Sister Laura Graduates. For which we travel to Idaho. I asleep sleep in the back on a mattress. Illegal.
The mattress, ft. Caleb
The sad state of many of the photos I took, dark and/or blurry
Documentation
Sister Laura
Sunday, July 10, 2011
maybe a car will come along
Haven't had much time or want to write blog posts. So, pictorially, here's what happened in May.
Sister Laura Graduates. For which we travel to Idaho. I asleep sleep in the back on a mattress. Illegal.
The mattress, ft. Caleb
The sad state of many of the photos I took, dark and/or blurry
Documentation
Sister Laura
Sister Laura Graduates. For which we travel to Idaho. I asleep sleep in the back on a mattress. Illegal.
The mattress, ft. Caleb
The sad state of many of the photos I took, dark and/or blurry
Documentation
Sister Laura
Thursday, June 30, 2011
assortment
Is it any wonder why we all leave home?
People say, "I knew you when you were six years old"
And you say, "But I've changed, I've changed, I've changed, I've changed."
---
On the side of a train passing me in Eugene while I waited next to the tracks three or four years ago I saw graffiti-ed: "Everyone I know who I love is dead or loves someone else." And I tried to identify. Probably I was silly enough and lonely enough to think I could connect myself to such a sad, silent sentence. What I want to write next is: "That I know better now." Well, maybe.
T. told me on the phone last Saturday about a friend he has who will deny all sadness, telling himself (when he is sad) that someone out there has it worse. Therefore, this friend concludes, his sadness is invalid, something to be thrown out. T. hates when people do things like this. "Own your own pain," he said, before adding (for the shock value), "It's okay to feel like it's the worst thing since the Holocaust."
One thing covering the courts beat has taught me is that you shouldn't own other people's sadness, although there is a time to be sympathetic and, for me, a time to absorb it into my own body so I can write about it and ask the right questions. But, bottom line, if you start stealing sadness you'll run the risk of being really obnoxious and/or going crazy. Also, it's not yours.
It almost feels like aging is about figuring out what is yours and what is not yours. I stack what is mine into piles I can decipher and I am more tribalistic than some people I know, relying heavily on the group for interpretation, raised as I was in a village sort of church.
---
It's too cold in this old apartment and the bread won't rise. So I've put the dough in loaf pans and tucked the pans into my electric blanket. See what comes with the morning. Hope for giant breads.
---
PS. After I posted this entry, Blogger shot up an ad on my page that read: "Is Despair Your Daily Bread?" Which proves just how creepy the internet is.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
209: stalinist oranges
I'd been at the fire an hour and had talked my way across the police and fire "do not cross" tape and everyone was worried about the power lines that swooped from the apartment complex, threatened by flames and smoke, to the pole across the street. One sergeant had already descended like the wrath of God upon two pushy people who had hopped the yellow tape and set up camp in a front yard to get a better view and were, incidentally, directly under the power lines.
Meanwhile smoke billowed and flames leaped. Or so I was told. The fire engine was in my way so I have most of this on faith. Neighbors and residents were clustered together on the sidewalk, cell phones strapped to their cheeks, holding babies, yelling at their wayward children. A firefighter revved up a chainsaw.
Then the mail lady, wearing her Pacific Theater-style silly white hat and blue shorts, a mailbag strapped across her chest, walked down the sidewalk. Her stride did not slacken as she approached the do not cross lines. It was as if she didn't even notice how her legs lifted to carry her over the tape. It was as though the tape did not exist. Bah! What is tape when you work for the federal government? When local police can't even enter your building to kill a murderer who still has the bloody knife clenched between his teeth unless they have been deputized by the U.S. Marshall? Again I say "Bah!"
She delivered mail to the first house. She delivered mail to the second house. She continued around the orange cones, over more police tape, past baffled policemen, firefighters and volunteer emergency responders and -- lo -- delivered mail to the third house. Then, she turned to the fiery apartment complex and would have (as heaven is my witness) delivered mail there too if everyone around her hadn't suddenly come to their senses and ordered her away.
Nothing -- not rain or sleet or snow or apparently electrical fires -- can stop the U.S. post.
---
Hope any of you who are still out there reading this are well. It's been nice to be gone, but now it's nice to be back. I deleted my Facebook account recently and that feels grand although it would feel even more grand if I could actually delete it. Because when I say delete, I really mean "deactivate" since Facebook doesn't let you get rid of anything. If I want it back (as if I'd never left) all I have to do is type in my e-mail address and password. So long as the e-mail is still up and working, Facebook comes back. Facebook may be the devil. By which I mean Satan.
Maybe Facebook has horocruxes. I just need to find them all and destroy them. It's one plan anyway.
