run away

A county sign showing escape routes from a house in case of tsunami or other flood-type event read: "PLAN YOUR ESCAPE." But instead of educating me, it just made me think of all the things you could plan to escape from. I have made a list. Forgive me.

PLAN YOUR ESCAPE! from:

- cardboard boxes (possibly the type that contain refrigerators)

- conversations that are
a. tedious
b. too personal
c. insulting
d. interesting

- Celtic music

- knotted up aprons
a. straight from the drying machine
b. shoved into a drawer
c. in a plastic bag (as was mine this morning)

- too small shirt sleeves
a.(this list is drawn from personal experiences)
b.(painful personal experiences)
c.(as you can tell)

- wedding photos

- all photos

- strangers with judgmental eyes

- tourist traffic

- enslavement

- Cormac McCarthy novels
a. THE CROSSING!!!!!!! ANYONE? HOLY LORDY.

- sugar high

- commitments

- ambiguous decisions

- current situations

- coffee shops with "bad atmosphere"

- phrases like "good energy"

the porpoise/purpose dilemmas

There is only one conclusion that I can come to: I have become a bad writer. I mean, I write poorly. Impoverished is my writing. I think it's because my subjects are lean (not in the well-muscled sense... I mean, they are scrawny). I've been reading through the blog archives and have decided that however vague it was at times, my best writing on here happened during my internship when this blog had purpose and scope. After the internship, it just became a diary. When I was employed at the paper, it became a sad and secret vault. I struggled to mask events in obscurity and I didn't tell you the whole story because we've all read about those employees who gripe about Things and then get fired. And now? It's a chronicle of my confusion and the trials of seating tourists in restaurants. Wheeee.

I ran across an old entry where I outlined some projects and goals. I'm going to do that again. This is the best time since this winter will be known as the Very Cold Winter of Poverty in which I plan to live paycheck to paycheck and not touch my savings. I know I will make a killing this summer if I just stick it out. In the meantime, the writing needs some work and the life needs some push.

So I will...

1. Edit select old completed short stories and start sending them out

2. Write new material and start sending it out (M says he will slap me if I stop writing. He claims others will support him in this including the police. I am doubtful but I don't want to call bluff)

3. Put together applications for several Writer-in-Residence programs for next year
(Been planning this/thinking about this for almost a year now and already made all sorts of outrageous plans in a very public way and will lose face if I don't follow through. Also, I just found out that the National Park Service has a lot of residences and I could live in the wilderness for a month FOR FREE and write.)

4. Be in a Writer-in-Residence program next year (in the wilderness)

5. Solve the problems associated with the incomplete circle rug for Mumsy which I promised her last Christmas

6. Find a purpose (porpoise! ... surely I'm not the only person who automatically substitutes the word "porpoise" for "purpose"? Anyone?)... Anyway, find a PURPOSE (...porpoise...) for this blog. Like so:

Oh lordy, stop the madness. I'm sorry. I've been loopy all morning and (while we're being truthful) all last evening too. I can't turn it off. I don't know where it's coming from... I need to work more maybe or have a religious crisis. Well too bad. I'm feeling quite all right God-wise, thanks, and I'm happy and I like being happy.

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."

sickness of the cars, pathogen of despair

"With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable."

- Lawrence of Arabia

I'm worried about Word Documents and how I can create new ones forever. Where do they go? Does it get tired making new documents? Is this wasteful? Electronic waste. I mean digital. I mean magic.

So besides that, a series of very depressing thoughts this morning while driving to get coffee from Marta and while listening to the Man From Snowy River soundtrack which is playing on an endless loop in my car for a reason that would take too long to explain but could be summed up by mentioning that my friend Gotter made me. I think.

List of sad:

- Squeaks. Our dead guinea pig and how when we moved to the new house he lived in the garage and we kind of forgot to play with him and his last days were probably very lonely although he remained well fed to the end.

This came up because I had a dream about a lot of guinea pigs and I was going to build them a fenced area outside so they could frolic in the green grass.

- How I lost my promise ring that my dad gave me and I lost it very early on and I still feel very loathsome and awful whenever I remember this and do usually end up crying a little bit.

- How I lose all jewelery.

