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Thursday: I interviewed a woman who may or may not have known who I was. She asked me several times and couldn't remember that it was Thursday, but then she would catch me off guard with a steel swipe of her pilot's eyes and describe in detail how her dad taught her arm wrestling tricks.

"See," she said, raising a skinny old arm, "I've still got muscle." She folded her hands on her lap and grinned out the window toward the ocean then looked back at me to see my reaction.

After two hours of talk, most of it circular and folding back to what we'd said before, I said goodbye and spent the rest of the afternoon at the beach. A stark naked empty beach on a gorgeous warm and sunny day...the only such day in a weekend destined to be full of cold and wind.







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Birthdays are the perfect time to change everything in your life, pretend you're someone else and claim their set of virtues, throw away old pieces of that former coil of waste, sin and failure and forge ahead into a future glittering golden in the afternoon sun. Birthdays are also a good time for presents and cake made with beer and all what you hold dear unto your heart around you like brothers and sisters who may or may not be related to you, plus parents and dogs and towns where you have grown in five ways for fifty years or maybe just since you were four and left Nebraska.

It was my birthday yesterday and thanks to working on today (a national holiday) I got to shove off Thursday afternoon and spend Friday in Portland with my family and all that afternoon with a friend, roaming a Chinese garden in the middle of the city and indulging in imported statuary.

I always make a big deal out of birthdays in private. I don't usually have parties, but I do get symbolic and ceremonial about a week before my birthday. There is the one legendary year when I forgot it was my birthday. That was the only year I didn't sit down and re-evaluate all facets of my being for a full seven days, write copious notes, burn key items, and visit the haunts of my youth. Because, normally, that's how I spend my birthday week. As I've gotten older and busier, there's less time to go fully pagan and candle-lighting. This year, I thought briefly about what it means to turn 23. I've decided it doesn't mean much. All it really means is time and I have increased my time or traversed another year of my time. I like the comfortable feeling of time piling up beneath my feet. Someday I will be wise. As the hours accumulate and millions of seconds filled with mistakes, like oily rainbows inside of bubbles, soaring along and popping and making everything taste like soap, so comes wisdom like a really good meal or that person who reminds you of God and just when you're about to bang your head against the wall in frustration, you realize like Scrooge you are not the man you were, nor will you ever be that man again. Thank God. Especially since I am not a man.

But anyway.

Thanks everyone who said happy birthday to me because I know you meant it and that's incredible. I feel very loved and buoyed up on all those passing glances of love and care. And, Mrs.Payne, you made my week. It's funny. Whenever I've been feeling the least discouraged these past few years, someone comes along who says something and it's just what I need and you were that person on Sunday. I think all you did was come straight up to me and you gave me a huge hug and said Happy Birthday. Both you and Mr. are always so encouraging though. I want you to know how much I appreciate it.

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On a completely different and decidedly less dewy note. Here's what went in to the paper today. I wrote this:

Fatal car crash

I'd give a lot to know what's going through his mind in this picture. At work, I have a wall of mug shots to help me keep track of who's in custody and where their case is at in the system. I wonder always what's going on behind their eyes in that moment, standing against the wall, looking at a brown-shirted deputy wielding a camera.

You should also read this: C. goes clamming. First-person narrative!

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My plans for today are many and it's already 2:30, so I need to scoot. Drive safe. Don't be an idiot and drive unsteady.

#141

I'm losing steam on this whole blog thing. Being me, I'm turning it into something existential. But being me, at the root of all my deep questions, I don't really care that much and probably I should just eat a full meal and go to bed an hour earlier.

While I'm off rummaging through my true consciousness, here's the week in brief:

- the rediscovery of my purple tinted sunglasses in the deep recesses of the closet. I thought I'd lost them. Everything is appropriately gray-toned once more.

- Nazi skin lampshades. I am not telling this story here. All you need to know is that the appearance of these almost drove me to an act of murder in a small modular classroom overflowing with people.

- House fires and bodies found in house fires. The missing of which will never be lived down and I'm buying a scanner and I will go to bed with it each night and the volume will be on loud and I will never miss such an event EVER AGAIN. As God is my witness. Scarlett. Etc.

- Empty beach, full sun, blue skies, three hours. I read American history and danced like a crazy person in the wind and the water and the sand. Then I got into my car and drove into Washington County where I was promptly surrounded by a million commuters, stuck in traffic for an hour and flooded by the rains of heaven.

Here's what went into today's newspaper:

1. HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

2. COUNTY MEETING. Only the beginning is interesting and probably only to me. Sigh.

rOdeeeO

Just a wee wifflet of a story for today's paper, but do (do!) regard Alex's photo slide show and attendant captions.

I wish I was Shane M.

road. kill.

We need a spot of carnage in our day-to-day activities. Liven things up with some death. Here's my contribution Photo by Alex. Please note the detail of the harness.

