Category: General

Busy, busy, busy! I’m not normally like this, I swear. But I didn’t like it when I wasn’t busy, so having a lot of stuff to do is a good thing, a happy thing. It’s what I’ve been working towards for a while now.

Last night I met my youngest nephew after work (me) and school (him) and had dinner – pizza, naturally – and saw a movie that his parents have no interest in seeing, “Resident Evil: Extinction”. Seeing the movie with a teenager helps me see how silly and light these movies are. Yes, I just called a movie about a bio-engineered super weapon in the form of Milla Jovovich kicking zombie ass “silly and light”. Zombie dogs are nothin’. This time around there are zombie crows. OK, so the movie steals from a wide variety of sources, like Hitchcock’s “The Birds”, or the Mad Max movies, or even other zombie movies. Having someone with the same sense of humor to lean over and whisper “they should have shot that zombie in the head!” (they really should know better) and getting an enthusiastic response back makes the whole evening so much more entertaining.

This evening I’m going to my second-oldest nephew’s wedding reception. The actual wedding was a month or more ago, in Lake Tahoe, with just his and her immediate family; the reception for the full sets of families is being hosted at the Bridgeport Brewery in NW Portland. (G’head and click on that link – as of my posting there’s a PHP error. Now that’s classy.) My nephew works for one of the beer distributors and that means that the beer is going to be free. Yes, free as in beer. I invited Tracy and her daughter as my guests, and the nephew in question is somehow related to Wecker, the notorious blogger of family and memories, so he shall be attending as well. Another fun evening!

As if all that wasn’t enough for a full weekend, I’ve got three, count ’em, three events on Sunday! Not sure I’ll make them all but I’m going to hit two out of three.

In the morning, is the Race for the Cure 5K, the annual benefit for breast cancer and breast cancer survivors. It’s one of the largest races of the year in Portland. Boobies are awesome and they put a smile on most everyone’s face, so I’m proud to do my part to preserve this endangered resource.

Sunday afternoon I’m hoping to attend Earl Blumenauer’s Town Hall, 1 PM at the Hollywood Theater. A month or so ago I emailed Blumenauer about starting, just starting, with impeachment of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Rep. Blumenauer, or his staff, sent back an email after several weeks. The upshot of his statement came in two parts: first, that impeachment requires a lot of investigation before Congress can proceed, and second, that the current administrations statements on the record in front of Congress and in the press do not already demonstrate an incredible lack of respect for the rule of law in this country. Needless to say, I could not disagree more strongly, and I suspect I am not alone. Let’s see if I, and others, can get that message through to this cowardly Democratic Congress.

Finally, Sunday evening will be spent with more family as we celebrate my sister’s husband’s birthday. Damn. He got an iPhone for his birthday. How lucky is that?

Yesterday was not “Dress Like A Pirate Day”.

But if you wanna dress like a pirate, I’ve found a place for you.

I wonder if they take American Express?

Apropos of a conversation I had at work, I would just like to state for the record that I miss Gilda Radner.

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People, people, people. Please.

I’m not going to call anyone out, but listen. It’s not dress like a pirate, write like a pirate, or any variation thereof.

It’s Talk Like A Pirate Day.

From the official FAQ:

Q. What do I wear on Talk Like a Pirate Day?

A. You know, the Pirate Guys get this question a lot, so pardon us if we sound just a little testy.

It’s TALK like a Pirate Day, not DRESS like a pirate.

You can certainly dress up in pirate garb if you want to, but that seems like a lot of trouble to us. Besides, there already is a Dress Like a Pirate Day. It’s called Halloween. We are not huge fans of costume parties (well, maybe we’re huge, but we’re not fans) and tend to go with what’s comfortable.

Ol’ Chumbucket is partial to Hawaiian shirts, the gaudier the better, while Cap’n Slappy prefers the “classic look,” i.e., any T-shirt he finds in his laundry that doesn’t smell too obvious.

If ye’re still at a loss, visit our Pirate Booty store at cafepress.com, where ye’ll find a wide variety of excellent garb to help ye commemorate International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

So get with the talking, already. Sheesh.

I’m in an early Elton John mood today.

Goodbye, yellow brick road, rocket man (I think it’s gonna be a long, long time); someone saved my life tonight.javascript:void(0)
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Bear with me. I just need a day or two to work this out of my system.

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Don’t worry. I’m channeling it all into creative energy. Writing, mostly. Isn’t that what a muse is for, after all?

There is a lot of confusion in my head over my first kiss. You’d think that I would remember such a singular, emotional moment. And yet, the actual moment of my lips on hers is gone. All that’s left is the events surrounding the actual kiss, the sight of her face, the warmth of the sun, the smell of the tall grass in which we hid, the sounds of the wind through that tall grass, and the tension in my chest that felt as though my heart was going to burst out of my ribcage.

