lies I let sit regarding the Columbia River

I didn't have my camera this morning so...

When I walked down the street from my apartment toward the river and the coffee shop this morning, the street spilled toward the river and it looked like this, buildings on the right and on the left, street in the middle:

|||||__________||||||

Sun shining, la-de-da.

Then BOOM a massive cargo carrier trundled up the river and the street (and the view) looked like this:

|||||{{{nnnDDDDhhhIm}}|||||

(does not convey how amazing and unsettling this is: to look down your street and see such a big thing slipping past traffic at eye-level. It's like the day the Burnside Bridge was up and we thought it was the end of times)

Someday I'll get tired of this but not today.

Just tried to find a picture of this sort of event on the internet. No luck. People only take pictures of stupid things. Like the Megler Bridge or the Cannery Pier Hotel or crumbling walls or sea lions (gaaaaaaaaaad, sea lions).

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My favorite thing is when people come into the restaurant and I try to seat them somewhere and they look at me like I'm pond scum and harangue me into seating them somewhere else at the front of the restaurant. Finally, having gotten their way and beaten an impoverished 20-something into submission, they lean back in their chairs smile at each other, gaze out at the Columbia River like it's a particularly nice puppy and sigh, "Ahhhhh, I love looking at the ocean."

At which point I don't care how small and vile their souls may or may not be because if you think a river is the North Pacific Ocean, you have other, infinitely greater problems.

And I smile and pour them water.

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10:14 a.m. NEWSFLASH!!!!

Man reading a newspaper and drinking coffee with some other past-the-mid-life-age friends and a popular song playing on the radio. Line singing about "my heart beats in my chest" and right before that line (but just when you knew it had to be the next line, because it's a popular song and that's what popular songs do), this man (who must be closer to 70 than 50) gets a silly grin and beats his chest, dancing a little jig in his chair. MY HERO.

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AND MORE! At 10:23 a.m.

Trying to get a handle on what's happening in the rest of the world, by which I mean what's happening in places that are not Clatsop County. Like the Occupy protests and earthquakes and it makes me think of a conversation a friend was told about and later told me. It happened between two high school-ish students who were talking about the Occupy protests. "Yeah they're happening everywhere," one guy says. "What are they?" the other asks. "I don't know... some kind of social networking." Pause. "Didn't one happen in ... whatsit called? ... Sibya." And the other guy pauses. "Yeah..." he says. "Sibya."