#182: sinful Caesar sipped his snifter, siezed his knees and sneezed

A fire engine and the deputy fire chief just raced past the coffee shop window and it makes me nervous. Only 20 minutes ago I was in a stakeout next to the bank, spying on them until I could figure out if I needed to leave the warm comfort of my car and start reporting on something. But that was then and then was a boring medical call... Now where are they off to?

Oops, there goes another fire engine, but minus the lights, sirens and reckless speeding. So everything is probably OK. (Famous last words).

Oh, and here they come back. Yay. Absolutely nothing going on. I will continue to sit here and drink chai.

---

I have Thursday off from work and by a happy coincidence it looks like Thursday might be the only time we're going to see sun this week. My plan ever since I found out about this day off last week was to go hiking -- come sleet, come hail, come all the powers of hell. I even broke down and finally bought heavy duty, gonna-go-out-to-do-some-commercial fishing quality rubber boots. XTRATUF! They're are going to last forever...or at least 6 years, according to Marta. (Also, I bought a hardhat, but that's a different story. The guys at the store looked at me in wonderment, trying to figure what on earth I would need with rubber boots and a hardhat especially since I was mostly communicating in grunts and hand signals. Industry makes me uncomfortable. I become acutely aware that I work in a pansy profession and the only calluses on my hands are the ones on my fingers from playing guitar and that I couldn't gut something if it jumped into my lap begging me to and that I'll likely call something a ship when it should be called a boat and fake my way out of that sort of situation by calling everything "a vessel").

Anyway, I'll likely still need the boots to deal with mud, but maybe I won't need layers of garbage bags and multiple knit hats and maybe I'll get some sunlight on my mushroom-white face, cause my cells to swell with vitamin D happiness.

---

Christmas was lovely. I feel...sanctified. Something like that. I needed some love and good food after the madness last week and I can say with surety that I'm more sane now and can remember things again. I went shopping last Thursday for a few remaining Christmas presents and honestly can't remember very much about it all. There were Christmas presents at the end of it, as if by magic. Well, we're past that sort of crazy now, I think.

It's really quiet this week in the courts and the county. Cops hasn't given me much of anything recently either. Almost all is well with the world, I guess. Chaos can't reign forever. It also needs frequent naps -- chaos and I are the same that way.

Most of the Wilson Children (and Brother Benny) Go for a Christmas Walk

Part 1: After a jumping over the city-erected trash can liner-looking fence and trekking through the wetland woods, they arrived at the suburban ghetto.



Part 2: Others had been there before them, and surely others would follow. The smell of fury lingered in the air.



Part 3: The stillness of death surrounded her.



Part 4: Forces of freedom unite!



Part 5: They didn't know what it was, so they kicked it.



Part 6: It was time for them to let go of the hate and bring the band back.



Part 7: But then tragedy struck.



The end.

eves

I might have frightened the front desk people on my way out of the office this morning. I was yelling to no one in particular, "Ohmygoshohmygosh I'm gone from here FOREVERrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!"

I still don't really know what day it is and time has been confusing (for instance, I know it's day...like, not night...but whether we're going forward or backward is what I'm wondering and 5 a.m. looks a lot like 5 p.m. and who's to say there's any difference anyway? Who died and made you God? And who says we need to conform to modern calendar and clock systems? I'll go off the migratory patterns of the local elk herds from now on).

This is why: waterfront fire.

Regard:


Hmmmm. I was going to write about this, but my soul is starting to protest, sobs and gnashing of teeth (actual guh-nashing). Short version: I got the call after one hour of being asleep Thursday night. I didn't sleep again until 3 a.m. Saturday and then slept only for a couple hours before working the rest of the weekend and into this week. I thought my kidneys were going to explode on Tuesday so I bought yogurt and that's what I've been living off of for the last two days. And I was surrounded by either fire-related people or the Christmas naysayers of Astoria (i.e. the youth I've been befriending). And all I've done is type type type type FIRE type type type. I called the fire station after hearing a report of a chimney fire over the police radio.

"Did that turn out to be anything?" I asked the guy on duty. He'd been at the two big fires last week too and he laughed a little crazily and said, "No." And I laughed a little crazily and said, "Oh good."

But now I'm home and none of it matters and I bought a bottle of champagne and my breakfast this morning between getting off work and hitting the highway was olives, cheese and a swig of champagne. My heart went forward singing. No I did not drive while intoxicated.

Merry Christmas, my dears. If you get a chance, go check out the "2010: The Year in Pictures" at the New York Times website. Kind of breathtaking in so many ways. Make sure you go to full-screen mode or, yes, not so breathtaking. Mostly just difficult to see.

179: gender politics

It was a slowest news day in America apparently on Monday because this picture I took for the paper made the rounds in TV, regional papers and (reportedly) a copy of USA. Today Kels Grabow picked up while on a work trip in Arizona (she called me). This other media, in a fit of ignorance and misinformation, referred to it as a sinkhole and blamed the rain. Nope, not a sinkhole. Sorry. Just a lot that shouldn't be exposed to the elements and that's rotten through beneath the pavement crust. Nor was it a city block...as in "GOOD GLORY, MR.MAYOR! An entire city block has caved in and the city engineers have found giant broken egg shells in the grim depths below and clawed footprints leading toward the vibrant and heavily populated city center!!!"

---

In other news, I've logged oodles of stories this week and am feeling fat and satisfied on a glut of news. The collapse of the old lot was only the beginning. That day there was a vandalism report and mayhem of all sorts and I ended up driving all over the county, camera and a notebook in tow. Hung out with a reprobate middle schooler who gave me the inside opinion on one case. Bothered some busy deputies. Information disseminated!

