A brief sunbreak

 I was one busy sonofabitch yesterday and didn't get to see or hear a moment of the inauguration of the 46th President. That was fine with me. I'm not a hopey-changey kind of guy. As you've probably noticed, I think my country is in a very dark place right now and, largely though the dogged efforts of "conservatives" is unlikely to get brighter anytime soon.

The mere fact that the nation was rid of the worst hominid ever to be elevated to its highest electoral office was enough for me.

When I got home last night, though, my Bride wanted to watch the ceremony, so I got to sit (well, mostly sit - the Little Cat demanded play, so I hauled out the jingle-ball-on-a-string that is Her favorite and spent much of the re-broadcast doing neko-jarashii as they'd say in Cat Samurai...) and watch the whole hour or so of lame speeches and political theater.

And then came Amanda Gorman.

And she was transcendent.

I'd read bits of her poem earlier in the day and had thought it was fine.

But in her own voice it was more that fine. It soared. It resounded.

It sang.

There will be dark and dirty, dangerous days ahead.

But every so often it is moments like her poetry that remind me that for there to be light there must be darkness. For there to be dawn there must be night. And that for there to be courage there must be fear, and the two must always be yoked together.

Amid all the refreshingly bland political mummery it took a slender young woman of color to remind me that even in defeat there is honor and glory in facing those fears and dangers bravely and with hope that the fight is worth fighting.

Or, as Gorman put it:

When day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid

The new dawn blooms as we free it

For there is always light,

if only we're brave enough to see it

If only we're brave enough to be it.

King of Rebels

The pablum "celebration" of Dr. King that typically appears today always pisses me off.

The man was nothing like the kindly saint of "civil rights" that usually appears in them. King wasn't some sort of foofy, kumbaya-singing pacifist. He was a hardass. He was a bombthrower. He was routinely condemned as a "communist" and a "public enemy". His "nonviolence" was a slit-eyed, cynical tactic that offered up the bodies of his troops to the racist thugs because he knew damn well that the Great American Public would seize on the slightest hint that the Rapacious Negroes were coming to Get Them to bury him and his cause.

He wasn't violent because violence wouldn't have worked, not because he was some sort of secular saint.

He also hated the sort of wealth-fellating and poor-bashing that the modern GOP so desperately represents.

The linked article is a cautionary tale of King's real views on things like equality, wealth, poverty, and the "American Dream" as opposed to the usual tepid encomiums of peace, love, and brotherhood that we're going to hear from radical reactionaries like Paul Ryan and whichever former Pravda stringer His Fraudulency trots out today; Dr. King would have fucked your shit up, wingnuts. He hated and despised everything you stand for.

And so do I.

The Cup and the Whiskey

Last night was an odd sort of an event for me and for the Green and White Army here in Portland.

Understand that our beloved Timbers have been dire this season. There has been heartbreak, there have been losses so foul that all memory of them should be buried at the bottom of a well at midnight, never to be recalled out of pure human dignity.

Our well-liked character of an original coach is gone, fallen to those same troubles. Any hopes for glory in the league or the Open Cup vanished far back in midsummer.

So for the little group that gathered at Portland's Rose and Thistle last night the expectations weren't high. Our team was playing on the road, where we had not won since LAST season, and against the Whitecaps of Vancouver B.C. who were playing for a spot in the postseason.

My own hope was that we would not disgrace ourselves as we had the previous match against Seattle.

But incredibly, improbably, on a screaming golazo from captain Jack Jewsbury, the Portland Timbers won at B.C. Place and won the 2012 Cascadia Cup, the local derby for bragging rights among the Pacific Northwest soccer clubs.

We will win nothing more. Next week we play the Western conference champions and then the Boys will go home for the season as our rivals, the clubs we defeated for Cascadia go on to play for the league championship. My team has a long and difficult winter to try and shake off the demons of this season and try and find a way forward for the next.

But that is for tomorrow, and sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.

Today is just for pure, unexpected, ridiculous joy.

The Portland Timbers have won the Cascadia Cup, and I sit here in the predawn darkness with a silly grin still pasted on my face breathing in the whiskey-scented air of serendipitous Glory.

Shagadelic, baby!

