Category: General

Walking down the crowded sidewalk in Moreland on a perfect Friday evening. Past the spicy Asian restaurant, under the marquee of the decades old neighborhood theater with the smell of actual buttered popcorn. Moms and dads and kids out walking around, groups of smokers sitting on the benches outside bars, clinking their glasses, laughing hello, hugging goodbye.

My fedora and I walked along. My stomach was full of stir-fried green beans and chicken and delicious chili sauce. My head was full of indecision as to which bar to spend my money in tonight.

Ahead of me on the sidewalk was a woman; blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail, tanned shoulders inked with red roses with soft white cotton hanging from spaghetti straps to cover curvaceous breasts and a flat tummy, her ass rhythmically moving under worn blue denim, moved by dainty pedicured feet in flip flops. A beautiful woman.

And a mom. Her three young children, all between the ages of 3 and 6, I think, scampered and shouted and strolled along in a youthful cloud of energy. Two girls and a boy, in generic Gap Kids togs, blue and red and brown and green.

The mom was walking along at about the same speed as me, but just enough out of sync that I wanted to either speed up to pass or slow down to avoid the appearance of following. Considering her butt in those jeans, I slowed down. I was in no hurry.

The tallest girl child, in a dress with dark brown hair, stayed near her mom’s left hand. I heard no words or sound from her at all, and then her mom looked down at her and said, “Your attitude! You’re really pissing mommy off right now, you know that, right?”

Again, I heard nothing from the little girl in response. I heard no crying or sobs, no backtalk. Either she was too quiet for me to hear or her response was entirely body language which I couldn’t see from my position several yards back.

But mommy continued. “All through dinner you gave me nothing but attitude. I’m sick of it. You need to straighten up.” Her voice was cutting and sarcastic. The little girl continued walking. Her head was not bowed down but it also wasn’t raised up in defiance. Her lack of affect affected me deeply.

The two other kids had danced ahead, and now mommy and daughter stopped next to a giant white sports-utility vehicle parked next to the sidewalk. The mommy shouted at the other two to come back, and as soon as they heard mommy’s voice they did so, excuses tumbling out of their mouths. “We saw the car, mommy, but it was locked!”

“Uh-huh,” mommy said as she dug out her keychain fob, “See that?” she pointed, with her chin, at where the two had been playing. “That’s a driveway. You could have been hit by a car.” She sounded to my, now disapproving, ears, to be entirely non-chalant to the fate she was describing.

She pushed the button on the fob, beep!, and the giant white vehicle’s horn beeped in response. Kids opened unlocked doors and climbed in and mommy walked around to the street side to get in.

And then the truck’s horn beeped again. And again. It was a pattern, a warning, an alarm. The headlights, taillights and parking lights all flashed in time with the horn.

Mommy fumbled with the keychain fob – beep! – again and again – beep! – beep! – but the transportational alarm continued. Mommy climbed inside – at least part of the system was working since the doors were now open – but nothing silenced the honking horn.

I walked another half-block, waited my turn, and got some weekend spending money out of the ATM, then walked back past mommy and her children.

The horn continued honking.

Mommy’s brow was furrowed in anger and frustration.

I’m just some guy… but I think she deserved it… but the poor, poor kids didn’t deserve such a bitter (though beautiful) mother, I think.

Tomorrow I’m going to hop on my bike and ride it to the Old Spaghetti Factory in SoWhat, and sign up for the Pints to Pasta 10K. Then I’ll ride it home. Or maybe downtown or somethin’.

Sunday I’ll get up early, and ride my bike to the Old Spaghetti Factory so that I can run the Pints to Pasta 10K.

Whole lotta exercising going on this weekend. Should be fun.

I haven’t run a race since the Shamrock Run 5K earlier this year. I’m not expecting to be superfast. If I break a 10:00 per mile pace, I’ll be ecstatic. Mostly I just want to gauge my fitness. And drink beer and eat pasta. And hang out with other runners. And lose some weight. And not be in the house.

…I guess I do have a lot of goals.

Are Republicans just so tied up in their culture of victimization that they want to lose? They like being beaten up and made fun of, is that it? And I mean “beaten up” metaphorically, here.

I just can’t wrap my head around the idea, on top of the lousy messaging that the McCain campaign has been doing, that they just keep on making goofy amateurish mistakes. How many times has he undermined his own message?

