Coop Weighs in With a Question

Cooper said...

I'm now very curious whether there are any voices of opinion in the media that you do respect. (Matt Taibbi? Steve Benen?) They can't ALL be useless idiots, can they? Seems like you eliminated the entire spectrum, unless you reserved a bit of fringe that I'm unfamiliar with. Or are you saying that you don't wish to read any political analysis of any kind any more? Do you think there's such a thing as objective journalism, free of bias? Would that even be preferable, if you could find it?

Superb question, Coop. Worth a serious response, and my gratitude for your having asked it.

Yes, I've probably eliminated the entire spectrum as it is defined by mainstream media. I guess that is my point. But of course I need to explain that a little.

First off, as far as naming some people I do respect, there are actually many.

Matt Taibbi's definitely very cool in my book. His articles in Rolling Stone about Wall Street are almost always a grand slam. I wish his colleague Mike Hastings had lived a bit longer to write more about national security issues, but he may well have signed his own death warrant with his last television appearance. Things are getting very, very weird.

Another giant in my book is Glen Greenwald, who has been one of the few clear voices about Snowden, but who is not even a "journalist" according to David Gregory.

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com is awesome in my book as well, but he doesn't write as much anymore.

Web Tarpley (whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year) is a downright monster for reporting in the Middle East. He goes right into the middle of war zones and tells it like it is. Over a year ago he exposed some of the bullshit that the Obama Administration is pulling in Syria, stuff that only came out during the Benghazi hearings that left everyone's jaws hanging. All of that was no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention to this.

But the same is true of Snowden's stuff. Anyone paying attention already knew for years pretty much everything he has leaked so far about NSA programs. The idea that he "revealed" anything is almost absurd. It's just that the mainstream media, right and left, has not been reporting on it. Tarpley even thinks Snowden is a double agent, doing a "limited hangout" as they say in the intel business, but he's in the minority on that point among the alternative press. You'd be amazed at how vigorous the debate is on various issues in the alternative media. It has it's own "spectrum" in a way. Tarpley is an "alternative lefty."

I don't agree with Tarpley about many things, I should add, but that goes without saying about anyone. I don't care about the specific disagreement part. I know I don't have the full picture, but I still feel I have a duty to do my best to piece it all together from what I can and do know. 

As Milton said, truth comes from the clash of ideas. Actually I can't find that quote online right now, but the late great Cecil Neth told me that quote at CSU journalism camp in 1982, so I'm trusting him.

He also told me: write about the beer, not about the foam on top. Those are two of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten.

A few more: I absolutely love watching Max Keiser for financial stuff on the Keiser Report. It airs on Russia Today. That's probably my favorite "mainstreamish" source for US news at this point (which is not to say I am a Vladimir Putin fan---he's a fucking KGB thug, for godsake).

Once you get outside the US controlled media, our right-left spectrum begins to seem (to me and many others) like the tiny slice of reality that it is. Foreigners tend to be able to see right through all of the postmodern wizardly of our corporate networks. Topics and ideas that we think are "fringe" here actually turn out to be quite "mainstream" in the rest of the world, where they are largely either laughing at us, or fucking disgusted at our self-denial at this point.

I compare it to how Turkey (both its government and many of its people) is still in rank denial about the Armenian holocaust, but the rest of the world knows damn well what happened and it's accepted as mainstream history. It just makes them look like fools and keeps the rest of the world from regarding them as a fully modern civilized nation.

For guerilla journalism, I very much like Luke Rudkowski's confrontational interviews of globalist phonies. He's a guy with real balls. I could never do what he does, ambushing Kissinger in the airport to ask him about war crimes, etc.

As for raw humor, I enjoy Mark Dice's video interviews of people on the street in San Diego, getting them to sign various petitions for absurd and horrifying things.

On the highbrow level, Russ Baker is a great historian/journalist of the Bush family dynasty (one of my all-time favorite topics to discuss over drinks). Wish we had more writers like him. I might have to become one at some point.

On climate-related issues, there is a whole slew of skeptical blogs I read that actually bother to discuss and weigh the evidence in a manner I find refreshing and downright scientific, instead of just name calling and screaming "it's the consensus!" But of course, I'm a denier, as you well know. So is Freeman Dyson. I can live with that kind of company, even if it is a lonely corner of the room for now.

And yes, I hate it that I have to find myself agreeing with the wretched likes of James Inhofe and other members of the Republican Party on this issue, but that's just how the chips fell.  I find myself agreeing with Democrats just about as often in an "accidental" sense on various issues, and I often feel just as icky.

There are many others individuals and sources I like if I think about it. You might have to get a drink or two in me to admit to some. The real truth is I'm still a petty coward about how people think of me based on certain of my opinions. But I'm striving to be more brave about this every day. Partly it's because I like to wait until I have "all my ducks in a row" and can make an air-tight case about things, before bringing them up. I like to win. Can't emphasize that enough.

As for U.S. politicians,  I can't really think of any current ones I'm into much at all.  Some days I feel like I have to go all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower for that. I supported Kucinich in '08, and still mostly like him, but he's part of history now. I probably would have voted for Gary Johnson for President this last time, if I had bothered to vote, which I didn't. I'm a fan of the UK Independence Party in England (that alone makes me a racist to some people).

Bias---I don't mind that at all in reporting. I like bias. Give me the full blast of your slanted view. Make your case. I can take it. I actually wish we had more open bias, not less, in the media, but also wish that it was admitted on the surface instead of masquerading as phony objectivity, giving "both sides" of nothing.

Almost mostly everything I listen to is either purely on the Internet at this point, or comes from outside the U.S.

You might compare it to how one might feel about the musical "artists" of the big record labels, versus the indie bands putting out their own MPGs cut on their laptops. I think we're reaching that kind of tipping point when it comes to journalism and politics, where the old order is giving way to a new one. The right-left divide seems to me at this point like a debate between who's a greater musician: Jay Z or Justin Bieber. I'll abstain, thank you very much.

But I don't have any idea what's coming next or afterwards, really. Actually I do have ideas of what the future will be, but they are almost certainly wrong by a mile. One thing I've learned: I'm often pretty good at sorting out the past, detective style, but really shitty about predicting the future. I'm along for the ride in that regard, trying to keep on course moment by moment with whatever moral compass I have regarding how other people should be treated and respected, and what I define as freedom.

I'm not ashamed to say that I have changed my mind many times about many things, and will no doubt do so many times in the future. I'm actually very convincible with the right evidence. Somehow that's seen as a sign of weakness these days. But I'd rather be right than consistent any day of the week.

Again, much thanks for question. Hope I made some sense at all. I enjoyed the challenge.

A Junkie for Hits on the Road to Damascus

Hooooo doggies, did my page hit counter ever skyrocket after that last post! Turns out if you want lots of people to see your blog, the best way is to mention lots of famous people currently in the news and link to stories and videos about them. Not sure how much of this was due to people finding my opinions more interesting, or how much was because Google slid me into a  hiher slot in their search results.

If I were (ahem) the type of guy to crave this kind of superficial attention and exposure, I'd probably devote my blog from here on out to those kinds of posts. But really, how many times can I say DILLIGAF over and over?

Checked out of the Clackamas Inn this morning and spent the day inside working. The job lately has been sort of a drag. I'm supposed to be starting a new phase of refactoring of the app I'm working on for the Big Publishing Company, one in which I'll be given a solo freehand to make some wide ranging changes that I suggested, and which they readily signed onto (because I know what the hell I'm doing).

But there have been so many small brush fires to put out from our recent server upgrade that each morning brings some kind of "cat up a tree" incident for me to deal with. Should have seen that coming with my Super PHP-based Gamma Ray Vision (now with Bluetooth). Fortunately I have solid co-workers who understand there is only so much they can expect from the Internet Man of Steel. So the Big New Push to Krypton has to wait until after the Fourth. I'm not complaining, just sort of longing to get on to the next thing.

Spending the day in the Starbucks near Clackamas Town Center (a much nicer neighborhood than where I was staying---more traditional middle class suburbanish) had the side effect of making me oblivious to the giant heat wave that had rolled into the Northwest during the middle of the day (must have been Lex Luthor at it again). When I finally went outside again around 3 PM, I was roasting within seconds. Any temperature above 75 around here starts to fee positively inhospitable, and the forecast called for it to go much higher than that.

