I get my advice from the advertising world

At what point do you throw the whiskey out the window and bellow (to no one in particular), "I'll abide no more of this tomfoolery. I'm moving to Montana!" Question mark.

Just do it. Just saying?

How do you come to that decision? What pinnacle of despair must one reach? Hypothetically, of course. Pinnacles being scarce among the sandstone and basaltic cliffs of this coast.

If I were to chart it out... but F. is opposed to time lines and plans. I could learn from this. He knows how plans make God's trigger finger jumpy.

I, however, like to lay out plans and can get easily carried away on a daydream, a detailed unraveling into the next 20 years where (on this very day, decades hence) I am scheduled to be sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch that simultaneously overlooks mountains and oceans while also being located in the remote middle of the United States. If all goes according to plan. I believe I also will be wearing burlap sacks and carrying a crossbow. Again, if all goes according to plan.

I'm baffled by the steps that lead up to a decision. I feel like I've stumbled into most things I've done and realized only later a decision was made. Most plans fall apart (God's got his revolver in the "at ready" position that scares police officers). Or they change direction in a way fit to give you whiplash. The plans I make are actually terrible, but they stack up nice (confession: I was once addicted to playing Tetris) and they do make sense. Truly.

I hate making decisions because I always choose the wrong line at a grocery store: behind the crazy coupon lady, next to the man in the kimono who pays for everything with pennies and rusted nails, in front of the meth addict on a bad day, with the only cash register operated by a foot pedal and a monkey. Clearly, I should not be entrusted with making decisions. I will step into a mess. But it's this sort of attitude, this fear of risk and change, that makes it possible to turn gray with age before you're thirty-five. I'm sure it also leads to kleptomania, hygiene issues and the inability to remember how to spell hygiene without computer spell check tools.

Stuff happens. Or, to be even more passive, incidents have been said to occur in altered ways.

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Can I get more vague? Ironic since only this morning I called out a police person for uttering something along the lines of, "We are working to establish a format in such a way that, down the road, we can better understand how to approach the situation and further our investigation." I started cackling once he said the word "format."

I'm trying to figure out how to lead an interesting life, having recently realized I will die (while I realize it, I still don't believe it). My mortality is like math: something I acknowledge must exist, but also something I can't ever really comprehend. There's so much out there I could do. I'm tired of doing things and staying places because it's comfortable (and therefore easy). Complacency will not be tolerated. Beatings will continue until morale improves. Etc.

Just a thought.

all my friends are talking about leaving, about leaving

To Mrs. P

My sister is moving to a tropical island paradise where she will languish in a life of untold drudgery and tears until she returns home years later, a warped and twisted ghost of the lovely woman she used to be. Or that's one version.

Also, my sister is moving. She is packing right now. I am not helping, but sometimes I say things like, "You don't need a pillow, just roll up a sweatshirt." And I'm reminded again how we're different people. I, in my mind (repeat: in my mind), aspire to a monk-like simplicity full of physical discomfort, one pair of dirty jeans and "putting up with stuff." L. is not the opposite of this. I.e. unbridled consumerism tempered by nothing but the availability of money -- she's not like that at all. But she does give me that Look (kind of like the Tone we're always complaining my dad takes with us during serious discussions. He denies this. Likely, L. denies the Look). That Look says to me that I'm trying to get attention by being Noble and I should stop because it's Annoying. Probably she's right.

Now we're eating PEZ candies from a Thor PEZ dispenser. I have caught one flung at my head. Now Sara has arrived in her (I will call it) sexy sexy blue dress. She has allowed me to call it this.

I'm on vacation this week, which means I squashed two week's worth of work into last week to justify not working today through Friday. Except that's a lie, because I worked today. So far though it's the best Monday I can remember. I'm trying to plan a wilderness camping trip and (in my mind, again) I plan to leave for it tomorrow. I also plan to drag at least one brother kicking and screaming along with me... mostly for protection against wildlife that might otherwise be tempted to chomp on my soft neck and flay the flesh from my bones. I need to present a more threatening front.

Here's how I figure it. Two grown people: threat level is a screaming red with a hint of orange. Safety level: pristine. One grown woman alone: dull gray, like the color of my pickled intestines on a bear's mantelpiece next his other kill trophies. Safety level: shot to hell. Or, if you prefer, heck.

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

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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

#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.

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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.

#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.