common colds for cures

Sun, fresh air and avoidance of anything newspaper-related didn't work. So here we have come to The Sick Day which, while wise and mature and self-loving in all the best ways, just makes me feel like a pathetic, weak-willed sloven-type person who would get kicked out of the tribe for failing to hold up my end of our survival. I'm laying in bed coughing and reading and drinking coffee with all the shades drawn because it's ugly outside and I don't feel like seeing the Smoking Man out on his porch. If I ever disappear without warning, check the Smoking Man's apartment first. I'll be the body that's shoved up into the air vent.

I suppose I should be drinking something herbal and more like tea but tea makes me think of grass which makes me think of horses. I am not a horse. Coffee, meanwhile, makes me think of edgy intellectuals sitting around being Communists and writing Russian novels and caring about things passionately and with great ignorance a couple years before falling into corrupt bureaucracy and killing everyone they shouldn't and creating rulers out of those they should kill. It also makes me think of "Coffee and Cigarettes" which makes me remember how much I love divey breakfast diners and Jack White.



But man, Jack White. I have written of him previously. How can you not adore/idolize/sinfully erect pagan alters to him? You're welcome:

willa cather day

Willa Cather and Mumford and Sons make me think that while it's not good for man to be alone, woman gets along just fine. (Incendiary, I realize and, likely, not true in the "when I look back on this time 20 years hence" sort of way. Guess we'll see in 20 years. For the now, I'm pretty content and while happiness remains elusive as I think it always will, there are moments of awe and peace and love for the people who ebb and flow around me and the places where I find myself, like the top of my cliff where God has appointed a cluster of rocks that perfectly fit the cut of my legs and my absurdly long torso and create the best reading spot I've ever found...it even beats the one I found at H. Point)

I sound more like a man than ever and have been coughing up interesting things. Kind of thrilling actually. But I woke up to sun this morning and so eventually found myself heading to the beach and the cliffs. Rain was out at sea, but moving inland. I kept an eye on it and the tide and climbed and read and when the rain was twenty minutes away and the tide was frothing deep at the feet of the cliff, I headed out while I still could.

See the rain way out there?



This is where I sit:



This is how I get there:



I will cry and be sick for weeks when this tree falls and/or dies:

sunshine

Everything here on the mountain is the way it should be

hi mom

If you could hear me right now, you might think (perhaps) that I am actually a male trucker from Canada who gargles nails and pieces of glass to keep myself awake on those long trips across the middle United States.

You would be wrong.

But, yes, that is how I currently sound.

Last night, while losing at trivia (like we ALWAYS do except for the legendary day after the fires when we won $70 on the Christmas-themed trivia round), I couldn't stop coughing. I'd brought a brown bottle of cough medicine with me and would take a swig from it to try to heal the coughing and make it stop. F.C. said it looked like I was taking meth on the sly. Anyway. One swig went very wrong...I think I took some of it to the lungs and since the base of the medicine is ginger. Oh my. The lungs said DEAR GOD NO! And tried to kill me.

So here we are this morning. It is sunny and extremely cold and I sound like a man and I am going hiking. I'll see your muddy path leading to the ocean and raise it twenty feet for the cliff path too and I will get to the beach on my own steam but thanks for the offer and the boots will be used and the land will be saved and maybe there will be a dead seal in the tide. One can only hope.

This has been a fantastically good week overall. Mostly...no, entirely because of people. They've been popping out like plants everywhere. Ready?

Last Friday, Chase-face came down and stayed with me through Saturday and was her lovely, delightful self and I was so sad when she left. I literally sat in my apartment and stared at a wall wondering what it is I usually do on weekends. Everything sounded so boring and lonely. That changed. Because, then on Sunday, Marta came over for breakfast/lunch and talking. Then on Monday, I went over to a friend's house and was with a whole group of people for Valentine's Day. Tuesday, after the Port meeting, I hung out with F.C. and ate dinner and went from that to M & Marta who had friends in town from Portland and went from that to The Best Live Music I've Ever Heard In This Town with Matt. Wednesday, ran into Marta, M and their friend Justin and Justin and I played a game where you try to guess what letter of the alphabet the other person is thinking about. It was short-lived game. Thursday, inadvertently ran into Cait at the breakfast place where Marta cooks. Justin and M showed up too. Then Cait and I went for a drive until I had to leave for an interview in Seaside. Thursday night, Bishop and Matt and C&C went and saw Harry Potter and we all jumped at that part with the old lady and the snake. Friday, yesterday I guess, ate some of Marta's cooking and ran into my upstairs neighbor who is a lovely albiet quiet person. Made plans to grab a beer with Marta and M when Marta got off work early that evening. Then, of course, with evening came trivia and hanging out with R and F.C. and then (and then and THEN), ran into Bishop as we were both walking to the house. The cup overfloweth.

But I'm going to go hiking by myself. I've realized that I really only like hiking with my dad or Liz. I mean, I'm sure I'd enjoy myself with other people, but I really (REALLY) like hiking with them and if I'm going for restful contemplation, I must either hike with them or go alone. Since they aren't here, I will go alone. Right after I find some different cough medicine.

justice wilson

N. tells me that when I become a cop, I will change my name to Justice Wilson. N. also informs me that when I retire from being a cop, I will write a memoir, the title of which will be, "Stop! In the Name of Justice." Or something like that. I forget exactly. N. has a lot of confidence that I will be a cop. N. believes (apparently) that I would be a good cop. My commanding presence, I guess. As he handcuffs law-breakers and loads them into the back of a squad car, my hypothetical partner will say things like, "Yeah, I know she doesn't look dangerous, but believe me... Man, I can't even tell you the stories I've heard. I get nightmares."