I planed to head back towards East Portland, but I forgot the the Golden Rule around here: never get on the freeway. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but on a Friday afternoon this time of year, that might as well be the rule. Slow creeping speeds being the Kryptonite of my old Bimmer, there was no way I was going to torture it and me with the stop and go crawl along I-205 in between semi trucks. After only a minute or so, I slipped out of traffic into the far right lane and accelerated with glee towards the next exit ramp.

I had no idea where I was going. I was in the mood just to feel some open road below me, to open up the throttle, and to get the air rushing through the windows and over the radiator of the engine. My car loves that kind of driving, so I'm rather forced to let it have that from time to time.

After a few requisite stop lights, I found an increasingly hospitable stretch of asphalt while climbing up along winding Mt. Scott Road, in between the cemeteries there, and dropping down on the other side into the hidden-pocket-in-the-hills community called Happy Valley. I've known a few folks that have lived there, and I could see why. It's a nice standard suburban community draped over the rolling hills amid the fir trees, with recently built civic features like schools and fire stations---not the worst place to be around here, although a bit too rural and off-the-beaten-track for me. No Starbucks in sight. Nor anything at all commercial for that matter.

Then I just kept flowing frictionlessly in the car, taking the most immediately gratifying open path at every intersection until I was zipping along Foster Road past farms and fruit stands selling strawberries and freshcut flowers---the Oregon Dream. Letting myself get purposely lost (since I had an atlas with me in the trunk), I found myself rolling into the little community of Damascus, where I stopped to rest in the parking lot of a Safeway at the intersection with the main highway.

This sector of the Portland exurbs feels like "average America" to me, the kind of semi-rural community of ranchettes mixed with isolated newer housing tracts that one sees from coast to coast, neither abjectly poor nor opulently rich.

Having yet time to kill, I followed the most open road further east, into the world famous little town of Boring, the name of which is a bit of false humility, if you ask me, given that its a not-so-bad little hamlet outside the city on the way to Mount Hood. It actually had a bit of charm for a town like that, and it didn't appear as if every other house was a Meth lab. But to be fair, I passed through there 25 years ago (long story) and at that time it probably lived up more to its name. Quite a conversion since then.

Actually-sorta-interesting, Oregon, I decided I'd call it.

Because who wants to be boring, really? This day and age, that's the worst possible thing to be (outside of the unpardonable Church of Postmodern Marxism sins I rattled off in my last post). Boring is definitely the worst thing for a blogger to be. So I have to keep moving forward, like my car through the hot humid summer air, gobbling up experiences so I can I tell you about them here as if I'm Candide with a Corvette.

So it turns out that socioeconomic commentary on the geography of the Portland suburbs only gets you so many hits, as least my version of it. But I'm not yet ready to see my page hit counter go back down to its previous average. Just one more fix please. Fortunately I left off a few folks in that long list of public figures whose opinions I'd rather just never hear again (to put it mildly). I suppose it behooves me to mention them here, while the topic is fresh in my mind:

...Michael Bloomberg, Christine Lagarde, Samantha Power, Ann Coulter, David Suzuki,  Naomi Klein, Paul Ehrlich, Barney Frank, Matthew Yglesias and anyone else who writes for Slate, the New York Times (aka the "toilet paper of record"), ,Jonathan Kay, Jennifer Lopez, Alec Baldwin, FEMEN (although they can still show their bare breasts if they feel they need to), the Westboro Baptist Church, Joel "Romans 13 tells us to submit to all authority" Osteen (a real special place in Hell for him perhaps, but it's not for me to judge)...

My Servitude is No Longer Voluntary

A couple times lately I've heard people say they just don't care about Edward Snowden and his "leaks" about the NSA that came out recently. Nor do they care about the victims of our drone warfare in Central Asia. Nor about what is really going on in Syria. Nor about what is happening to Bradley Manning. Or the probable murder of Michael Hastings. Or any other number of things that I might bring up to discuss.

Cool. I dig. We all have the things we care about and the things we don't care about. There is so much news lately. All of us have a very limited amount of attention we can bestow on things in the world around us. With all the information coming at us lately have to ration our attention to the things that truly matter to us.

I can respect your own rationing system for your sympathies. I hope you can respect mine, right? In that vein, here are some of things I just can't seem to be bothered to care much about lately. It's not that I don't have empathy for certain individuals and the horrible things that happen to them, or the life trials they go through. I do. It's just that I am trying to concentrate on the small subset of things that really matter to me. I guess I'm just fatigued from overstimulation, so forgive me. I'll leave concern about the other noble causes to other folk.

Here are some things I don't care about lately:

what Paul Deen said
what Casey Anthony did, as sad as it is
what George Zimmerman did or did not do
what a bunch of Israeli settlers did on a bus
what a bunch of high schoolers in Ohio did 
what benefits that federal government employees get
who gets to have free birth control provided to them
how the federal government conducts meaningless elections to obtain our "consent"

also: any further opinion uttered by the following walnut-brained individuals or organizations, who if their voices disappeared from public discourse right now, I wouldn't miss for a microsecond: Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, Sean Hannity, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Joe Scarborough, Brian Williams, Oprah Winfrey, "The Donald," Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Piers Morgan, Robert Rodriguez, Taylor Swift, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Bill Maher, Chris Rock, Chevy Chase, Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper, Candy Crowley, David Gregory, Matt Lauer, David Letterman, Larry King, Jim McNeil, any of the interchangeable bimbos on CNNFoxMSNBC whose names I don't even care to register, Mark Zuckerberg, Billnmelinda Gates, John Botoxface Kerry, Al Gore (aka Manbearpig), George H.W. Bush and any of his various devil spawn, Barbara Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Valerie Jarret, Susan Rice, Karl Rove, James Baker III, General Petraeus, Michelle Obama, Barry Obama, Bill Ayers, Rahm Emmanuel, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Hickenlooper, Ahnold, Pat Buchanan, Rick Santorum, Rudy Giuliani, Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder (he wouldn't remember anything he said anyway), Joe Biden, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Nancy Pelosi, Pat Robertson, Ritt Momney, Barbra Streisand, Jim Carey, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Noam Chomsky, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Jay Rockefeller, Kofi Annan, Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Benjamin Netanyahu, Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geitner, Hank Paulson, the Southern Fucking Poverty Law Center, Diane Fucking Feinstein, Focus on the Fucking Family, any president of any too-big-to-fail-and-jail bank, the President of Mexico, pretty much anyone who holds any position of authority in the Federal Government of the United States (®) including and especially the Supreme Kourt, anyone on NPR now that Click and Clack are gone.

Do I even need to mention professional sports figures here? Of course not.

Also along these lines I don't care anymore about being labeled (1) hate-filled (2) racist (2) homophobic (3) misogynistic (5) anti-Semitic (6) anti-American (5) reactionary (6) a rape apologist (7) the problem with America (8) obstructionist (9) crazy (10) conspiracy theorist (11) denier (go on, watch it) (12) anti-science (c'mon, really?). Sorry, but the ship has sailed on all of those. If you use any of those with me, I'll take it as a concession of your unconditional surrender in any argument you are trying to make. I'll give myself a high-five and yell "woo-hoo, I kicked your ass!" You're gonna need better insults now, so sharpen your wits and bring it on. I love to see creativity in this regard and will reward you with genuine applause if you can surprise me with something new. Of course actual evidence and sound logic is far better, but that would be like asking to see an unassisted Triple Play in the World Series---a once in a lifetime event.

Yecch. I feel gross just typing these peoples names in the list above (except Click and Clack). My friend Kelle (whose opinion I do care about) would probably remind me I'm giving these folks power by doing this, so I hope this is the last time I have to mention any of these people ever.

Now this video is for my baby sister, a fellow thought criminal and soldier in the fight for freedom in the spirit of Étienne de La Boétie. It may have taken me almost thirty years, but I've finally tuned in to the message of 80's metal. What took me so long?

Crash Landing in Clackamas

Recently I was emailing my good friend A---, a native Portlander who lives in New York City. He and his wife M---- are both old college friends of mine. He's a successful graphic designer. She's a successful artist. Three years ago they rented out their house in SE Portland and moved to Brooklyn with their young daughter to experience Gotham for a while, with the intent of eventually returning to Oregon.  He told me in his most recent email that they are moving back to Portland in August.

It's good news for yours truly, since he is probably my closest long-time friend here in Oregon. I've felt somewhat alone without the two of them here. I've come to realize that this has been very good for me, in a way that hearkens to the spirit of state motto itself: Alis Volat Propiis.  I felt as if this summer was my last chance to pull of this kind of personal Oregon bootstrap "all on my own," as I was when I first came here.