That's about all that's going on today. I've just spent the last hour reading "A Confession" by Tolstoy. A sad Russian speaks on religion, the meaning of life, suicide and fulfillment. Need I say more?

I also read this:

"A man who is isolated and alone can be regarded as a sort of discarded person. He is a man cast out of society, and that type of man, in the old days, would have been killed. Let me say this -- and I say it very seriously: there is nothing worse than being isolated." - Dinizulu, king of the Zulus, c.1910

And this:

"Water is taught by thirst" - Em. Dickinson

electioneering

ELECTIONEERING. Yes, Like the Radiohead song. Listen for Thom's creepster background cackle. My favorite part.




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Today's pap-ur: County elections are FINALLY a done deal. Check out all the times that rabbit was updated. I can't believe I spent three hours down at the JGB Building making phone calls to the newsroom, calling candidates as the official reports rolled out and watching people count ballots. I paced. There will, of course, be another story in today's edition, mostly a repeat of last night's story but with a few additional details.

I didn't expect to be so excited about the elections last night. It hit me all at once ten minutes before the first report came out. Wheeeee elections! All that build-up and now we'll have results. Being, as I am, an objective journalist-type person, I can only have small, internal opinions about the races. My joy primarily comes from getting to be nosy and in the middle of things.

It's great being a reporter. You get stuff. Not usually stuff other people would want, but great stuff if you're a slightly kleptomaniacal (new word), information addict, research nerd. Police reports, logs, arraignment dates, land use briefs, election reports, DATA!!!, maps of tax lots, photographs, mug shots, clippings from other publications, hand written thingamajigs.

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After I got off election coverage (around midnight), I (typical) was all awake and unable to go to bed so I finished watching "Atonement."

Now...let's see. How do I say this in a way that's descriptive, informative and clever?

Boooooooo, Atonement, boooooo.

The end.

But not quite. It was a pretty movie and it was shot in a clever way with minimal dialogue. That, I've decided, is what I like about J. Wright (director)...now if only the dialogue that was in use had been useful. But let's not even talk about the movie proper since it was so horrible. Let's talk about how they shot it. There's a five minute pan of a Dunkirk scene that is lovely and the way music, conversations and background noises weave in and out and around each other: another thing I like about JW's films.

I think I might actually be able to finish the book now. Some books make me very tense. I have never skipped ahead to read the end of a book, even of a book I thought was stupid. I can't do it. As a result, I leave a lot of books unfinished because they stress me out too much...I know something bad is going to happen and if (for whatever reason) I can't plow through the bad, there's no way I'm going to skip it. YOU DO NOT SKIP PARTS OF BOOKS. Addendum: You do not skip parts of books unless you have read said book about 5 times.

So this all goes to say: Now that I know what cliffs the disasters jump off of (thank you, movie), I can now finish the novel, content in the imminent misery.

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Well. Back to work.

#135: time let me hail and climb

I call this one "Print Journalism in a world that has forgotten how to make paper". That's the working title until I find something even more esoteric.

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There is a part of me that really misses college at 5:49 p.m. today. Remember when I lived in a garret room filled with animals, both living and dead? And how at 7 each morning the squirrel family would scamper overhead and through the walls and wake me up on days when, ordinarily, I could have slept in? Although, granted, those days were few. Remember the quality of the light through a northeast window and putting my hair up in front of the mirror, footsteps in the narrow hall behind me meant someone stooping through the tiny door to come in and talk for a bit or for an hour? Going to classes. The tetris game of setting up my schedule so that I could work my jobs and get the classes I needed and go to bed at a reasonable time but instead I went to bed at unreasonable times and woke up five minutes to five most mornings until it became such a habit I'm still doing it to this day. Mostly I miss being around people I know and mostly I miss the grace of small mistakes. I feel like every mistake now is enormous.

So I'm trying to figure out if the awful feeling I get when I screw up at work outweighs the joy of being a reporter.

I've made this vow before, but I will make it again: When I am old and I have the kind of voice that makes children cringe, I will not go out of my way to make the youth feel stupid, especially if those youth are writers because heaven knows writers are already neurotic enough without someone spitting at them over the phone in the most condescending of whines. That TONE. That tone makes me want to crawl into a closet and die. And not a nice closet. Some musty tomb full of lye and bleach and highly-chemical, fraught-with-death glass cleaner. The kind of closet where janitors have abandoned old towels, now molding, and old shoes infested with spiders--where the cocoons of unspeakable insects (the kind with impossible number of legs and bodies not to be believed and antennae shooting out of every pore) lie waiting for sunlight that will never come.

Anger and embarrassment is mingling with a Cheshire cat grin of well-being because, darn it, I was productive today and I could have stayed at the office longer and been perfectly happy to do so. But I made myself come home so that I eat dinner and go to bed early so I can get up early tomorrow refreshed and alive. Also, to listen to "Skinny Love" a million times (oh hush) until the feeling of failure passes entirely into a feeling of well-being. No more flip-flop--give me one straight emotion, no ice, no lemon twist, no soda.