In an unrelated real-life story, the courthouse deputy once told me that the other deputies wondered for the longest time who I was. They always saw me in court when they were transporting prisoners. "Is she some sort of repeat felon?" they would ask (the defense lawyers didn't ask. They just assumed I was and were glad they hadn't been appointed to represent me yet). "Man," the courthouse deputy told them, in an eerie mimic of my hypothetical partner, "you don't even want to hear half the stories I know."

But anyway. Back to my imminent career change: As Justice Wilson, I can smell truth and suss out the bitter brine of lies. I can shoot lasers, sausages and bullets from my eyes (sausages only come out of the left eye). I can run twenty miles like they're nothing, uphill, in the rain, against the wind. My stomach, reinforced by steel, can take the most military-grade of all military-grade coffee. Not content to drink coffee, in fact, I swallow the grounds straight from the tin. The only water I drink: my enemies' tears.

So, yeah, look forward to that.

internet related symptoms regarding technology

There are yellow signs where I go running out in the wilderness. These yellow signs say (paraphrase): "We exist because at one point someone saw a cougar here so, by law, we are posted to warn you that cougars will eat your children and your small dogs and try to maim any slow-moving adults within your vicinity." The signs say further: "If you encounter a blood-spattered cougar in the process of eating a freshly-killed bull elk, do not run away. This will only make the cougar's ears perk up and its heart race and it will run you down into the dust and tear out your throat." Next to the yellow signs are other signs, signs that indicate cyclists and joggers are welcome to use the trails. In fact, please use the trails, please please please.

Let's put this together: There are cougars here. Cougars chase moving objects and fast-moving objects just encourage them even more. Meanwhile, please engage in fast-moving activities. Yet, beware of cougars. Good cop, bad cop, good cop, bad cop AGHHHH whiplash. Die.

So I like running these trails because they're devoid of people on bad days, barely even a handful of folk on tolerable days. There are no "good" days. It's February on the Oregon coast, what are you talking about? Just past the trails, on the beach, the wind is horrible and it's bitter, bitter cold, but on the trails the trees protect you and the cool air is a bonus as you heat up from a run. I'm much more productive in this sort of running environment where no one can watch me and judge me.

M. runs too and she told me how after she does her set number of laps, she'll sprint as fast as she can on the very last lap. Last time she did this she almost threw up everything she'd ever eaten. Sounded great to me. And it was and is and I have incorporated it into my runs. I'll trot along the trail at a medium clip, intersperse trotting with walking if it's a quiet sort of day and then, on my way back to my car, I'll bolt, sprinting as fast as I can for a little under 1/4 of a mile. My lungs feel like they're about to explode and my legs might give way underneath me at any second and my heart's banging around like a car crash and I want to die. It feels fantastic.

I usually collapse next to my car wheezing and shaking and sometimes park rangers drive by and frown like they're thinking about calling an ambulance. They haven't yet.

---

The Internet has been filling me with a sort of panic recently. Or, I mean, I've been filling myself with a lot of panic about the Internet recently. Yes.

It's too fast and colorful and full of people who groove it and take lots of pictures of themselves and leaves on sidewalks. It's also fantastic and you could keep traveling the road for years and it's expansive like the universe and completely overwhelming. I've been reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and I must have a technology phobia like he describes.

This has also been said before, and maybe it's just been at the forefront of my mind, but I see the whirling glitter of the Internet and gadgetry and I don't think it's made any of us better people. Big surprise, I know. Shocker. (Thriller!) I don't know that we've become any better at loving or thinking. Instead, I have new ways to obsess. So, yes, a me problem, not necessarily a societal problem unless it is a society of 1 and I am that 1. Which I'm not. I hope.

Know more! But there's already so much to know. Visualize! Imagine! Create more! Express more! Read read read read read and listen. Are you bored, boring, moving, sleeping, dancing/not dancing, involved, uninvolved, volunteering, in the know, in the way, in the blogosphere, definitions, snarky asides, cut and edit and... research!

So obviously Katie just needs to relax and stop over-thinking. Katie will go do that now.

jackie

Last night I was in a strange house full of strange noises with a dog that barely clears my ankles sound asleep on the couch and not standing guard at the door like I feel it should have been. Also, my hazy consciousness was telling me that this house was the key property in a shell game played over the last decade by corrupt local businessmen and, guess what, there were county documents to prove their evil. Only I didn't have the documents and the news story expose was due in five hours, except I was asleep and the corrupt businessmen's angry relatives were prowling around the house, rattling windows, muttering threats and murder. Then I dreamed I was in a store and found exact replicas of my childhood tiger and rabbit stuffed toys. I think this was a carryover from real life earlier in the day when I was at a music store in Portland browsing through the 95 cent rack and thought, "I wish I could find that Poe CD" and I turned and THERE IT WAS.

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So, I just found this out, if you click on a blogger's name and the blogger hasn't allowed public access, this message pops up:

"The Blogger Profile you request can not be displayed. Many Bloggers have not yet elected to publicly share their Profile."

What?

"Elected"?

Are these Calvinist bloggers?

Is that why Profile is capitalized... it's their god?

Back to the white board, blogger PR-men, your work is not done.

---

This was the most pointless blog post ever.

Jackie thinks so too. She's looking at me with disdain and her tail is uncurled (a sign of anger). She is also bored with me. I am not worth her happy prance welcome dance. Now there's that bitter taste in her mouth, the taste of having given love heedlessly, of having opened herself up to a million letdowns. Nothing I say or do can soothe her. Trust has been broken and it cannot be rebuilt. Love has been cast along the highway and been run over, tossed by vehicles and wind, battered by rain and pooped on by seagulls. What a frail thing, trust! To trust, to be dismayed, to shatter like glass and your beloved the thrown stone.

I'll give her a crispy treat.