In my email, I warned my friend jokingly that leaving New York City can feel like "crash landing in the jungle" for a while. I knew he already was well aware of that, but I liked taking the opportunity to express a bit of post-NYC camaraderie with someone who knew exactly what I meant.

The phrase "crash landing" is exactly what came to mind yesterday after I drove the last few miles from beautiful, chic downtown Lake Oswego to my hotel off I-205 in Clackamas. I knew that Clackamas itself wasn't exactly the most inspiring place in the metro area, at least by my criteria. Nevertheless it was still a rude shock when I got there in the late afternoon.

The hotel itself---the Clackamas Inn and Suites---is actually a pretty nice place. I have no beef with it at all so far. 

It's only a few hundred feet off I-205. As I always do on the first try around here, I missed the turn lane off the exit to get into the hotel parking lot and had to spend the next ten minutes looping through side neighborhoods for another opportunity to get there. It's one of the ways that Portland is like suburban New Jersey. The freeways and roads are such that if you miss your exit or turn, you are completely screwed for a while.

But that's not what gave me the rude shock in Clackamas. It was everything else around the hotel. When I first got off the freeway, I saw a sign for the nearby Hampton Inn, the budget entry of the Hilton group.

Hampton Inns are not my favorite hotel (I think they are overpriced for the value) but seeing one is usually a good sign for the quality of the surrounding neighborhood. But this is Oregon, and in this case it proved what is becoming increasingly obvious to me about Portland as a whole---it has some awesome, unique neighborhoods, both urban and suburban, but the drop-off from niceness into blecch is often very steep, almost in a Third World way at times. In this case, the "nice neighborhood" around the Hampton Inn extended pretty much to the edge of the parking lot.

It wasn't obvious at first glance, until the last stage of my multiple awkward left turns to get back to the Clackamas Inn's parking lot. I wound up circling through the driveway of the business next door---a 24-hour adult bookstore occupying what once had been a restaurant.

After checking in, I went up to my room on the third floor and looked out the window to the street below to survey my surroundings. On the sunny sidewalk in front of the hotel, right at the interchange by the freeway exist, small clusters of people wandered up and down the sidewalk.  First came a muscular man, shirtless with multiple tatoos in a manner suggesting his body had been sculpted behind prison walls. He saw me looking at him from the third floor and gave me a curious stink-eye look.

Next came a pair of young women wearing mini-skirts and Goth-Preppie outfits in the style of streetwalkers. Then aimless punkish kids in small groups crossing the street to the convenience store, which upon close examination looked seedier than the average one---all of this within 100 yards of the busy metro freeway.

This is the kind of Portland culture that my native Oregonian friends detest in a manner suggesting shame.  As I've mentioned, they have quite a different view of this place than does the rest of the country and many transplants, who see Portland "through Rose City colored glasses," if you will. To them, Portland is a high-tech hipster entertainment paradise (which it is, to be sure), the "place where young people go to retire."

Despite this, it's been difficult for me to allow myself to publicly make the same observations of the "real" Portland, since I am not a native (moreover is the fact that many of the native Oregonians I know seem to downright hate Colorado---go figure).

I remind myself that I've earned the right to speak the truth about this place, as I see it.  Not that one needs to earn such a right, really. It's only in my head that the necessity for this right exists.  But having granted it to myself at last, I seem to be making up for lost time.

The romantic notions I had a long time ago (and even recently) about Oregon and what I thought my life would be here are all long gone---burned away by the brutal sunshine of real experience. Once that happens, and the romantic patina is gone, there is no going back to the illusions one once had. It doesn't mean I like this place any less than I did. In fact the more-nearer-to-realism mindset I've achieved this time actually gives me greater empathy for people here. I'm less confused by what I encounter here, and thus my mind is constrained by far fewer stressful thoughts than it once was.

Really I'm not so different than the hipsters and other folk who came here hoping for some kind of life reboot. It's just a different kind of reboot---a personal one. But aren't all true reboots highly personal in that way? It took me almost three decades of bashing my head against Oregon Illusion to finally break through, but at last I almost feel downright comfortable here.

But just not in Clackamas, thank you very much.

Hi Ho, the Real Lake O

On Wednesday morning I was scheduled to check out of the Phoenix Inn Suites. I had a conference call scheduled after breakfast, but it got delayed a couple times. In the meantime I lay on the bed with my laptop addressing other work tasks. By mid morning, feeling someone inert, I began to formulate the idea of extending my stay at the Phoenix a couple more nights. It wasn't a bad place, albeit with a few drawbacks. But what did I expect from the cheapest hotel in that section of the I-5 corridor?

During a break I went down to the reception in the lobby and inquired about extending my stay. The woman at the desk brought up the reservation system and told me rooms were available, but the rates for the following evenings were to increase by thirty dollars a night, taking it well above the hundred dollar level, which is the benchmark I strive to maintain as a rough floating average of my nightly accommodations. I don't mind going above that if I have to, but I try not to do that out of sheer laziness, which is what this felt like. So I went online and booked a room for the next two nights at a budget inn along I-205 in the nearby town of Clackamas. The location was actually more convenient for the social activities I had planned.

After checking out of the Phoenix Inn just before noon, I decided to head over to Bridgeport Village to continue the momentum of my new temporary work habit. But in this case too I was stymied, at least on the surface. The entrance to the parking lot that I had been using was blocked off by a Tualatin Police cruiser with its flashers on. The cop was letting cars out, but it was evident that people were not supposed to enter through there.

I could have circled around to another entrance, but in the whimsical way I do, I decided to take it as a cosmic sign to explore another place that day. In these kinds of circumstances, I have found it best to flow like water and follow the least-resistance path, unless it really matters. I'm rarely disappointed when I do that, and almost always regretful when I don't. It's the kind of rolling synchronicity that makes me wonder if we really may be avatars in some massive holographic universe, with an illusion of separate consciousness and identity. Who am I to say we aren't?

After musing for a few moments over possible destinations, and rejecting all of them, I decided to follow my standard protocol and head towards my next hotel, so that by the time I finished work at whatever place I found there, it would be only a short drive to my lodgings at check-in time.

I could have taken the Interstate the long way around to Clackamas, but decided that since I had time, I would cut through the side streets of Lake Oswego, which I hadn't really seen on this trip, even though I had technically been staying there. The part of "Lake O" (as the locals call it) with the hotels and the chain restaurants where I'd been staying is on the very western fringe of the municipality along the freeway, and not indicative of the community as a whole. Given my interests, it seemed more than appropriate to visit the actual downtown, which was a few miles away to the east, along the Willamette River.

A few minutes later I was cruising through a very pleasant residential neighborhood of tall trees and green lawns on rolling hills. Any thoroughfare called "Country Club" is usually very nice like that. Within ten minutes I was in the quaint little gridlike downtown.

I recognized it from years ago, when I went to party at a friend's house near here. He's a local musician. He doesn't live in Lake O anymore, but he is among the people I like seeing when I come here.

Back then it didn't register to me that Lake Oswego was any place special in the Portland metro area, even though people talked about as being upscale. But it took only a few minutes after parking and taking to the sidewalks that I began to understand why people make a point of living here.

The brand new apartment complexes, the trendy restaurants, the small boutiques, the walking path along the lake itself---it made for a superb mix of new development and old charm. But it's not as if Lake Oswego struck me as extraordinary on the scale of America as a whole. In Connecticut or New Jersey, it might be taken as typical mid-to-upscale bedroom community. But that's exactly the point. It could actually be a place there, whereas almost no other community in the Portland area could qualify on that score. In other words, as nice as Lake O was, what made it stand out in this area to me was mostly simple process of elimination.

My friends from this area probably could have told me this. But certain things I need to prove to myself by empirical observation. Up until that moment, I hadn't yet been ready to recognize Lake Oswego for what it was---pretty much the only suburban community around Portland that I could imagine living in. Bridgeport Village was certainly a great place to work and hang out. There were good hotels nearby there, but man does not live by Starbucks alone. BPV was a brand-new commercial district, without the organic charm of a true neighborhood (someday it will have that---you have to plant those seeds for the long term). If I was going to spend any time around the Portland area, which was my intention, I needed a real community that was more than three years old, and where I felt comfortable.

With some time to kill over lunch, I strolled along the lake, past an upscale hotel with patio balconies that hung right over the water, and then up some wide concrete steps to a bustling new French bakery and "salon de thé." There's the magic word again, I thought---thé.