I'm continuing to gape in a droolingly embarrassing fashion at the incredible images coming out of China's anniversary party. The military parade is intriguing, as much for the costumery as anything. Here are the 1201st Women's Militia Battalion and Health Care Cooperative strutting their stuff down Tianenmen Square.I'm not sure what makes this so delightfully awful. Is it the pink little flirty, skirty "uniform"? The fact that the "girls" have a little teeny, weenie machine pistol instead of a big ol' AK-knockoff like the "boys"? Is it the Carnaby Street oh-so-very-Swinging-London white vinyl go-go boots?

Hard to say, but the commander of the parade troops is on record as saying that the parade was designed to drive home the transformation of the People's Liberation Army from a lumpish gang of armed peasants to a "high-tech, 21st-century" armed force. And I don't know about you, but NOTHING says "high-tech, 21st-century" to me like a pair of white vinyl go-go boots.

Small Step to Nowhere..?

I'm not immune to popular enthusiasms, and with that I note the 40th anniversary for the "small step for a man" that capped NASA's manned space program in 1969.I was not a particularly bright kid at the age of 12, and I remember the summer of '69 more for my mother's frenzied ranting at the Chicago Cubs on their way to their traditional September swoon in the year of the Miracle Mets than for the lunar landing.

And, really, after forty years, you have to look back - at least, some of us look back - and wonder; what the fuck?

Riley over at Bats Left/Throws Right pretty much nails it. The space program was born, grew, and died like a mayfly, in 1969, It didn't die because somehow we jacked the money to bomb Vietnam or give food stamps to Negroes.

"It died because it's damned near at the edge of what we might accomplish provided we threw everything we've got into it (and if we haven't learned from doing that several times over that the main thing it accomplishes is bankruptcy, then we've been paying even less attention than we appear to be), and means fucking nothing whatsoever to anyone above the mental age of eleven..."

The reality is that Einstein's Wall makes interstellar travel impractical unless you're willing to construct monstrous argosies that will carry, in effect, little Earths, voyaging for countless generations through the empty voids between the stars. Even assuming the idea was practical - and the ill-fated "Biosphere" experiments suggest that we are, at best, generations away from a workable model, no nation could afford it. Mars and Venus, the closest planetary objects to us, cannot support life, and the remaining planets are even worse.

Nope. We're stuck on this planet save for in the imagination of sci-fi fans, books and movies. The "moon shots" were a one-off, a vastly expensive, mildly entertaining bit of government pork thrown at the military, useful for collecting some rather valuable geologic data but otherwise sterile. The fact that there are mental ten-year-olds presently in elective office that seem to think that sending a human being to Mars is a good idea says more about our electoral process than it does about the value of the idea.

So I guess I understand why the "celebration" of the anniversary of Apollo 11's landing was so muted.

Who celebrates the puberty of a eunuch?

Update 7/21 pm: I want to hammer this home - I'm not saying this stuff just to be curmudgeonly. The IDEAL of space exploration, of humanity finding a way to the stars, is a terrific one. Not only for the pure knowledge and adventure of it - being confined to a single planet is begging for extinction. But here's my deal; why are we celebrating our piddly little "dream" of flag-waving Yankee Doodle moon shots? Why not dream REALLY big? An "Ark in Space", the real chance to give the human race a shot at a future beyond the lifetime of our star?

National space progams like the Apollo missions, IMO, are the problem, not the solution. They divide the human race, forcing nation to compete against nation, militarizing the space programs and condemning us to farting around near the Earth's orbit for the next ten generations.

The real dream is up there. But the groundwork for the dream is here, on Earth, and it involves moving beyond the Apollo-type missions to real, global cooperation and exploration and, yes, commercialization, of space.The day we see the launch of the "Nostromo" from Kaiser's orbiting shipyard near Ceres, with a commercial crew and funding from Reynolds Metals, will be the true culmination of the dream of space exploration. At that point we will truly be reaching out into space, rather than simply using it as a void through which to swing a fist.

Scariest. Jack-o-lantern. Ever.