I can see her brown hair, long, past her tanned shoulders. I can mimic, now, the pose my body took in the moment immediately after – sitting, leaning back, partially rolled over on one side, my left arm holding me up. The memories are strong of the precise way my muscles and skeleton were arranged. I couldn’t tell you if any of the other elements of that memory were accurate or not, however. I can’t even recall her name – it might have been Patty, or Heidi. The field of grass in which my memory of the events surrounding my first kiss – that may or may not have been next door to a church, or subsequent events and re-rememberings or re-tellings of the story may have altered all that beyond the original imprinting, erasing the details and overlaying them with new, fictional, half-remembered details.

I must have been young, because another thing that I am nearly certain about was that the kiss took place when my family lived in Kalama, Washington, so it had to have taken place before I entered 3rd Grade. That would make me, what?, 8 or younger? Yes, I was a precocious child. I definitely remember trying to kiss Heidi Foster, Kenny Foster’s sister, in Kindergarten or maybe 1st Grade and shocking my teacher, and I snuck under the cafeteria table at lunchtime to kiss Patty’s knee, and that was absolutely at Kalama Elementary School. But before those two events, I remember laying in the tall grass with the brunette girl, and kissing. And the two later, clumsier attempts may have lent the names of the girl to the first one.

I remember thinking about kissing the brunette girl. And such a feeling of excitement and shame is attached to that memory, surely I must have carried out the thought?

I kissed her.

I’m sure of it.

As sure as I can be of a memory that has tattered and torn over the past 35 or more years, becoming like lace, only less patterned. A translucent memory of a warm golden-lit afternoon in tall grass with a brunette girl.

Only one kiss. I think it was all we had time for, because another feeling that accompanies this particular near-remembrance is that of others, searching for us. A game of hide-and-seek, perhaps? Or is that sought-after feeling just residual guilt for the forbidden kiss she and I shared?

My first kiss. And followed, apparently, by two other, lesser attempts. And then…

…long years of no, or next to no, more kissing. I remember a bloody nose from a buddy whom I thought was a friend. I remember gasping for air after having completely failed to breach the other line in a game of Red Rover. I remember crush after crush, all unrequited, for many more brunette girls, down through the years, until eventually, in high school, kissing Amy Lincoln, in the park behind the library, over and over again, and finally, after a decade, feeling again the warm press of lips against mine, and mingling breaths with a woman who also wanted to kiss me back.

One time a couple of years ago, I was dating a woman who was a serious runner. Like Hood-to-Coast, competitive, train hard all the time, 6:00 mile, runner. I was not so into running, but at the time I had several friends who were also into running, and I had a gym membership that I used several times a week, and once in a while I would go out running with my girlfriend or with my friends. I was always the slowest one but I had some fun with it.

So it was summer, and it was a month or two before Hood-to-Coast, and one morning my girlfriend and I got up early, packed some food, and went for a hike up by Multnomah Falls. We started at the bottom and got to the top of the falls, which was the highest I’d ever been on those trails. It was fun, but since I’d been getting more and more fit, and she was, as I said, a serious runner, so we checked the maps (she had maps) and decided to go up to Devil’s Rest and back. We made good time, and enjoyed each other’s company. But once we reached there, and snacked a bit… I still wanted to go further. But she was still training for H2C and wasn’t sure. We hiked down a bit, and came to a crossroads.

And I talked her into going further, up to the top of Larch Mountain.

She checked the maps and figured that would make our total loop over 19 miles. I said that was less than a marathon and since it’s just walking it would be OK. She said that it’s not walking, it’s hiking, and we’d be going up and down steep trails. But she agreed, because I was so enthusiastic.

But she got quiet for that section of the trip. In fact, she pulled out her music player (it wasn’t an iPod – I had an iPod but she had some other brand) and spent the rest of the hike up listening to her music. I thought it was a bit rude but the scenery was fantastic. Have you ever been up there? Amazing waterfalls…

We got to the top, and broke out our lunch. She’d thoughtfully packed beer (Fat Tire – her favorite) and we toasted our hike. She took of for a short 10 minute run, and then we packed up and headed down.

A couple of miles down, she had her headphones on and was behind me. I saw some movement off to my right, uphill, back in the woods. It was black, which stood out, even in the heavy shadows of the trees. I stopped.

It was a bear. A black bear. Ambling along, parallel to the trail. I wasn’t sure what to do. Was it dangerous? Would it ignore us? I stopped.

I turned around and whispered to my girlfriend. She gave me a frustrated look, and plucked her earbuds out of her ears. “What?”

“Bear,” I whispered again, and pointed.

It was gone.

She shrugged, said, “Sure,” and kept walking. She didn’t believe me! The bear had been right there, not 100 feet away! She’d missed it, completely.

I’ve always wanted to go back on those trails. Only with someone less… y’know… bitchy.

I knew that the evening, a dinner hosted by new friends, had not taken an eerie twist when she smiled, stood up, and said, “Well, here, let me show you my knife” and I did not run away screaming.

Twin Paradox coffee is my favorite coffee in Portland. Even though they just brew Portland Roasting Company coffee.