I ducked inside the bakery and treated myself to a pain aux raisins. I took it outside to the patio, where I sat on a metal chair overlooking the lake. It was quite chewy and delicious. 

As I ate it I thought of an old friend of mine, a woman I'd had a fling with many years ago, during a trip I had made up here from Texas. At the time she was single and lived in NW Portland. The short time we spent together, and even the aftermath, was very joyful (at least for me), at a time when I really needed something exactly like that to make me feel welcome in Portland again. In a way she was no small influence in my life---a breath of fresh air. Funny how it works that way. Now she lives in Lake Oswego and is (happily) married with two kids. We've kept in touch over the years and have corresponded from time to time as friends---one of those "flings with a happy ending." Ironically I met her at a party hosted by my aforementioned musician friend.

I had no plans to seek her out in person, or even tip her off that I was in the area, but of course it occurred to me that I might well run into her at any second while I was in downtown Lake O. I rehearsed clever fun opening lines in case our paths crossed. No doubt she would be surprised but I hoped it would be a pleasant reunion, if by chance it happened.

"Now I know why you chose to live here," I imagined telling her.

As I looked over the lake and the beautiful homes amid the fir trees on the ridge beyond, I thought about the hotel in Clackamas where I had reservations. Yet another magnetic key card, another mini-fridge, another bar of hotel soap, another "breakfast 6-9 in the dining room." The thought of it all made me a bit fatigued. I was approaching the point of diminishing rewards for constant hotel jumping, and felt the need for something a little more stable for a while.

The thought hit me: maybe it's finally time to check out what's available around here on AirBnB.

Gotham, Remotely

Yesterday after I work I received a surprise message out of the blue from a friend of mine whom I hadn't seen in many years. We went to high school together, and later he played a key role in my early days in Austin back in '89, letting me crash in his apartment for a few days while I was looking for a place to live. These are the kinds of acts of friendship that stick with me,  and can earn a lifetime pass of gratitude from me, so it was very pleasing to hear from him.

Back then I remember him doing computer programming on his Macintosh. "You can write programs on a Mac?" I remember asking him, in my naivite. The irony of that question is rather poignant, given that's now what I spend my days doing for a living.

He lives in New York, where for years he has been an attorney. He has a wife and kids. He wrote to say he enjoys reading my blog. I had no idea he was among my readers.

I told him that these kind of comments are what keeps me going doing this. So long as I know there are a few people out there reading me, and that they are people I give a damn about, then somehow I find this to be very rewarding.

We exchanged messages about what I do for a living. I told him that I work for a New York based company, headquartered in a famous landmark building in a lower Manhattan neighhood that is named for the building itself.

My first boss for this job  actually lives here in Portland, where I got hired two years ago, after a short interview around the block from the Portlandia statue.  But since then my work responsibilities have ballooned and lately many of the people I deal with on a daily basis are in the New York area. I know their voices, and would probably recognize them from their Skype profile pictures, but I have never yet met any of them in person.

When I first started working with New Yorkers again on a daily basis, it was a steep transition, but one that was easy to make, because I've done it before. I remembered quickly that working in New York is a "contact sport" (ironically my supervisor there is big ice hockey player). One of the quotes I remember formulating to myself, while working in the City back in the day was everybody in New York has their own agenda.

Actually this is true everywhere on the planet, if you ask me, but in New York no one really pretends that it is otherwise. It's refreshing to me. It feels more honest.

Another pleasing aspect of our conversation was that he told me that he had particularly enjoyed my posts and pictures from my visit last February to Front Sight, the firearms training school in Nevada where I learned to properly handle and shoot a Glock 9mm pistol. It turns out he went to Front Sight back in the late Nineties, when they were still in California, and were a much smaller operation. I told him he wouldn't recognize the place now---it's a big family-friendly experience.

My friend has long been the kind of person who believes strongly in the principles of personal liberty, and has been outspoken over the years, in his personal life and in his work, of putting his money where his mouth is. This often rubbed people the wrong way, but I always respected this. I'm somewhat ashamed at how long it took me to wake up to such things.

He and I probably are not of like mind on every issue (in fact I know we are not), but I don't really care about that. I don't mind disagreeing with someone. I just figure we see the world differently, and strive to learn from them. Life is a journey of a discovery, as they say. I'm willing to bend my views to accomodate the Truth, if it is indeed the Truth (and I do believe there is such a thing as Truth). What I care about is whether someone is trying to take away my freedom.

As they say, there are two kinds of people: those that just want to be left alone, and those that won't leave you alone.

I told him that the Front Sight pictures I had posted here and on Facebook had cost me a decades-long close friendship with someone we both knew from high school (not by my choice, but theirs). It had saddened me at first, but I've gotten to the point in my life where I know when it is time to cut off the past and move on without looking back. Once you do that a couple times, it becomes easier.

I said that I didn't regret those posts. I knew exactly what I was doing, and had wanted to make my position on the issue loud and clear. I would do it again in a minute even if it cost me every friend I had.

We made plans to meet up in New York next time I'm there. Just making the resolution makes it more likely I'll return there in the near future. It's amazing how far I'll detour, just to have a drink or two with an old friend.

Heck, I might even drop by that famous landmark building where my co-workers hang out, and have few drinks with them too. But as far as ice hockey goes, I prefer to watch from the bleachers.

Latitude and Longitude: Bridgeport Village

For the all the spontaneous, free-range travel that I do, I often feel very much like a creature of habit. Yes, my lifestyle allows me to go where I please, as much my resources, conscience, and commitments allow me to do,  even on a daily basis, but as appealing as that is as an ideal, in practice I find myself easily falling into a pattern of doing the same thing day after day.

Variety, it turns out, only takes you so far, in a psychological and spiritual sense. At least for me.

For example, it took me only a few days here in this part of the Portland area to establish a daily cycle of work, with my epicenter here at Bridgeport Village, the high-end lifestyle center here in the suburb Tualatin that I find so appealing.

At one point in my life, having the freedom to travel as I do would have been an end in itself that I would have exploited as much as possible. Certainly I've gotten plenty out of it. But life is about more than going from point A to point B.  To actually get anything tangible done, routine can be a great advantage. 

Bridgeport Village is certainly "my kind of place," as far as working and living go, based upon my past habits. The Starbucks here at the corner of SW Hazelfern Road is perfect for me as a morning workplace. I passed three other decent-looking Starbucks on the way here this morning driving through Lake Oswego from my hotel. Any of them probably would make a good work "office" for me. But I chose to come back to this one, because I am already comfortable here, and walking in the door brings me instantly into the mode of getting certain work things done. I quickly scan for my favorite table, and if it isn't available, I'll set up shop (as I did this morning) at a nearby table and wait for my favorite one to open up.

Certainly there is an element of purposeful repetition in coming to a place like Bridgeport Village that is in the spirit of my exploration of "placeness" while I travel. I sacrificed a fleeting experience elsewhere this morning for a further deepening of my understanding of a place that interests me. That's the kind of trade off I can live with.

But the most important reason is simply that I need and want to get certain thing done, both the work I do for money, and the projects I do for my own creative purposes in my free time (yes, I have ones other than this blog).

This morning was my fourth time coming here to BPV. Already I am parking in exactly the same spot,  on the west edge of the parking lot by the trees near the Container Store. Anyone looking for me in this big wide metro area could probably easily find me. They'd just have to wait until they saw the old black Bimmer with Colorado plates exactly in that spot. I'd either be at this Starbucks working, or making my rounds in REI (didn't even see it until yesterday) perusing camping equipment (which I find relaxing), or wandering through Barnes and Noble, or eating a Joe's double cheeseburger in the plaza next to that "Spring Eternal" sculpture that looks like Olivia Newton John at the end of Xanadu. And I don't mind that.

Of course this principle would go the other way too. Anyone looking to avoid me altogether would just have to check that parking spot to know if the coast is clear. But I can't imagine anyone around here would want to do that. My company is simply too interesting.

The Ultimate Sexual 5

Last Saturday evening when I was in East Portland, I was sitting around after dinner with a friend. I was explaining various things about how I view life. She asked me if I knew what my Enneagram personality type was. I recognized the term. I'd seen those titles on the shelves of bookstores for years, but had never once opened one of them up, or looked into the idea in any detail. I pleaded ignorance and asked her to explain.

It turns out there are nine basic Enneagram personality types, each subdivided into three categories (social, sexual, and self-protecting), making a total of 27 types.