Meanwhile smoke billowed and flames leaped. Or so I was told. The fire engine was in my way so I have most of this on faith. Neighbors and residents were clustered together on the sidewalk, cell phones strapped to their cheeks, holding babies, yelling at their wayward children. A firefighter revved up a chainsaw.
Then the mail lady, wearing her Pacific Theater-style silly white hat and blue shorts, a mailbag strapped across her chest, walked down the sidewalk. Her stride did not slacken as she approached the do not cross lines. It was as if she didn't even notice how her legs lifted to carry her over the tape. It was as though the tape did not exist. Bah! What is tape when you work for the federal government? When local police can't even enter your building to kill a murderer who still has the bloody knife clenched between his teeth unless they have been deputized by the U.S. Marshall? Again I say "Bah!"
She delivered mail to the first house. She delivered mail to the second house. She continued around the orange cones, over more police tape, past baffled policemen, firefighters and volunteer emergency responders and -- lo -- delivered mail to the third house. Then, she turned to the fiery apartment complex and would have (as heaven is my witness) delivered mail there too if everyone around her hadn't suddenly come to their senses and ordered her away.
Nothing -- not rain or sleet or snow or apparently electrical fires -- can stop the U.S. post.
---
Hope any of you who are still out there reading this are well. It's been nice to be gone, but now it's nice to be back. I deleted my Facebook account recently and that feels grand although it would feel even more grand if I could actually delete it. Because when I say delete, I really mean "deactivate" since Facebook doesn't let you get rid of anything. If I want it back (as if I'd never left) all I have to do is type in my e-mail address and password. So long as the e-mail is still up and working, Facebook comes back. Facebook may be the devil. By which I mean Satan.
Maybe Facebook has horocruxes. I just need to find them all and destroy them. It's one plan anyway.
Monday, April 18, 2011
#208: stories
What a weird day, piloted on one hour and 30 minutes of sleep (12 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. and then off to Portland then turnaround come back again to be at work in Astoria by 7:30 a.m. The moonset was lovely and the sunrise beautiful). I don't think I'm tired but it's like when they're drilling in your mouth at the dentist's office and though you can't feel the pain, you know it's going on. So. I don't feel tired, but I know I must be. Deep down. Like maybe in my ankles? Kidney? Something. I don't remember being this moody since...well, while we're being honest, I guess it hasn't been that long. Since the bail hearing probably when the victim's autopsy report came out and I felt like throwing up and kicking things.
Here's a teaser of what I wrote for today's paper. This is a test to see if you want to keep on reading... Let me know if you don't. I learn from this. I'm curious.
<><><>
When 10-month-old Kaiya Maclay sees a photo of her mother, her eyes widen, her mouth opens to form a perfect oval. She pushes her tongue out against her gums.
“That’s her excited face,” says grandmother Judy Bleecker.
If it’s a photo Kaiya has seen many times before, she will make that face and dance, waving her arms and kicking her legs.
She’s old enough now to understand that the people in the photographs aren’t alive. She sees her mother’s picture and knows it’s only a picture. The real person is somewhere else.
But if Kaiya is shown a photograph of her mother that she’s never seen before, she’ll look at it intently then take it in her hands and turn it around to peer at the back.
She is looking for Jess Maclay, but she can’t find her.
Maclay, 30, a caseworker with Clatsop Community Action, died in a car accident Sunday morning, Feb. 20.
The car she was driving hit a patch of ice on U.S. Highway 26. She lost control, spun across both lanes and smashed into a fire truck parked on the side of the road.
It was the third car accident to happen at that exact spot that morning.
Emergency responders cut Jess, her husband TJ Maclay and their daughter Kaiya out of the car.
Jess was taken by helicopter to Portland where she was pronounced dead soon after arrival.
Here's the FULL STORY.
Here's a teaser of what I wrote for today's paper. This is a test to see if you want to keep on reading... Let me know if you don't. I learn from this. I'm curious.
<><><>
When 10-month-old Kaiya Maclay sees a photo of her mother, her eyes widen, her mouth opens to form a perfect oval. She pushes her tongue out against her gums.
“That’s her excited face,” says grandmother Judy Bleecker.
If it’s a photo Kaiya has seen many times before, she will make that face and dance, waving her arms and kicking her legs.
She’s old enough now to understand that the people in the photographs aren’t alive. She sees her mother’s picture and knows it’s only a picture. The real person is somewhere else.
But if Kaiya is shown a photograph of her mother that she’s never seen before, she’ll look at it intently then take it in her hands and turn it around to peer at the back.
She is looking for Jess Maclay, but she can’t find her.
Maclay, 30, a caseworker with Clatsop Community Action, died in a car accident Sunday morning, Feb. 20.