• “John McCain is just regular folks… and yet he’s so rich he can’t remember how many houses his former mistress trophy wife has bought for him.”
• “John McCain is a proud Republican and has served in Congress for 25 years… so John McCain is the outsider maverick who’s going to be an agent of change.”
• “John McCain is a reformer who’s trying to clean up Washington… by flouting the campaign finance laws he himself helped to enact.”
• “John McCain stands for family values… which is why he had an affair with his first wife, dumped her and married his mistress.”
• “John McCain goes his own way… which is why he selected a far-right Christian woman for vice president in order to excite the far-right Christian base the Republicans have depended on for the last several decades.”
• “John McCain has the experience that Barack Obama doesn’t… so we’ve selected an unknown governor with less experience than Barack Obama to be our backup president.”

See? It’s like the McCain campaign wants to lose.

Which is the only way I can wrap my head around the continued, minor gaffes they make. Like showing a picture of a Hollywood middle school behind him during his speech last night. Whuuuuuh…?

Someone who doesn’t exist did not just email me to ask:

Q: “What did you have for lunch today, Brian?”

To which I respond: Alligator pizza, mofos!

It wasn’t all that great, actually (I didn’t care for the crispy noodles) but just eating alligator makes me feel more cool.

Many thanks to Deacon Duncan for beautifully expressing the simple and basic flaw that Christians have been attempting to avoid or rationalize away for centuries.

The God of the Bible simply does not show up in the world we see around us.

I can already hear the fum-fuhs and harrumphs as untold millions begin their practiced refutations and contradictions!

I’m going to set aside the overwhelming evidence of a world shaped by explainable causes and forces. I’m going to set aside the arguments against God’s existence on the basis of the existence of evil. I’m going to set aside the observance that there are multiple revealed religions in the world and in history, and since they all contradict each other, they can’t all be correct and therefore are probably all incorrect. Set aside all that and consider only two things: the world as described by the books of the Bible, and the world you see when you look out your window.

And then, answer me this: why doesn’t the world around us look like the world described in the Bible? Old Testament, New Testament, you name it. Compare the miracles, the plagues, the resurrections and prophecies in the Good Book with the weak, metaphorical, have-to-look-at-them-in-just-the-right-way-to-see-it “miracles” we have today? Why do prophets and fortune tellers today have such a poor record compared to the nearly-infallible ones in the Old Testament?

Sure, science can move enough water to enable people to cross what’s normally an impassable sea – with pumps, and electricity.

Why would a God that supposedly loves us, only reveal himself to a handful of Middle Eastern men (and maybe a few women), two thousand years ago?

If He was all-powerful and all-knowing, as the Bible itself claims, then why would He forsake the millions of human souls that existed prior to His series of revelations in Israel and surrounding regions? Why would He, by His own actions, doom countless people to His creation, Satan’s, clutches? Parents, let me ask you this: would you kill or torture one child to save another? No? Then why would you worship a being who has apparently done that very thing?

If God was infinite in power, He could very well appear to each of his followers, just as Saul of Tarsus said Jesus appeared to him.

If we could look at the world and see the concrete, not metaphorical, actions of God, intervening in world events… there would be no atheists.

But Jesus (or his biographers) taught a metaphorical way of looking at the world. He taught in parables, which are just fictional stories with a moral conclusion. He spoke in metaphors – Was Peter actually made of stone when Jesus said “Upon this rock I will build my church”? Um, no. No, he wasn’t. Sorry, even the Bible shows that Peter was just flesh and blood.

But modern fundagelical Christianity mistakes metaphors for reality. And in doing so, they miss the most obvious evidence for the non-existence of their God: the God described in their own holy books simply does not appear in the world in which they live.

Where did summer go?

Set aside Gov. Palin’s experience and judgment.

What does his choice of a vice-president have to say about Sen. John McCain’s judgement?

Did he choose an unknown “surprise” candidate simply to steal the news cycle away from one of the most important, historic speeches in modern history? Is this his attempt to say, “me, too! I can be historic!”

Sen. McCain appears to me to be acting like a spoiled 2 year old, out of jealousy.

Isn’t that already the kind of man we have in the White House? Do we want another four years of that kind of disaster?

I say “no”.

I will always remember exactly where I was when Sen. Hillary Clinton suspended the roll call count of delegates for the Democratic National Convention, and called for the party to nominate Sen. Barack Obama by acclamation, officially making Sen. Obama the first non-white presidential candidate for the United States of America.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCCm1A9bYUk&hl=en&fs=1]

I was sitting in a hospital room, with my sister, as she was waiting to find out if she was going to need surgery. In spite of her and my worries about her health, we were momentarily proud to be partisan Democrats, the only party in America currently capable of this decision.

Congratulations to the Democratic voters, and to my country, for making this historic moment happen. It’s not the end of an era. It’s the beginning. But I hope that it is a good step forward.