"I think you might be a 4 or a 5," she told me.  I was in a mood to hear more about this. She got her small library of books on the subject and cracked them open, reading various sections outloud as I listened.

While she read through the various personality types, I gave my reaction to them as they might pertain to me.

Nope. No. Not me. No. Not all. Definitely not. Absolutely no... I fired off in rapid succession, in response to the sentences she read.

Then she got to 5 (the Investigator). As she read down the description, my curt responses changed to: Yup. Yes. Yes. True. Definitely me. 100% spot on. Exactly me...

Some of the descriptions in the book were almost word-for-word the way I had been describing myself earlier in the evening.

I felt a mix of warmth at the accuracy of the description, and mild unease at how well it pegged me.

We further determined quite easily that among the subcategories, I was definitely a "sexual" 5, rather than a "social" or "self-preserving" one.

"Ya mean there's more than one of me out there?" I told her, with a wry smile. The fact that it didn't bother me that I was a "typical" 5 was probably enough by itself to disqualify me from being a 4 (the Individualist), a category that only superficially reminded me of myself.

My friend said that she herself was a 9 (the Peacemaker). It occurred to me that my adolescent self was probably closer to that category, and that I'm perhaps drawn to that type of woman.

We playfully contemplated the possible Enneagram categories of various people we knew. I remarked that my ex-wife was probably a 6 (the Loyalist). But maybe it was just her Catholic upbringing. My friend said she'd been in a long relationship with a 6 as well.

In thinking about other people I knew, I told her how I had once thought that I should be more like other people I knew and respected, because they seemingly "had things I didn't have." But I had no such thoughts anymore, and hadn't had them in a while, even as I felt regret at certain life decisions at times. I knew exactly who I was, and how I fit into the world. We both agreed how freeing it was, to be aware of such things.

The next morning after I got coffee along East Burnside, I walked past the old Laurelhurst theater. It shows both new releases and older mvoies. I saw on the marquee that they were showing Bullit (1968), staring Steve McQueen, as part of their programming in the coming week.

I'd seen the movie for the first time only within the last year, and had watched it completely again on TCM while I was in Casper, Wyoming a few weeks back. At the time it when I watched it occurred to me how closely Steve McQueen's character in that movie is to my own personality in many ways, in how I approach the world and relationships. Yes, a lot of men want to believe they are like that particular character, but I really am like that, although I am (thankfully) not a police detective.

It struck me all at once that Steve McQueen's character in that movie is probably the quintessential Sexual 5---in his job, his friendships, and in his relationship to his girlfriend played by Jacqueline Bisset. I could think of no better movie example of that archetype.

I hadn't ever seen the movie in a real theater. It sounded like maybe something to do. I walked up to the box office of the theater, still dark on a Sunday morning. Showing at 9:30 PM all this week.

High Drama in Lake Oswego

Sunday afternoon found me relocating from the pleasant, hip, organicness of residential east Portland down to a hotel by I-5 in the suburb of Lake Oswego. The work week was going to demand some full attention for a couple days, and I figured it would be the best way to plow through some of the tasks ahead of me.

My route down to Lake Oswego took me south along the length of I-205, the loop on the east side of Portland. It so happens that this route is exactly the one I took when I first came to Oregon, in September 1985, riding in an airport shuttle from PDX down to Salem as a new transfer student. Driving along that same route, looking out of the rolling hills with their ragged edges, the sawtooth outline of fir trees so distinct to this area, brought back primeval memories of that earlier version of me, prompting me to ask musing questions about my life.

Of the questions that went through my mind, some were unanswerable, but one question, "Where did it all bring me to?" was easy to address. In some ways it felt as if my entire life history since that initial ride along I-205 had been some kind of ultra-intricate Rube Goldberg machine of cause and effect, with a line of snaking dominos falling to set off some trap door and a bouncing ball across trampolines to make an arrow shoot into a target, etc. But really the answer to the question of "where did it bring me to?" was simple: right here, and right now.

I'd booked a room for three nights at the Phoenix Inn and Suites in Lake Oswego. I didn't want to be going anywhere for a couple days, except maybe to the nearby Bridgeport Village center.  Phoenix Inn is a Northwest hotel chain that was new to me. The check-in time was listed at 4pm, and usually I like to follow all the rules exactly, just so things are less of a hassle. When I pulled off the exit onto the frontage road, I was about an hour early to check in, so I decided just to hang out in a mellow Sunday fashion until the official time.

Driving past the hotel, I passed a few chain restaurants---a Chevy's Mexican restaurant and an Olive Garden, and then a Trader Joe's (a place I often seek out for my supplies). It seemed like the perfect landing spot for a few days of work.

I followed the street, Bangy Road, a few blocks south along the Interstate until it started climbing a small hill into a residential neighborhood. At the corner of Bangy and Burma Road, I came upon a small vacant lot with a stub of a driveway and some sewer fixtures sticking out of the ground. The grass and weeds were overgrown in a manner suggesting someone had started to build a house there and had abandoned the effort.

I pulled the Bimmer into the driveway stub and parked it, perched on the hill overlooking Bangy and the Interstate beyond. I got out of my car and just leaned against it in peace, smelling the residue of the oil on the engine and watching the cars roar by on I-5.

The airy life questions in my head continued to dance around in harmless thought-play. I didn't really care about coming up with any answers. I knew it wouldn't matter anyway.

Then I pulled out my phone and checked the time. Still a half hour to go.

At that moment, a bizarre and random thought popped into my head out of nowhere: This seems like a perfect place to call someone and say "Meet me at the corner of Bangy and Burma."

What happened in the following seconds really threw me for a loop. Within literally less than a minute of that random thought, an aging Buick came down Bangy Road from the same direction I had come. It turned on Burma as I had done and made its way up the hillock on which I was perched. Then it pulled over on the side of Burma right across the street from where I was parked and standing.

There was no one else in sight, and no house where the car was, so I wondered what was going on. I saw that the driver was a middle aged man with unkempt grey hair. He was talking on his cell phone, completely absorbed in the conversation he was having, and seemingly oblivious to my presence.

Then a couple minutes later, another car, a late model red Volkswagen came along the same route on the street and pulled to a stop along the curb about ten feet behind the Buick. The driver was a young woman. She too was having a conversation, holding an I-Phone in front of her with her fingers extended to avoid breaking her fingernails. She too was seemingly oblivious to my presence, only a few feet away. Her conversation was very animated. It appeared she was angry and was screaming into the phone at times, although I couldn't hear a single word through the car door.

A popular spot, I said to myself, cradling my own phone in my hand.

I did my best to avoid watching both them, but I couldn't help sneaking sideways glances at them. About five minutes after the woman arrived, she opened the car door, and with great theater as expressing anger she grabbed some items out of her little Volkswagen, shut the door firmly, and then stomped up to the Buick. She opened the passenger door and climbed inside, shutting it with a loud noise.

A few minutes later, the Buick drove away into the residential neighborhood on Burma Road, leaving the Volkswagen with its engine running and its turning lights blinking.

I couldn't help but be stunned a bit, and not just just because of the weird synchronicity of my thought "coming to life" in front of me. It was yet another incident of the kind of thing that happens to me repeatedly around here, but which seems to happen rarely elsewhere. I seem to keep being privy to people's private conversations and incidents.  A couple years ago, for example, I went back to a small town very near here, where I spent some time years ago, to revisit a park where I had once seen a musical theater production. The park had been completely redesigned since my visit (not for better, unfortunately---they pretty much ruined the place). While I stood contemplating the changes, I was forced to eavesdrop on a very heartbreaking conversation nearby in the parking lot between a mother ostensibly dropping off her daughter in some custody arrangement. The mother was sobbing while apologizing to her child that she would not be able to hold her and put her to bed at night. "Mommy still loves you," she kept saying. At the time, there was no way for me to escape while giving away that I had been overhearing them. I had to stick it out until they were done.

With the VW sitting along Burma Road idling without a driver, I decided that it might be a good time to make my exit from the vacant lot, and be gone by the time the Buick got back. I got back in my car and drove away, heading back down Bangy towards the Phoenix Inn, checking in a few minutes before 4 pm. 

I thought that would be the last of it, but later, walking down Bangy while looking for a place to eat, I saw the Buick drive past me. I recognized the license plate. I couldn't tell if the young woman was still inside. I didn't look very closely.

Laurelhurst, I Presume

Woke up this morning to the soft sound of rain on the roof, and on the leaves of the tree outside the open window.