- How I miss my brudders and my sista.

- How people wear unflattering colors all the time. Pathogen of bad taste and/or color-blindness (myxamatosis). But that's petty (but not really). I just saw a girl with ORANGE hair (think lite brite, think cat hair all over your black sweater) and yellowish skin (like mine) wearing a very light olive-green colored coat and I think she has a mustard yellow scarf as well. Bad decisions. But my hair is literally a nest today so... judge not lest ye be judged.

Don't have to work until three (the depressing list is done now, by the way). My shirt will probably not be dry in time but I had to wash it because it was starting to smell like dead lynx. In the meantime, I plan to write and play musics and make soup?

I'm trying to plan a soup, bread & wine night at my apartment -- following the success of sandwich, salad & wine night which happened Saturday, a very mellow, pleasant time with just a handful of people and we mostly sat around and talked and looked at the National Geographic Portraits coffee table book Mumsy bought for me years ago. There was a heap of food on the table and such good red wines. More events are desired (by me). New co-worker apparently makes a killer Italian wedding soup and I just make things and there are people I know who eat... so... yes. It's nice to have the apartment peopled (and I did clean up the hobo encampment before they came over).

Lovely day today. Maybe I need to go hiking. Hiked for hours yesterday and played disc (DISCO) golf in the Washington woods with Friends. Got very car sick as well. Also read this: "We have heard a voice of trembling, Of fear and not of peace." Which might have referred to words that the Lord spake concerning Israel and Judah but which I shall apply (new age Jefferson gospel fashion) to being car sick. Sounds about right.

the screaming children will not win

I am so very ready for the sickness to be over (down with the sickness?). It's at the embarrassing leaking stage now where snot explodes down the nose while both eyes (or, more often, one solitary eye) tear up and a single cough could send my whole face sideways. All of this happening at the most inconvenient time every time, like when I'm pouring water for a customer or about to hover over someone else's food. I was at Fred Meyer buying stuff that also included leg warmers and enough tea to float boats (many many boats) and the cashier said, "Sounds like you're sick."

"It's evolving," I said.

"Ahhh," he said, "it will last two more weeks."

"Don't tell me that."

"I'm just preparing you."

Thus spake the prophet Isaiah unto the children of Israel in the days of the
tribulation.

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Also, I weary of my computer but am not even sure where to begin with replacing it. Did some cursory research yesterday and ended up on the National Park Service page for someplace called Buffalo Lake. I think. Or was it River? A nationally significant space of water.

---

Only a four-hour shift today. But caution, my love. Last time I got excited about a short and easy Friday I ended up staying on a second shift and working very late and what with my early early morning at the coffee shop tomorrow... no good, no good.

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The apartment is ridiculous (and dogless, but let's not reopen that wound). I've been in it almost a month and it still looks more like a hobo encampment than a place I've lived in for... almost a month. The living room is presentable and put together. Half the kitchen is still in boxes, though, and the study is more of a study in despair than anything else and I need to clean the fish tank so the inherited fish won't die.

And speaking of dogless. I'm launching Plan Don't Let Baby-the-Pound-Dog Die Part 2 where I go to the church council and petition them in person and question how they could possibly worry about a barking dog in my apartment when they have forty million screaming children running loose below me who begin screaming at 6:45 a.m. and don't stop until 6 p.m.

catching up

"Have you no fear, English?"
"My fear is my concern."

-Lawrence of Arabia

When I worked at the paper, I learned some of the ways people lie: about themselves, other people, events, circumstances, ideas, reasons, religion, states-of-mind, pictures... anything. (I am listening to a man lie right now, in fact. He's several tables down from me. He lies shamelessly, loudly, constantly and with his ego in his voice. I once told him after a meeting I was covering that he was a liar and he screwed his face into this faintly disbelieving smirk and continued lying... but lies are tricky. It's not always a blatant lie, rather a slight rearranging of true things so that the final quilt comes together false)

Now, in the service industry, I'm getting full doses of pettiness. Really (really) does your table matter THAT MUCH? I think it's fear of death.