So this weekend we went to visit our friends Brent and Janelle to carve pumpkins. Our friends provided a wonderful time, and lots of kid- and grown-up fun was had in the process.Here's a selection of the spooky jack-o-lanterns that resulted from everyone's artistry. I'm not sure which one I like the best, they're all cleverly different as an approach to what is scarey about life this Halloween.The only guest who isn't represented one way or another is little Missy, who loved her little pumpkin too much to let me hurt it; instead she carried it around like her wubbie until I gave up. She did enjoy drawing on the pumpkins with the Sharpie pen, though.I have to say that Brent's "Mutual of Omaha" pumpkin is my personal favorite, with the storm threatening the happy home with it's 360-degree rail fence. Not sure if the image is a metaphor for the mortgage crisis or a more direct depiction of a rare late October electrical stormThe other beauty is Janelle's "autumn flowers" pumpkin with the cleverly carved amoeba-like blooms draped over the side of the big orange squash. I think the scariness of her creation is more muted yet more ominous in its very obliquity, don't you think?And, of course, when you think "scarey" there's really only one thing that comes to mind in this electoral season. So, with utter horror, I give you "W, the Pumpkin".

Tradition

I am not a particularly nice man.

I'm not a particularly bad man, either, but generally I talk too much, my opinions are often rude, and I am caustic and immediate in my judgements. I am a fairly sloppy dresser, tend to disrespect authority and pretty much everything else, for that matter. I have been, by turns, a bad employee, an angry and difficult husband, a disobedient son and a faithless friend. While I have also been a loving father, a caring and affectionate spouse, a genuine pal, a diligent and responsible wage-earner, a sharply competent professional and a compassionate family member, this just balances the scale against the Bad Stuff.

Put both sides together and I'm about right on the mean for human attributes. Half devil, half angel, fully human, I guess.

But.

What I do own; what I have a complete lock, 100% pure-D monopoly on, is what you'd call "survivability". I'm just hardwired for survival. Something in me just doesn't want to die. You can kill me as easily as any other human, but my mind and body won't work with you on that.

I'm the guy, if I were in one of those 1980's made-for-TV movies, you know where the airliner goes down in the Andes and the wretched survivors, after spending endless, grueling days freezing, starving and dying of thirst finally feed off the corpses of the victims and, eventually, each other, gets hauled up to the rescue helicopter as the credits roll, burping gently?

I'm that guy.

I'm the guy who rolls past the four-car fatal accident with a glance and a grimace. Whose reaction to the explosion that destroys the office block around him is to ensure that he gets his expense receipts out of the drawer ahead of the fire. Who walks into the barracks room where the privates are watching "Faces of Death XIV: Too Gruesome For Anyone!" munching a burrito and exclaims amid the retching "Hey! I didn't know my old buddy and my girlfriend knew HOW to work a videocam!"

That's me.

Note: this is NOT a good thing.

For one thing, it makes it difficult for me to be truly human and truly empathetic. I am not good with the sick and the grieving, and I have an unpleasantly distant reaction to hurt and loss, more a longing sort of mild regret than truly tearing grief. I'm missing something very essential, some emotional accessibility that my system just doesn't have.

It works, in terms that it makes me a very emotionally and physically durable person. But there is something very...needed, missing in me to obtain this, and I am the poorer, the less...human...for it.

My beloved Mojo is, if anything, the exact opposite. When she gets hurt, or sick, she collapses. Grief and anger and worry tear at her.She has been depressive, clinically depressive, and has suffered through torments after the loss of our first child, and after the disruption of our first adoption, that I can literally not imagine.She also tends to "break down": she neglects herself, and her body takes its revenge by shutting down. If I were in the middle of a massive emotional crisis, my mind and body would force me to stop and eat, take a drink, nap. Mojo will push herself beyond that point and, finally, collapse.

Six years ago today we enjoyed a wonderful, joyous, splendid day.

The wedding we crafted and celebrated together, complete with our own vows, music, the celebrant of our choice, a reception at our beloved Overlook House catered by our favorite taqueria - we still mourn that they didn't feel okay with doing it out of the taco truck; we wanted a picture of Mojo in her wedding dress lined up with the other guests at the curb - and a honeymoon at one of our most secretive B&Bs.

It was, for lack of a better word, magical, full of the love we feel for each other with all of our friends around us.

Poor Mojo was so wired and so excited she literally forgot to eat ALL DAY.