"I'm in  Portland, to be sure," I'd told my host the evening before. It was the feeling of the house, the curve of the arch above the passageway leading to the dining room, and above all, the smell. All the houses in Portland seem to have that pleasant smell, I explained.

The only drawback---no coffee in the house. I had make quick trip down Burnside for my java fix.  A little bit further trip than shuffling into the hotel lobby for their continental breakfast. On the other hand, I could sleep as late I wanted to without missing the standard 6:00-9:30 window, dozing on and off through several rounds of the rain in Sunday decadence.

Well, you can't have it all, can you?

A Long Lingering Evening in Salem

The moment of the summer solstice this year, around 10 pm last night Pacific Time, found me in an upscale lively wine bar in Salem.

"I can't believe how much this town has changed," I told my friend. "They've really juiced it up."

I could picture in my mind what used to be on the exact location of the wine bar, right across the street from the public library on Liberty Street, where the it crosses the creek. There was an abandoned hotel or restaurant with a round roof. It just sat there vacant and rotted while I walked past it, over and over, on my way to my apartment on the south side of Bush Pasture Park.

My friend had lived there quite a while too. We talked about the changes of the town, and why it was still "Salem" after all these years.

"We used to call it Stalem." My friend had never heard that one.

But the wine bar (Orupa, it's called), is nothing to be ashamed to about. The "baseball" cut steak (it mystified both of us when the waiter called it that) was delicious with two glasses of Pinot Noir. If you're going to spend an evening in Salem, this was it.

Tualatin, Your Neon Lights Will Shine

Back on the Interstate, it was only a few minutes before I found the right exit in Tualatin. The Apple store was in a place called the Brideport Center, and when I laid eyes upon it, I could tell it was a very modern, new lifestyle development commercial center of mid- and upscale businesses of various kinds.

I navigated down the crowded "streets" of the downtown-like center and parked in front of the Crate and Barrel. When I out of my car, I saw a brand new Barnes and Noble across the street. The sidewalks were crowded, with many women of various ages, mostly dressed nicely, groups of teenagesrs, some children, and a few men like yours truly.

Ah, heaven, I thought. I can breathe here.

There was a time in my life when I would have scorned this type of commercial district. But in the last few years during my travels I had come to shuck off all such prejudice and very much appreciated the amenities and conveniences of what I have come to call "civilization." I could tell immediately that if I spent any time at all in this part of the Portland area, that I would find an excuse to come here. Compared to much of the Portland area it felt downright opulent.

It had the normal pantheon of businesses one finds in such developments---Coldwater Creek, P.F. Chang's, and Regal Cinema. Walking around it, it reminded me in no small wise to the Riverplace Center in north Fresno. They might well have been designed by the same firm, and both were the nicest places for miles around.

Both this one, and the one in Fresno, were much more elaborate than ones I've seen in, say, Colorado. This is a good thing, because Colorado has a surplus of recent suburban commercial development, whereas the Portland suburbs and Fresno have a defecit (from my point of view). It no wonder they were so crowded.

I located the Apple store, not far from my car, and walked there carrying my broken power cord. The store turned out to be packed---really packed. There were at least fifty people inside, and all the blue-shirted customer reps seemed busy. I had a hard time catching the attention of one. Finally when I did, I asked "is there a line?" She said "yes, a long one," but she saw the cord I was holding and said she cut could help me right away. It took only a few minutes for her to pull a new one off the shelf and, using her Ipad, punch in the information she needed to make the transfer.  While I waited for her to get the new cord from the back, I leaned against a table in the store.

A pretty teenage girl next to me was taking pictures of herself with her IPhone. Her boyfriend or brother was standing next to her. She asked him, "Look at this one. On a scale of one to hobo, with one being hobo, what do  you think of this one?"

With mild disdain, he barely looked at the screen and said flatly "Pure Hobo."

My kind of guy, I thought. You're gonna go far.

It didn't cost me a cent. I only had to give my name. It was exceptional service. They run a great op. But even the woman who helped me couldn't figure out why the place was so busy on a Thursday afternoon.


Having fulfilled my mission in Tualatin, I didn't really want to leave yet, so I meandered around for a few more minutes. I went inside the Barnes and Noble and perused the map section on the second floor and looked over the new bestsellers. Then I walked into the central plaza area, past the open door of a women's clothing store. My eyes landed on a sign inside the door: "Have Your Best Booty Ever."

In the middle of the plaza there was a lifesize bronze sculpture of woman. She was thin and pretty, and leaping in the air, raised up by a pile of rose blossoms. Her dress was barely resting on her breasts and the strap of her dress had slipped off her shoulder. In her hand she was holding a long-stemmed rose. She was looking at the top of the rose, or rather just slightly over the top of it.

On the pedestral was the name of the sculpture "Spring Eternal," by a local artist.

It wasn't a bad sculpture when seen at first, until one looked at her face. Like so many installations by local "artists", the face was hideous to the point of being grotesque. Her teeth looked crooked and rotten and her eyes had a demonic absorption in whatever she was looking at.

It occurred to me that the expression on her face reminded me of the way many young women look at their smartphones now. I once saw a pretty girl in line at Starbucks in the aforementioned Fresno center looking into her phone that way. It was as if the phone were showering her with love and attention. The coffeeshop probably could have burned down around her and she wouldn't have noticed. Since noticing it, I see it everywhere. It's as if half the young women in America have turned into the Wicked Queen from Snow White, staring into their little screens with narcissistic glee, asking "who's the fairest of them all?" and always getting the answer they want.

Too bad about the sculpture, I thought, because it made it almost unpleasant to look at from certain angles. But I knew I'd back at Brideport anyway. The coffees hops there would make a great place to work. It immediately rocketed to the top of my list for my "bases" in the area south of Portland.

When I finally got to Salem and checked into the motel, I went on Facebook and looked over my profile, cleaning up a few things so I looked sane and normal to any new friends to whom I revealed my full name. Of course I am sane and but hardly normal, as I often say.

I spent a few minutes watching a video that my sister had posted on my wall, this scene from end of the movie Xanadu.  As I watching it, it suddenly hit me. The sculpture in Bridgeport is Olivia Newton John wearing in the white dress, at the clip.

If only the sculptor had nailed the face. Don't know why the local artists don't seem to be able to pull that off. For me it was always the easiest part of the human anatomy to draw.

A Gentleman's Cheeseburger Club in Tigard

My intention to spend the day getting a flying start on the next phase of my work projects at Starbucks in Laurelhurst was thwarted by the fact that the power adapter on my seven-month-old Macbook Air had gone pear-shaped, as they say in Britain.

At the Jupiter Hotel I had noticed that the machine wasn't charging properly and saw that the sheath on the adapter cord had somehow ripped open.  I found I could get it to charge if the cord was in just the right position, propped up by pillows and blankets in a delicate fashion. It wasn't such a big deal then, since I was on vacation, but now that I was back at work, it was a very undesirable situation. Moreover it seemed to be getting rapidly harder to position to cord to make it charge. I realized that replacing it was a top priority.

So I cut short the Starbucks session. My destination that night was Salem, so I booked a cheap room off the Interstate before leaving the coffeeshop. Then I looked up the location of the various Apple stores in the Portland area. There was one listed in Tualatin, just off I-5, right along my route.

After fighting my way through the maze of Portland to get onto the freeway (from Laurelhurst I finally got on the entrance ramp on the other side of the river), and then creeping along the freeway in the constant rush hour Portland traffic (the highways here really are a disgrace), I finally hit the stride of full speed right as I was approaching the area where the Apple store was located.

But as I always seem to around here, I got off at the wrong exit---the one for 99W in Tigard. I realized I had made a mistake but around here, turning around to get back on the freeway is sometimes an epic adventure. There was a Carl's Jr. right off the exit on 99W, and since it was lunchtime, I decided just to take a breather from traffic and duck in for a cheeseburger.

Carl's Jr. was one of my go-to places for lunch when I was in California, but I hadn't been inside one in a while. The one in Tigard turned out to be a brand new franchise, with nice interior decor and television screens mounted from the ceiling. After I ordered my burger (no fries or drink, as always), I sat at one of the tall tables, looking out over the green hills of Tigard. My attention was inevitably drawn to the video screens. It was impossible to avoid them.

The screens were showing an in-house corporate programming from Carl's Jr, with promotions interspersed with fluff-piece lifestyle features of general interest, and music videos. It was completely unnecessary as a distraction form the meal, but harmless.

