."

It sounds silly now, yes, given that NOTHING HAPPENED to Oregon (except in Brookings, my goodness), but for 15 minutes, while pulling on my jeans and hunting for my car keys and driving to the office, I was a little frightened. I realized I had no emergency preparedness. Not no how anywhere. I tried to be rational. I checked the fridge and the cupboards. Nope, no canned goods. I would have to rely on the local raccoon population to sustain me. What to do what to do... I grabbed my checkbook and my social security card and then, on a flash of inspiration, filled every mason jar I own with water.

Then I got to the office and they told me we're only going to get, at most, four foot waves.

Oh good.

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So nothing happened here in C County, but awful things happened in Japan. I read a story today where the prime minister (Naoto Kan, born in 1946) called it the worst crisis since World War II. They're estimating over 10,000 dead. Can you even wrap your mind around that number? You can't. I just tried. I can't either.