So most of the customers at both jobs are older and most of the people working at both jobs are younger. The older fears the younger, fears our ability to (I don't know) kick them in the shins when they're not looking and run away very, very fast before (perhaps) the police can catch us and beat us with night sticks. They believe we were raised by wolves and we're eying their tendons, ready to run them down like sickly elks.

"Why are you seating me at this table? Is this where the floorboards are rotting? Do I hear a chainsaw? Are you going to con me out of all my money?" They clutch their glasses of water and watch my every move. I am out to cheat them, part them from their money, their dignity and wrench open their hands to sever the pinch they've kept on life which they have held onto not for any joy life brings them or they bring to life, but out of habit, because their fingers bend that way.

But then there are the nice elderly people.

The couple so old and bent and confused we wondered if they should be out at all. They sat on the same side of a four-seat table and she kept her hand on her husband's knee while she ate dessert. She kept apologizing to the server for her messy hair. "We were driving and it was windy and now my hair's a mess and I'm wearing a hat inside. I'm sorry you have to see me this way." They left holding hands and smiling vaguely when we thanked them for coming in.

And there was the man, who struggling to get out of his chair, both hands laid flat on the top of the table, working his knees and hips, caught my eye as I passed with a water pitcher, commanded me, smiling, "Don't get old."

holden caufield

The fruit fly invasion is no longer all over the kitchen. Now it's just in the garbage which means that when I empty the garbage, the glorious Fruit Fly Dawn will likely return to the kitchen.

Before last night they'd been roosting by the hundreds at the top of my cupboard where I'd put out white wine and apple cider vinegar traps for them. Then last night, I walk in and there's nothing, not a stir. None of them tried to fly up my nose or swarm around my wrists. However, neither were there bodies to evidence a final and magnificent end. Where did they go? Clearly they all died, I decided. But where are the bodies? Where? Do they turn into dust? Do the living sweep the dead under the oven? Is there a secret fruit fly burial grounds somewhere in the bowels of the sink? (I bet that's what the Drosophila suzukii strain does. Apparently it's an invasive species. Can't trust it with your daughters or your Cadillacs. Can't trust it to die decently and leave a corpse for evidence).

But enough of this. I know where they are now. They're in the garbage, nuzzling up to a peach pit or whatever else is rotting down there. I just emptied the can, but whatever, go to town, fruit flies. I don't want to know how many eggs you can lay at a time. I squished a copulating pair with a paper towel and felt just fine about it.

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Title for today: "Everything makes me dizzy except lying on the couch and reading novels."

I'm sick! Score one for Fall: fevery, icky, lazy, work-canceling stupidness. Making no money today that's for certain. New survival plan currently being formulated and will mostly involve eating garlic and not reading "The Catcher in the Rye" ever again. I can't be sure but I think it made me sick.

Apart from causing my sickness, I think I hated it because it succeeded at what it set out to do. It made a true voice and maintained that voice. Good on you, Salinger. Unfortunately, it's a voice I hate. My instinct with "Catcher" was to never read it because the only people who recommended it over and over were 1) boys who 2) said they read it in high school or as freshmen in college and it 3) changed their lives but 4) they, despite this change, remained boys and were fairly useless though perhaps they've recovered. I need to call my friend T. and talk to him about "Catcher". I think I could respect his opinion and appreciate Holden Caufield's place in his life. Everyone else, all you 20-something boys, nope. Sorry. Probably I'm immature. I'll take that.

The whole time I'm reading it I want to push Holden Caufield into a large, muddy pool. Or constantly nay-say him, which is (more or less) what I did in my mind but I think I was largely directing comments at various boys I've known who have reminded me a lot of H.C. and probably only remind me of H.C. because they read "Catcher" and decided H.C. was amazing and DEEP and TRUE and tried to emulate him around the time I crossed paths with them in Eugene when we were all more-or-less, freshmen in college. Oddly though, most of my male friends are probably guys who read "Catcher" and adored it. But they grew out of (or maybe into) the adoration in a different way than the guys who are still like H.C. and have fallen like dead fruit flies and disappeared. (Tying it all together. Point!)

But it's some sort of classic. So now I've read it. I feel a sense of relief akin to the time I finally read and finished a Thomas Hardy novel. Oh Thomas Hardy, ye olde darlin' manny.