Well, almost harmless. As I watching it, a short fluff feature came on, the subject of which was how women can remove excess lipstick from their lips, while putting on make up. The technique the offered was illustrated by an attractive young woman with full lips slathered in red. With her head turned sideways to the camera, she put her index finger into her mouth and slowly drew it out of lips.

WTF? Isn't this supposed to be a family restaurant? In the 1990s's the woman's presentation was the kind of thing one would see in a strip club advertisement. Now I was right in face as a fast food place in the bright sunshine of the lunch hour.

I wanted to look around at anyone else watching, but there was no one else watching.  So I averted my eyes and ignored the screen, looking out instead to the southwest, over the hills of Tigard and beyond, because I had no other choice but to do that. Then I got in my car and somehow managed to cut across four lanes of busy traffic without an accident and get back on the Interstate.

Working for the Man on Burnside

The three nights I spent at the Jupiter turned out to be among the most enjoyable I have spent lately. They really have put together a nice place there to relax. It actually has a built-in hip-tech conference center right next to the lounge and restaurant, but work was completely off the radar for me the whole time.

As I checked out, I chatted with the woman at the front desk and asked her about the local lodging industry, and history of the Jupiter itself. She said it had once been an Econolodge---I had thought perhaps Motel 6 from the size of the rooms, but the surface decor of the hotel was not the usual kind for that flag.

After savoring the solitude in the underground parking garage for extra fifteen minutes, I started my car for the first time since Monday and drove out onto Burnside, heading for the Starbucks.

Vacation was over. It was time to go back to work at my job for the Big Publishing Company. I could feign like this some kind of bad thing, but I actually enjoy my job quite a bit, not just for the rare kind of freedom it affords me, but also because I'm good at what I do, and people depend on me and trust me to get things done. That brings me a great satisfaction along with the paycheck.

While sipping coffee and opening my backlog of emails (thankfully not many, given that we just shifted the production installation of the app to a new servers---that's why I got burned out), I stumbled on article by Helen Smith on Huffington Post about why straight men seem to be losing interest in marriage. She's an excellent writer and find her articles to be insightful and well-written.

As I read the article I came up with what I see as a solution to the "problem."

As I man, especially the "cisgendered" straight Northern European descent variety, I know that I am essentially on my own in this big wide world world, and beyond a very small circle of people who love and care about me, that the world really couldn't give a crap whether I live or fall into a gutter and die. I know that inasmuch as I am a victim, I am victim only of my own poor decisions and my corrupted repressive soul.

So my solution to "problem" of straight men losing interest in marriage is to pour a massive amount of shame upon men in our society. That's what usually works for me. Nothing motivates me more than having some woman remind me that all my complaints are "mansplaining." I love being mocked about my "feewings." It sobers me up immediately and almost reflexively pushes me down to my knees to want to propose to any woman saying that.

I need this shaming because despite my work ethic, I lose track of the fact that as a straight white man, I actually run the world. 

Last night I was telling my date---a particular excellent evening for OKCupid---about some of these things. She mostly just sat and listened to me in an uber-feminine way that was deeply satisfying but which was about as far as possible from the solution I just describing.

Too bad, because it was a fun evening. If she had only given me a Waaaaah. What about the menz??? and pretended to dry fake tears in her eyes, she might have gotten another date out of me. If only she had been a little bit more like my ideal woman, besides the red hair.

Well, that's as much commentary as I can afford right now today. Work calls. Gotta go keep the Patriarchy running.

Smile as she came callin' out my name

Mid-morning. Sunshine and rain in shifts, with sunshine gradually winning. Singing a jaunty melody from my childhood I walked along the rough concrete sidewalks on east Portland near, alternating the parts between falsetto and deep baritone, and not giving a whit if anyone thought I was nuts from singing out loud.

The sidewalks of Portland had seen in many different moods over the years. Here was a new one, echoing past ones in its way, but brand new in other ways. Suddenly everything seemed fun. The funky mix of urban/industrial and entertainment/hip, intertwined on the same block, the essence of East Burnside, especially down by the river---why wouldn't one travel half-way across the country to come live here?

I had taken the day off---most of the week in fact. My blank-slate no-work-thought mind felt lighter than air. Whatever I found on my walk would surely please me, I knew.

I spent an hour inside the outdoor store on Broadway---three floors of various equipment. On the main floor a row of camping chairs were set up by the tents. I found the most luxurious one, that looked like a lounge chair, and plopped myself down into it, putting my feet up on the rest. For the next five minutes I sat in the chair doing nothing, imagining myself in it beside a campfire along a cascading river.  I eavesdropped on conversations from the staff about various tents and their advantages. I wondered if they might ask me "Sir, can I help you," but they left me alone. Then I went to the next chair and did the same thing, going from to another until I had tried all the chairs.

I was about to leave the store without buying anything, but saw the sunglasses rack by the door. I had left my last pair in a bar a couple nights before, the cheap pair I had bought in Santa Barbara, so I picked out a pair like them, of better quality, and without looking at the price, put it down on the counter. The young bearded man behind the counter struck up a conversation with me.

There was a box of Trivial Pursuit cards by the cash register. I pulled one out and read the question outloud: "What country has the highest population of sheep?"

"I'm gonna say...Australia," I said. I turned the card over. "I was right."

They guy and his co-worker laughed. "Some of the answers are outdated though."

"Yeah, some have a Cold War Era feeling," the other said. "Some of the countries don't exist anymore."

"Probably ones I've been to," I said.

Somehow that led to a couple minutes of them asking me about my "Adventures Behind the Iron Curtain Back in the Day." They were surprisingly curious, so I went with it. As I was talking some other customers came up behind me and one of the two young men starting talking to them.

The other one kept asking me questions about Eastern Europe. I told him that I had made multiple trips, years ago, and that I had had great man. "It was great to be a young man there," I told him. "The women in the former Soviet Union were very friendly."

As I said that, I saw his eyes sort of get slightly tense. It was at that point I figured we were done, I thanked him and turned to leave. Right behind me I saw the other customers---a pair of identical-twin-looking Lesbians with short grey hair wearing biking outfits.

I laughed to myself as I left the store. On the way out I noticed the community newspaper. The cover was an article about "Appreciating Straights." The idea was that straights can be useful because they can be the ones to "make gay marriage happen."

"They can have it," I tho,ught myself.

Of course I've had plenty of these kinds of thoughts since coming out as straight. Being a straight man in America these days is akin to declaring yourself a war criminal. It's OK to have heterosexual tendencies, but a man is supposed to keep these as closeted as possible, because it is offensive to most of society to hear about such behavior now.

In ten seconds I was back to singing my jaunty song. Somehow my head tone was really good that day. I'm not a natural born vocal performer, but occasionally I can hit almost any note perfectly.

Jupiter June

Tuesday evening. Portland. Last strands of daylight at 9 pm. He stood in the doorway of his room at the Jupiter Hotel, leaning against the wall. His whole body felt slack and comfortable. The air felt like a warm bath.

Across the way a tall attractive blonde in shorts read read her smartphone. She was standing at the entrance of the Doug Fir night club.

In the nearby patio of the restaurant, a half dozen couples and groups of people sat drinking and talking on the picnic tables.

He went downstairs into the parking garage to get some maps. Later in the room, the sounds of music from the club.

He thinks about a friend he just met. He imagines a phone conversation they might have.

Later in his room, the sound of music from the club vibrates the walls. He leaves the door ajar, and without taking his shoes off he lies across the bed and watches a dance competition show on television with the sound turned down. The movement of the dancers is entertaining, but he prefers the sounds of people in the courtyard across the way.

Encamped at the Prairie of the Tea

"And by encamped," I wrote in the email to my friend in New York. "I mean staying at the Best Western in Washougal, next to La prairie du thé."

My friend knew my location from that. He knew the Portland area well. He had been born here and had grown up here. At one time, a few years back, he was the Oregonian and I the New Yorker. Now our roles were almost reserved, at least for now, in some curious fashion.

We were old friends. My reference to la prairie du thé bespoke of an inside joke-reference between him and me, but one I'd have to explain later, because it was so obscure, even to myself. It had to do with the coincidence of deciding to blow off seeing Fort Vancouver the week before, just a few miles downriver. That place had once been the object of a completely different road trip.