Here's some of today. Just a little thing we call The Death Penalty. Did you know it was legal in Oregon? Now you do.

In college, I took a class about the history of the death penalty in the United States. It was from the history professor who taught history as if it were a literature class: stacks and stacks of books, novels and first-hand accounts and trial transcripts and documentaries. Next to Professor D., he was one of the best professors I had...just the sheer amount of STUFF he could jam into my head. He was also, how do you say, a passionate lecturer. There was pacing and bobbing on tiptoe and wild hand gestures and extremely effective and eloquent pauses while we all squirmed at our desks, wallowing in our ignorance. Sometimes I think history is a study in guilt and how we feel guilty about what isn't in our control, what is done and what WAS done. Thank goodness I was born a woman. My sex perpetuates few wars, genocides and mass enslavements. Or so it seems. But our wombs are the reason everyone gets born. So there's that.

offending lord peter...

who said boring people tell other people about their dreams. But I had this dream last night where I was at a local thrift store and was carrying a baby around and the baby was hyper intelligent and had the ability to cause me emotional damage with one damning look from his (indiscriminate color) eyes. And this baby was not mine. It belonged to someone else and the whole dream, people kept telling me that this other person was going to show up and I (for my part) spent the whole dream hoping he/she never did because, darn it, I was keeping that baby. I knew it would abandon me if it even got a whiff of another parent-figure. It was a disloyal baby. No fidelity whatsoever.

---

It's the weekend and I'm reading "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy who writes things like this: "Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire." I want to leap around screaming about this sentence. What could be more simple and declarative and then (like the saucy minx he is) McCarthy switches what we expect by writing "world entire" instead of "entire world." Instead of sentiment, we get something that edges closer to...bones? The wages of truth? I don't even know what I'm talking about obviously, but such a simple thing and it makes his language remote, knowable and yet infinitely vast and frightening. He frightens me, literal chills.

Also, his career is based around a private war against punctuation. Commas scar his soul, I assume. Or, oh wait, he's modeling it off of James Joyce. I'll try not to make fun of this because the man is a god and he should model whatever he wants with impunity.

---

Goal for today, or goals:

1. Decorate the tiny, prickly Christmas tree B. slaughtered in the woods and dragged back to civilization for me. I have no ornaments and only an old string of blue lights which may or may not contain high levels of LEAD (poisoning), depending on what report you read.

2. Wash dishes.

We're going to repeat that goal again:

3. WASH DISHES

It's time to stop living like a hobo monkey and instead be more like the adult of a more graceful species.

177: the lion king, also watering holes

Very few terrible things happen outside of grocery stores. This should be some kind of truth universally acknowledged. But to be clear: Everything bad in my life (including the death of the family dog) is probably linked to a grocery store, if did not in fact happen INSIDE a grocery store (Brother 1 running away and hiding in empty cardboard boxes, for instance. Remember that one, Mom? So much fun) Anyway.

Somehow, as God is my witness, grocery stores are disasters waiting to happen. Let's call it Watering Hole Syndrome. Everyone (except this one guy I know, apparently) goes to grocery stores, rich and poor alike. In more populous areas, the rich and poor can frequent different grocery stores and thus strengthen the dividing ditches. But in other places (here, for example) where there are really only two grocery stores (plus the co-op), rich and poor, dirty and clean, chained and free, all mingle in one messy human rat trap, jostling shoulders, exchanging communicable diseases. If you live here and you want to leave your work at the office, you should never go to grocery stores. You should plant a garden and raise your own food and never need anything like heavy whipping cream or cream of tartar or anything requiring you to go to a grocery store because a trip to the grocery store only ensures a continuation of the labor you thought you'd left behind at the office.

Grocery stores are fascinating places, like how the edges of cliffs are fascinating or state hospitals or roadkill or rainbows. I like grocery stores best when terrible things happen and I'm feverish or otherwise extremely ill.

Here's a story. It's not terrible. Just symptomatic of the Watering Hole.

I went to the grocery store. For reasons known only to someone else (not me), I went at 5 p.m.

5 p.m. is a magical time. It's the hour when everyone looks at each other, winks slyly, and says (in unison): "Hey, let's buy food." EVERYONE. AT THE SAME TIME. For real. This is why you never go to the grocery store at 5 p.m. It's generally accepted to be a Bad Idea. But I did. So be it. Also, there's this thing that happens sometimes when I'm in grocery stores. It's that I get really distracted and wander around and around and around the store, which was what I was doing when I turned down an aisle and heard:

Female voice: "WHAT? (expletive deleted) I didn't know you had a warrant out on you! (expletive deleted)"

Male voice: "I...(expletive deleted) When was this? (aside) I didn't know."

2nd Male voice (a little wearily, and trying to extricate himself from the conversation): "Now you know."

I came around the corner and a man and woman were furiously muttering at each other and moving away with a shopping cart and a second man was turning on his heel. I knew the second man. He works with parole. He saw me, smiled and gave a little wave.

"Do you ever get to leave your work?" I asked as I passed him clutching my laundry detergent like a Bible.

"Not really." And then, with a look of bemusement: "I have to find my cart. I'm not sure where it is. It's somewhere around here. I just had it."

On my way out, I narrowly avoided a slew of county employees and several secretaries from various agencies, plus a stream of petty criminals. Approaching the check out, I opted for the crazy-but-infinitely motherly cashier over the pretty young one who once sold me wine even though I didn't have my ID on me and she thought I was 17.

december

This was my Friday after-work-hike. I hope you're all appropriately jealous.