The car she was driving hit a patch of ice on U.S. Highway 26. She lost control, spun across both lanes and smashed into a fire truck parked on the side of the road.
It was the third car accident to happen at that exact spot that morning.
Emergency responders cut Jess, her husband TJ Maclay and their daughter Kaiya out of the car.
Jess was taken by helicopter to Portland where she was pronounced dead soon after arrival.
Here's the FULL STORY.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
#207 instrument
This is where all my free time and certainly a good stack of my money has gone recently. M. started calling it my boyfriend.
I felt a lot of guilty for casually laying it out on the carpet like this so I could take pictures. Yes, I am in love.... like Disney Cinderella singing "So this is love, mmmhhm mmhmm, so this is what makes life divine." And I do only play it while dressed up in a lot of gauze with a boomerang on my head:
But it's not that it's just pretty (although it is) and fits my arm-to-torso ratio quite nicely and sounds fantastic (it does)... It's that it also looks like this: (Hmmm. Don't know how well you can see. Bad photographer)
This guitar has been played and dinged up and carried around and loved. I like that best.
Yesterday, in a car, we were talking about houses because Marta and Matty were looking at houses to buy last week. The last house they looked at was a dirty little hole on a fantastic tract of land. The minute Marta set foot in the house, she wanted to leave, she said.
"I don't believe in spirits or anything like that, but there was something nasty and bad about this house," she said. By which she meant, Matty clarified, it was a place where someone had been hurt, molested, beaten. It had that feel.
I think about places we have left -- for all time, for a little while -- and how a house smells strange and musty when you come back from camping, how the yard has grown up and the blackberries have started to take over in a hostile way, how one time the faucet let loose a stream of brown water.
I think how hospital rooms will always be hospital rooms: places of blood and medicine, the stinking skins and bodies and wounds mixed with the smell of disinfectant, rubbing alcohol. Death and birth, different sorts of pain.
I think how we know when places and things have been loved and cared for, and conversely, when we are in a place of terrible actions. It must be something we can smell but could never name. Like how I know a crisis is coming between me and another person, but I only realize at the last minute that I know and have known for a long time. We pick up on so much and only a quarter of it we ever realize consciously.
I felt a lot of guilty for casually laying it out on the carpet like this so I could take pictures. Yes, I am in love.... like Disney Cinderella singing "So this is love, mmmhhm mmhmm, so this is what makes life divine." And I do only play it while dressed up in a lot of gauze with a boomerang on my head:
But it's not that it's just pretty (although it is) and fits my arm-to-torso ratio quite nicely and sounds fantastic (it does)... It's that it also looks like this: (Hmmm. Don't know how well you can see. Bad photographer)
This guitar has been played and dinged up and carried around and loved. I like that best.
Yesterday, in a car, we were talking about houses because Marta and Matty were looking at houses to buy last week. The last house they looked at was a dirty little hole on a fantastic tract of land. The minute Marta set foot in the house, she wanted to leave, she said.
"I don't believe in spirits or anything like that, but there was something nasty and bad about this house," she said. By which she meant, Matty clarified, it was a place where someone had been hurt, molested, beaten. It had that feel.
I think about places we have left -- for all time, for a little while -- and how a house smells strange and musty when you come back from camping, how the yard has grown up and the blackberries have started to take over in a hostile way, how one time the faucet let loose a stream of brown water.
I think how hospital rooms will always be hospital rooms: places of blood and medicine, the stinking skins and bodies and wounds mixed with the smell of disinfectant, rubbing alcohol. Death and birth, different sorts of pain.
I think how we know when places and things have been loved and cared for, and conversely, when we are in a place of terrible actions. It must be something we can smell but could never name. Like how I know a crisis is coming between me and another person, but I only realize at the last minute that I know and have known for a long time. We pick up on so much and only a quarter of it we ever realize consciously.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
oh little grasshopper, it's not so bad
My mother used to say to us, "Oh little grasshopper, it's not so bad" and she'd say it in this voice -- think Old World peasant comes to the New World, making fun of a freshly-arrived-off-the-boat neighbor's accent.
Being adult is not what was advertised, but it's not so bad (little grasshopper). Keep calm and carry on.
Miles and I used to tease Hannah and L when they played "teenagers" when we were all around 8 or 10 years old and raggedy like kids used to be back then in the good old days, the golden years, angel.
"What are you going to do when you ARE teenagers?" we'd demand, swinging above them in the front yard tree. "Play 'adult'?"
We were quick and witty then.
We were never going to grow up and we barely knew what death was, not even in theory.