I've been dealing in dead elk today and I will for the rest of the week it seems. A new theme perhaps? Dead elk and crime? Winning combination, I think.

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Jesse was oh so very kind and set up a www.rabbitsinwalls.com for me, but I'm not sure if I want to move the blog because enough people have told me they read it here and I don't want to be confusing. Maybe I'll use it as a photo site? That might be a good idea. I need to work on my photographing skills.

I will ponder on it.

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I love The New Yorker and I really like this writer. Mostly because S. F-J. interviewed Johnny Greenwood about audio integrity and I got to be a real-live nerdy fangirl for ten minutes. Whenever I get stuck on a story at work, I pull up The New Yorker's website and read a story or two (as long as they're not 20-page epics...oh my heart, can you imagine?! 20 pages is infinity in the newspaper world).

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On the reading list:

1. "My Traitor's Heart" by Rian Malan. This is another "Dispatches" for me, I guess. So rending and I can't stop reading it and I know it's going to put me in a funk full of idealism and the impotency of idealism.

2. Still hacking away at "Silent Spring" I can't seem to get into it.

3. Kurt Vonnegut, because I never have and it shocks me that I never have. I slap my face.

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Well whaddayaknow, soup and rice time.

134: weddings and books, unreleated

I've been up to weddings mostly. Weddings and not living in my apartment and living in slovenliness when I am at my apartment although (rah rah!) my kitchen is quite clean in this present moment. However, if I'm killed in my bed tonight by some sad person bent on destruction, I will be very embarrassed when the police come to investigate the scene. They'll think I live like this always: piles of notebooks, piles of clothes, random acts of silverware in stemless wineglasses that might have contained grapefruit juice of a morning. And let's not forget the bobby pins. They show up everywhere, upright and exactly where you're going to set your foot down next. I hope the police at least note the unusual neatness and superb ordering of my books and my bookshelves. I also hope one of them is slightly corrupt in awkward ways. Like, he steals my ukulele and takes it home with him, hidden beneath his rifle in the squad car and learns a lot of folk songs on it and sings to himself on his days off, sitting on a front porch with mineral water and ten gray cats.

Speaking of criminal investigations, I just finished "The Corspe Had a Familiar Face" by Edna Buchanan which my Other Mother had recommended to me over a year ago when I was sniffling in her office and her way of cheering me up was to tell me horrifying and funny stories of her own experiences with being a morbid media-type person. Example: her car exploded or something (bottom line: caught on fire). Her first reaction: Okay, we're all safe. Grab the cameras and start filming. Husband looks on aghast/amused.

I don't know what to do now that I've finished the book. I feel like a friend has departed, left me bereft. Some voice has been silenced. There are no more pages.

I stayed up so very late a few nights back because I hit the "Sex" chapter in which B. said, "Sex kills." And proceeded to talk about how, right up there with drugs and guns, sex takes its toll: angry spouses, jilted lovers, rape victims, serial sex offenders who are also serial killers. It was a terrible chapter and I nervously tracked the neighbor's movements as he paced his deck and smoked a cigarette. Then it really got late and I really needed to go to bed and suddenly I realized there was no way on this earth I was going to turn off the lights and go sleep. NO WAY. I saw a long nose in the window beyond which glittered lustful, murderous eyes.

I gave myself permission to do my best to kill anyone who dared attack me that night. I sat in bed, book on my lap -- honest-to-God shaking.

Oh, we all laugh now.

But this is what I had to do. Three things were obvious: I needed to sleep. I can't sleep with lights on; I require absolute darkness. I could not bring myself to turn off the lights. Therefore, it seemed, I would not sleep.

In the end, I called a friend (hi Adam) so I could talk to someone while turning off lights and tucking myself under five blankets and digging a little escape tunnel into my pillows.

I pretend I am a brave person and I think, generally, I probably am. Most people are ... we just never encounter capital-S-Situations every day of our lives. We are not tested. But my imagination has always been out of control, able to turn me into a bed-wetting baby in half a gasp. This is why I don't watch scary movies. I can walk dark streets at 2 a.m. (don't read this, mom) and I can talk to crazy people, drug addicts, hold onto growling dogs and I can shake off drunks twice my size, but I can not walk slowly across my bedroom at night when the lights are off. I take bed at a run. Three steps. No more, no less, or something bad will happen. What, I don't know. I will never know. Since I can remember, I have always taken three steps from the light switch to my bed. Some kind of terror grips me in that moment just after turning off a light and the first movement towards the bed. Three steps or...

Who knows.

Such knowledge is too high for me. I can not attain it.

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Anyway...

Gonna see the dog sometime this weekend. And the boys. And the sister. And the progenitors.