Okay, I think she had two bites of wedding cake. Three. Tops.

So as we were leaving the B&B to get dinner that night her blood sugar crashed and so did she. We ended up eating at the first place we could get to, a NW Portland Cantonese greasy stick, nearly got our car towed away, and Mojo slept for the next ten hours straight. Ah, youth! Ah, romance!Ah, real life. It's SO not like a Hugh Grant romcom.

Fortunately, Mojo hates La Grant.

So I should have guessed that when my love said she had a headache last evening it wasn't just a figure of speech. We had spent a long, busy day, she'd been socializing and sipping wine and mommying and not eating or hydrating right. She didn't take her medication on time. So the poor girl crashed into a hideous migraine; we spent all morning at the doctor's office and she's knocked out in bed upstairs as I type this, a victim of our anniversary tradition of Mojolicious' distress.

I'm sorry, lovey, that you feel so poorly, and that I am so distressingly chipper. I hope you feel better soon.

But on this day of iron and chocolate, I will whisper into your sleeping ear:

Now, as in Tullia's tomb, one lamp burnt clear,
Unchanged for fifteen hundred year,
May these love-lamps we here enshrine,
In warmth, light, lasting, equal the divine.
Fire ever doth aspire,
And makes all like itself, turns all to fire,
But ends in ashes ; which these cannot do,
For none of these is fuel, but fire too.
This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong arts
Make of so noble individual parts
One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.Happy Anniversary, my love.

Nickel-Uno

"An eerie, intermittent croak - it sounded like a cricket with a cold - was picked up by radio recievers around the world last week.It came from beyond the stratosphere and signaled an epochal breakthrough into the new age of space exploration."

That was me.

Okay, that was "Sputnik I". But we had the same birthday:

4.X.1957 the Russians would call it; October 4, 1957 by our reckoning. Fifty-one years ago today.

All things considered, I've had a better run. The old Soviet spaceball lived about three months, reentering the Earth's atmosphere in January, 1958. The Missile Gap was here. I wasn't nearly was threatening, taking several years to so much as walk and throw avocados for the first time, although when I did I was deadly, according to my parents. I was Hawkeye with a fruit, able to knock down young toddlers (my little sister) on the fly with casual indifference.

I don't know whether I've changed that much, I'm afraid.

Mojo and I had a lovely birthday Saturday. We spent Friday lolling about until afternoon when we headed up the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge to the Bonneville Spa for a relaxing day of soaking and massaging and just doing nothing and listening to the rain. We slowly made our way back to town today, stopping at the Portland Chinese Garden for tea and a quiet wander.

Here's a selection of pictures from this beautiful garden: the main pool,
Lotus in the rain.
Tea and ricecakes.
Raindrops.

Finally home, to work on Maxine's bedroom, cook, read and just enjoy the quiet until the little peeps got back with their beloved nanny Jen and her inamorate Toni. Thanks, Jenny and Toni! Some tasty birthday pumpkin pie, savory and sweet with whipped cream.And then a slumbrous bedtime, and a quiet house.

One of the two of us born on that October day in the late Fifties lived fast, died young and...well, there wasn't much of a corpse, good-looking or otherwise. All things being equal, I have to say; I think I got the better deal.

Birthday Girl

The last weekend in April was bursting, both with Missy's second birthday and the first real warm weekend of Spring.

The dogwood and the cherry are heavy with bloom, the lawn is at the perfect Spring equinox between winter's hoar and summer's sere, all the borders are bursting out and the house looks its best.

(Okay, except for the hideous freaking Christmas lights STILL above the door. I'm going to get them down next weekend. I swear. Honestly...you screw one sheep...)

The point still remains: the weekend was lovely.So of course, everyone wanted to get outside and play.


Missy and The Peeper got out in the yard or on the porch at various times all weekend. Although they both enjoyed the mild days, their styles of play are very different.

Little Miss is still in the "if I can pick it up it can be thrown/I can hit something with it/I can use it to hit something. Occasionally this is ever appropriate - she certainly went after everything that didn't move and several cats that did move (but slowly) with Shea's plastic hammer. Her aim is erratic but her style is consistent.