That changed and was in fact always changing even though I didn't know it until later. It comes to us in pieces, an inkling that someone lied to us except probably nobody did. It might have started when my uncle tipped me over the edge of the coffin to look at my lemon-tinted dead great grandfather. Or it might have been earlier, when I saw how a dead spider curls into the shape of a miniature birdcage, all the breath knocked out of it. And there is always sleep.
In an old movie, the villain stands on a wasteland beach, looking out to the sea, and is asked by a hero why he is not sleeping. They will need strength for the days ahead. To which the villain replies, "I don't sleep. I hate those little slices of death."
I'm more aware of how food dies now that I'm an adult. But that's a trick. It's already dead. So I guess I'm more aware of rot. How food rots and needs to be dealt with all the time, just like how the body must constantly be cleaned and the carpet vacuumed or else, uncleaned, the body will smell and, unvacuumed, the small corpses of misguided pill bugs will pile up along the molding and under the heater. Pill bugs enter my apartment to die. They trundle across the carpet, appearing out of nowhere, creepy and crustaceanous.
This must be dealt with. Adulthood looks like a series of "dealing with." For example, I must deal with my wisdom teeth, but first I must deal with a tooth improperly filled by a dentist then I can deal with sending x-rays to the surgeon and organizing time to be knocked out on drugs and drooling blood into my pillow. Then I can deal with all the stories I am behind on, but actually I should deal with those first in case I respond badly to the painkillers. Then there are the dishes. I'd hate to die in the night with dirty dishes everywhere. And the empty beer bottles from the night people came over for dinner. I will die in a clean house. Also I should deal with laundry and the clutter in my closet. And I should do something about the mismatched curtains in my bedroom, put up something to block the light out more. And I should look into a five year plan and open a savings account and stop relying on memory for so many things because every day memory pulls a tougher bargain: "I'll let you remember That, but I'm taking all of Monday." Oh memory, you jerk. Then there are other decisions: sign up for the 401 K? Stop eating bread? What is that lump on the back of my head (don't worry, mom)? Sleep now? Sleep later? Eat now? Eat later? Eat what? Call that person? Drop the ball? Keep on juggling. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Laura: Move to Hawaii. Do it.
Being adult is not what was advertised, but it's not so bad (little grasshopper). Keep calm and carry on.
Miles and I used to tease Hannah and L when they played "teenagers" when we were all around 8 or 10 years old and raggedy like kids used to be back then in the good old days, the golden years, angel.
"What are you going to do when you ARE teenagers?" we'd demand, swinging above them in the front yard tree. "Play 'adult'?"
We were quick and witty then.
We were never going to grow up and we barely knew what death was, not even in theory.
That changed and was in fact always changing even though I didn't know it until later. It comes to us in pieces, an inkling that someone lied to us except probably nobody did. It might have started when my uncle tipped me over the edge of the coffin to look at my lemon-tinted dead great grandfather. Or it might have been earlier, when I saw how a dead spider curls into the shape of a miniature birdcage, all the breath knocked out of it. And there is always sleep.
In an old movie, the villain stands on a wasteland beach, looking out to the sea, and is asked by a hero why he is not sleeping. They will need strength for the days ahead. To which the villain replies, "I don't sleep. I hate those little slices of death."
I'm more aware of how food dies now that I'm an adult. But that's a trick. It's already dead. So I guess I'm more aware of rot. How food rots and needs to be dealt with all the time, just like how the body must constantly be cleaned and the carpet vacuumed or else, uncleaned, the body will smell and, unvacuumed, the small corpses of misguided pill bugs will pile up along the molding and under the heater. Pill bugs enter my apartment to die. They trundle across the carpet, appearing out of nowhere, creepy and crustaceanous.
This must be dealt with. Adulthood looks like a series of "dealing with." For example, I must deal with my wisdom teeth, but first I must deal with a tooth improperly filled by a dentist then I can deal with sending x-rays to the surgeon and organizing time to be knocked out on drugs and drooling blood into my pillow. Then I can deal with all the stories I am behind on, but actually I should deal with those first in case I respond badly to the painkillers. Then there are the dishes. I'd hate to die in the night with dirty dishes everywhere. And the empty beer bottles from the night people came over for dinner. I will die in a clean house. Also I should deal with laundry and the clutter in my closet. And I should do something about the mismatched curtains in my bedroom, put up something to block the light out more. And I should look into a five year plan and open a savings account and stop relying on memory for so many things because every day memory pulls a tougher bargain: "I'll let you remember That, but I'm taking all of Monday." Oh memory, you jerk. Then there are other decisions: sign up for the 401 K? Stop eating bread? What is that lump on the back of my head (don't worry, mom)? Sleep now? Sleep later? Eat now? Eat later? Eat what? Call that person? Drop the ball? Keep on juggling. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Laura: Move to Hawaii. Do it.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
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