And congratulations to Sen. Barack Obama. Please make us proud to have chosen you.

PS: I hate hospitals.

I consider myself a writer. An unpublished one, but even so. I think in terms of story and plot and character. I try to structure my conversations into beginning, middle, end. I’ve attempted several novels. I dissect movies and TV shows with an eye towards the story being told.

I’ve lived in Portland, OR all my life. OK, some of my earliest years were spent in various parts of Washington state, and I did have that 8 month term of duty in Austin, TX. But I was born here, and the bulk of my life has been spent here. Me and my group of friends, years ago, decided that the best answer to the question “what’s your hometown?” is the town from which you graduated high school, and for me that would be Milwaukie, a suburb of Portland.

I love this city. I love its quirks, and its beauty. I love the parks, and hills, and coffee shops and strip clubs. I love Portland’s public spaces, like Pioneer Square and the Rose Quarter. I am vastly entertained by the local underculture, an intoxicating mix of left-wing, Vegan, strippers and bouncers and musicians and improv and theater and writers. I celebrate the fact that President Bush I called us “Little Beirut”. I love how it’s basically a big small town.

And having worked for Multnomah County for the past 9 years, and having various friends and family members employed by local government, I’ve got a pretty good grasp of how corrupt local politics is. It’s all about protecting business interests from any kind of social responsibility and increasing their profits. Maybe that’s true of other towns, too, but I can see the mechanisms and lines of power very clearly here. Mayors, commissioners, District Attorneys, state representatives, Federal representatives, all seem to get elected with the help of developers and the business associations.

Likewise, as a writer, I have my influences. If I had to give an elevator pitch about my personal ambition, I would say the following: “I write about Portland in the same way Carl Hiaasen writes about South Florida”. I can see the interaction between the high culture, the business and politics, with the low culture, the strip club owners and dive bar staff and musicians, and it fascinates me. When Phil Stanford pens another column about some retired beat cop trying to nail a known criminal and being stymied by the higher-ups, that’s red meat to me.

When a friend and fellow county employee is fired in order to cover-up the mis-use of contract workers as a scheme to funnel money into un-elected county managers… that’s both real-life and red meat for my writer’s brain.

So I’ve been trying to come up with a fictional, but realistic, plotline that I could use to explain and expand on how corruption works in Portland. And in the last couple of years, I sketched out a bare skeleton of a plot.

Basically, I envisioned a couple of mid-level managers in the county tax assessor’s office conspiring against a local, long-time fixture of a strip club. They would fudge the facts, and “find” a bunch of violations of the tax code, and pretend that back taxes were owed, and then use that leverage to force the strip-club owner to go bankrupt or sell the business to a local developer (who is working in cahoots with the county manager) at a loss. Then they’ll build a condo tower with claims of it being for “low-income housing” but in reality, making massive profits from the sales of those apartments. They’d use the construction to funnel money back into their own pockets with the use of contractors and kickbacks.

In my version of the story, fictionalized, of course, the bad guys would over-reach and end up killing someone who found out about the scheme. Maybe one of the strippers at the club is also a law student who digs into the problems the club owner is having. Maybe a shop steward at the county finds out. In any case, in my fictionalized version of Portland, the scheme is uncovered and upended, and the city takes a few steps towards cleaning up the influence of business and the puppetry of its civic leaders. Y’know, until next time.

So imagine how chagrined I am to find out that something very much like that appears to be happening: Is Commissioner Randy Leonard abusing his power to drive out “undesirable” businesses?

Is my book idea too late? Or will it be even more timely? Decisions… decisions…

Dante’s is a brick oven. I knew that, and yet, I still wanted to dress up a bit. Black jeans and a black t-shirt.

Considering it was The Retros I was there to see, an 80s New Wave cover band, along with Tracy, Gina, and Arlene, maybe I should have busted out my skinny tie. Sadly, time has not been kind enough to leave me the option of Big Hair – not without a wig.

But it wasn’t deathly hot inside. Just normally hot. And with plenty of water and booze (Bombay Sapphire and tonic for me, please) it was bearable.

For the record, the song that finally got me up out of my chair to dance was The Cure “Just Like Heaven”. Love that song.

Tracy had a headache most of the evening, but even she got up to dance eventually! I forget which song inspired her. Maybe she’ll chime in on the comments to remind me.

All that music reminds me of the summers right after I graduated high school, when Amy, Terry, Rod, Andy and I would spend weekend nights at the Blue Aardvark in downtown Portland, dancing and laughing and smelling like clove cigarettes (and Terry would actually smoke them). It was right out of a John Hughes movie, at least in my head. Sadly the club is no longer there. I think it’s a shoe store now.