Peeper has moved to the "line up all the trucks" phase. He doesn't actually come up with much in the way of scenarios. He just likes to get them ALL out and...ummm...line them up. I've tried to work with this but there's not much to start from. He has a hard time understanding Daddy's rapid boredom with lining up the trucks.

When lining up trucks finally palled, Peep and I went to the Zoo and Children's Museum Saturday:
First stop, the Children's Museum. Peep had made some money cleaning and vacuuming the cars and it was burning a hole in his pocket. He searched for, and found, the backpack-and-truck set he'd thrown such a tantrum over when we didn't buy it for him, oh, say, six months ago. Child has a memory like freaking Rain Man for a toy half-glimpsed in the middle of a maelstrom yet has no idea where his shoes are ten seconds after he's taken them off. Wassupwitdat?

After a quick dig in the Dig Pit and a fast splash in the Splash Tank it was off to the Zoo.

Peeper loves the zoo, and I was pleasantly surprised that, though crowded, Portland's wild animal jail wasn't the mad crush we'd experienced for Zoolights. So we zipped through the "members" line and headed off down the hill to the train station.Peeper loves the little steam train he calls "Old Smokey", and by good luck we got there at the right time and caught the Wabash Cannonball around the zoo, waving with equal and indifferent enthusiasm at patrons, elk and elephants alike.The train ride was followed by an entertaining visit with the sea lions, who were going through their feeding-time performance with the effortlessly polished mushin of a Republican appointee lying to Congress. A brief visit to the sea otter and it was a Peeper-skip and a dash to the sandbox, where we had a lovely dig (for the Peep) and half-doze (for the Daddy) before ankling along to the "Africafe" for some tuck-in.

Here's where I give the Peeper his big boy props. All the way down to the bottom of the hill he's talked about getting some animal-cookie-shaped french fries. But the moment we walk in the door we see a sign that tells us the animal fries are gone, lost, verloren, verkakt, verraten. Pining for the fjords.

I wait with some trepidation for the resulting meltdown, but the Peep just shrugs and says; "Well, let's share some popcorn, instead..."

Hurray for grown-up almost-five-year-olds!! We did get our poppy and a yellow elephant-shaped water bottle before sauntering all the way back up the hill and home. What a lovely day!I should add that we also enjoyed a very pleasant evening with our friends at the Timbers game - terrific game! - and then a stop for sweets at "Saint Cupcake" afterwards.
A warm, sunny day, good kid fun, hellacious good soccer (some of the best I've seen at any level),with the Timbers Army giving us a little taste of Champions League spirit (a special shoutout to the guy in the TA who brought the best banner of the night: a Suzuki-tribute, Kyokujitsu-ki battleflag [only in yellow and green Timbers colors]); and then home to a quiet house and sleepy children.

Today was Missy's actual birthday - at least, it's the best guess the orphanage people in Dongguan could come up with. Two years ago (plus or minus) a woman we will probably never know brought our little Miss into the world. We don't know why she couldn't keep her, although we might guess that poverty and a cleft lip may have had an effect. And we don't know why she chose to leave her rather than foster her, or, even more frightful, expose her or do away with her. We know that for every happy adoption story there is a grief, and though we cannot know yours, we are grateful, 生母, for your gift of our little girl.

谢谢

But before the cake and prezzies - the first panel of drywall went up in Missy's future bedroom! Insulation, cutouts for window and outlets, and finally the drywall itself! Yay! Now it's just some fine finish work before we get the corner windows and we can really start to finish the room. We feel like the thing may actually be coming together

So Mojo and I measured and cut, drilled and nailed, stapled and screwed. Hey, hey, drywall screws, getcher mind out of the gutter. Besides, we're parents of preschoolers. We only get to do that on the random occasion that the children are more tired than we are. Do the math. God knows how these fundamentalist families manage to pop out fourteen or more of the little grunions. They must have exterior locks on the kids' room doors or something.

Not that we are looking for anything like that level of fecundity. The Fourth Rule of Fire Direction: Your Vagina Is Not A Clown Car.

So at the insistence of the Peeper we had cake with an inexplicable four candles (two in base one?).

And we blew them out, since Missy was utterly clueless.

But she did like the cake.

And then we all went out for dinner where both kids bounced around like total maniacs and ate gravel (OK, she ate it, he just threw it) and raced around the Blockbuster and came home and watched "Air Bud" which is like torture only with torture if you get lucky you eventually die.

And then she went to bed, a two-year-old.

Good night, my little daughter. Good night. Happy Birthday, my little girl.

May we share many more together.

And the red leaf looks to the hard gray stone
To each other, they know what they mean
Somewhere, their future is still yet to come
In ways that are yet as of now unforeseen

Embracing the Suck

It's a window!

My buddy Brent came over this past weekend and held my hand and led me through the process of putting a new window in an old wall.

So - now Missy's future bedroom has...no, not insulation, drywall, a ceiling, lights or electrical outlets...a window!

What's good is that it opens the house up: you can see from the front room all the way to the plum tree in the back yard. Light can flood (or trickle, as happens this drizzly week) in from the south. Nice.

The really trick thing is that it's weathertight and...ummm...fairly plumb. We did manage to bend more than a few nails. And I know that things have changed since the 1980's, but, still; a 2 x 6 is still a fricking 2 x 6. So how the hell come a 2 x 6 installed by The Former People is about 5.75 inches wide and a 2 x 6 purchased at the Janzen Beach Home Depot in 2008 is about 5.95 inches wide? Hunh?

Wussup wit dat?

But the good news is that the first window is in. Now we just need Mojo to settle on the windows for her little bank of windows in the corner and we'll be ready to start on the finishing; drywall, fixtures...

Missy may be sleeping in her bed for as long as a month before it's time to leave for her freshman year in college.

We christened the new aperture with "He'Brew", the Chosen Beer. All the tchochkes aside, the mensches from San Francisco make some pretty good suds. And appropriate, for work consisting mostly of carpentry, after all.

'Cause for a newly hired civil engineer my pal Brent is a pretty nifty carpenter.Meanwhile, Little Missy and Mommy and the Peeper watched TV, played and made Artwork.

Clearly they didn't know that Daddy had declared the static visual arts dead. Missy just wanted to scribble...While Mojo was making a Treat Board for the Peeper, to try and corral the Boy's raging lust for all things sweet.

We're working on that.

Sunday was a lazy sort of day until the afternoon, when we got ready to go visit our friends Millicent and Floyd and newly-two Nola!

As always, a big part of the journey is to arrive well dressed.

Missy, on the other had, believes that the best way to cycle around the house is "sky-clad".

Except for the mittens. Wouldn't want to chafe anything sensitive...

So - we went over to Aasgard, home of the God of Thunder who, despite her mom's publicly expressed fears of the effect of Processed Sugar On The Daughter, was a delightful hostess, played happily and smiled at everyone.

The cupcakes were good. And the little hand-held foam rubber rockets were a hoot.

But the "French 75s"? Mmmm...

Let's say that there was some darn good beer.

So - here's just some random images of the Birthday Girl having fun in the backyard.Nola had a lovely little dress on when we arrived (and played quite demurely in it for a bit) but changed into her rough clothes for some outdoor fun later on. I'm sorry I didn't get a shot of the dress - it, and she, were adorable.

I had come across a kiddie ride-on "loader" at the toy store earlier in the week and decided it would make a good Nola-toy. She seemed to enjoy scooting around on it in the fitful afternoon sunshine. Her dad sure liked the hard hat.

The Peep desperately wanted to play with it.

Missy wasn't sure, but it seemed oddly fascinating. So she hung around the job site. This may be a "nature" thing, being a girl from a rough, tough harbor town.


There was more than just digging!

Peeper had his fire truck. And there were stairs to climb, and dark doorways to explore. And gardens to run in (and over, sorry...).

There was also a tiny jungle gym/playset, that Missy, being the Queen of the Slide, had to try.

And there was a hose for spraying.Peepers, that is. And mommy's roller blades to wear on ones' hands.Anyway - this may be the last post for this week. I have a 24/7 gawdawful-hours job in Lincoln City. Playing the Dirt Nanny, too, in the rain, which is always entertaining. Ugh.

But we used to say in the Army that when things get really sucky you have to just let go and embrace the suck. So - for the record - I'm hugging as hard as I can. And it's up a 4 tomorrow to get back to the jobsite...so...

...goodnight.