My hotel there in Washougal was only a hundred yards from the Columbia. My room looked out on the green hills on the Oregon side, and the water that sparkled when the sun was out (about half the time). Next to the hotel was the Parkersville Historical Site, from the early part of the Nineteenth Century. I learned from the signs there that Washougal is the grassy area where the American traders bypassed the British authorities at Fort Vancouver, effectively allowing an American invasion of the Oregon Country. And then there was the tea thing. But that was a different life.

He was on the rebel side now, and also on the Washington side of the river. He told his friend, who was ironically staying up the Hudson, that he felt more comfortable where he now was. He could breathe. The wind up the gorge felt as if it connected one to the outside world. 

Savoring the Sweetness of Aloha

Still needing to do some really work, and having many hours before I checked into my next hotel, I kept going east on the Pacific Highway into Hillsboro, which I already knew from previous visits was busier but hardly more inspiring in character than Cornelius or Forest Grove. Having no business there that day,  I drove straight through, bypassing the Starbucks there entirely.

As I always do whenever I get in a car in Oregon, the feeling to just keep driving until it's all in my rearview mirror temporarily took over. I resolved to keep going in towards Portland on the side arteries until I finally hit something resembling modern American civilization.

I knew that surely I would see such neighborhoods somewhere between there and Beaverton. I let my mind wander as I drove, following a fellow Bimmer with a metal law enforcement badge fixed to the back license plate, who somehow knew just how to navigate the weird turns in the streets.

At around 235th Street, in the town of Aloha, the apartment complexes and hedge trimmings began to evoke the feeling of the modern suburbs of Austin. Yet despite the new urbanist developments, which are in the majority, there are rustic pockets that remain, and probably will in some cases, becoming quaint as the memory of the old era fades away, if the history of places like Boulder and Aspen is any indication. But that's in Colorado, where rustic things can be cherished as quaint without the stain of being attacked to poverty.

Finally I approached an era of green sculpted landscapes along a parkway with office parks beside, something that I associate with most of suburban America. At last I felt that I could have been in suburban Virginia, from the way it looked. As I approached the next intersection, I looked up at the sign on the stoplight pointing into the entrance of one of the nicer corporate areas.

The sign read "Nike World Campus."

Sliding Towards Civilization in Cornelius

After two nights I checked out of the Best Western and split Forest Grove. My date from the Grand Lodge had agreed with me that it was the only place worth staying around there. But I had business to take me elsewhere for a few days.

I headed into Portland on the Pacific Highway in mid-morning. I needed to do some work. The Starbucks website had said that the Safeway Starbucks in Forest Grove had wi-fi, but when I toted my backpack in there and asked the woman behind the counter about this, to confirm, she said "no" in a way that implied somehow an "of course not."

It wasn't hard to see why. The parking lot seemed half-full of people sitting in their cars doing nothing at all (something I do on the road sometimes, but I don't like it when there are other people doing it). Across the street on the main road was a Goodwill thrift store. At once I was remembering why I ever time I came to Oregon, thinking this is where I would live and make a life for myself, that I wound up fleeing as fast as possible, wanting just a breath of fresh air.

The Starbucks in nearby Cornelius, just one town in towards Portland, supposedly was a real Starbucks which would certainly have wi-fi. It was just a couple miles down the road.

At first when I rolled into town, and saw the quaint town sign with flowers, and the coffeeshop beside a bright tanning outlet in a modern strip mall, I felt like I'd climbed up one level of civilization. I immediately began to regret some of my earlier harsh take on the far suburbs of Portland.

But after I went inside, and tried to work, I immediately corrected myself again. The clientele weren't much different looking in demeanor and appearance that the ones in the Safeway Parking lot, the kind of people who if they have laptops are working on a resume for a part-time job they hope to get.

Working was futile. The woman behind me, at least 350 pounds, took out her phone and made a long loud call to make a doctor's appointment.

The young men behind the counter was very friendly, chatting me up in almost a girltalk sort of way that felt frankly gooey. I wanted to growl at him like a G.I. on leave,  hey mack, just give me my java.

Later he talked to his equally half-way-to-effeminate young man across the room at times. Half the young men of that generation seem to be that way to me lately---in an earlier era, you might think they were surely gay, but if you listen to them, you can tell they are not, and if they were gay now they would be really effeminate.

I could have coped with those kinds of distractions, because I have before, but in the coffeeshop they were playing not the usual corporate-planned rotation of songs (someone is genius there in Seattle on this) but a bunch of pop hits, which really destroy my ability to concentrate. When they started playing Tom Petty's "Breakdown", in which that talented man repeats the title in many lines, I couldn't take it anymore. So I packed up my backpack as quickly as possible and fled the place.

Needing some mouthwash and sundries, I noticed a nearby Walgreen's (a standard bit of civilization which Forest Grove seems to lack as well), and hoofed it across the quiet highway, past some flower-laden island berms and bricks barriers that had installed by the city to spruce up the town in recent years.

It's a strategy that, were I in charge of planning for any of the little towns orbiting Portland, I would heartily adopt.  It really does change the mood ones feels, on a daily basis, if it seems people give a hoot about such things.

It made sympathetic to the folks in some of these towns, among whom there must surely be a practice of taking a hard-line stance against the "Old Oregon" ways with  some kind of local-fascist vigor, implementing such surface improvements to invite in new development as quickly possible, as if not only to enjoy such amenities but also to proclaim loudly to the world that "we are not the hicks in the next town over."

My trip to Walgreen's was successful, but it had the side effect of allowing me to see what Cornelius looks like, just a few blocks off the highway. The feel of modern civilization drops off quickly, just as if does on a large scale as one leaves the better parts of Portland and its prettier siblings.

In Which I Enter the Grand Lodge

Had a fantastic time tonight with a woman I met on OKCupid just this afternoon. Two hours after saying hello (and having her almost block me because she construed my initial message as a crude come on) we were having drinks together in the "Doctor's Office," the bar in the basement of the of the McMenamin's Grand Lodge in Forest Grove, which at one time was a Masonic Hospital and Care Home, before becoming a hotel and bar.

It was her suggestion. She actually grew up in town (partially) and went to Pacific University---a vocal music major, the kind of girl I used to fall for at Willamette. I told her that at one point in the evening when we were joking around.

I made her give an extensive tour of the grounds. She mentioned the places where the ghosts supposedly hung out. After all her stories, I was surprised we didn't run into one of our own. Maybe next time.

Over drinks, I particularly enjoyed hearing about how her comical experiences messaging other men on OKCupid. I told her that all of them are losers. I'm the awesome stud. She told me I was narcissistic.  I think we hit it off well. "Oh, yeah, we'll see each other again..." she told me, as she drove off back to Hillsboro, to make dinner for her teenage kids.

Oregon at Point Zero

If there is a word I have come to associate with my time in Oregon, it is the word failure. I want it to be an epic and grand failure, but that is giving far too much importance to my life.  It's more appropriate to say that it is a petty and meaningless failure, like a squeak in the Cosmos unheard and of no consequence.

Even though it provided a brief spasm of laughter for the gods, no doubt, on a personal level, this failure feels like so deep an error in perception and judgment on my part, over so long a span of my life,  that all I can do is scramble as fast as possible to raise the white flag and admit deeply and utterly that I was wrong about everything. Just let me be free of this at last.

But then there's my job, that I got here, which I like very much, and even if it ended tomorrow, it would certainly have been a huge success as far my life's goals.

I have nothing against this place or its people. In fact I love it in many ways, as much as I can still bear to do that. This is despite the fact that I know it would be very hard for me to live here, and not just because of old memories, but because Oregon is not an easy place to live in, if you ask me.

There are only a few pockets of places here that even feel like civilization, of which I am a big fan. I can go off the grid as much as anyone, but what feels so oppressing here to me is the general feeling that I just want it to hurry up and catch up with the rest of the world.

The pockets where I'm most comfortable, where I go just to hang out and feel normal here, are ironically not the urbanish areas like Portland, which are marvelous and appealing but no longer my style or vibe Instead they are the clusters of modern "Interstate culture" where the hotels, convenience stores, and big box outlets are relatively new and clean, and where it does not feel like one is living in Hillbillyville. Those are the places around here that I go just to "breathe."

Forest Grove by all rights should be a boutique hip college town right off the highway between a hip thriving urban tech center and the god-damned ocean. But it isn't. I feels like a little refugee town from a timber culture that died three decades ago and never came back, that ekes along as best it can like some place in the middle of Oklahoma.

It struck me the reason it feels so different here is that Oregon is not only rustic but poor. Wyoming and Montana are very rustic but not poor (except on Indian reservations).  New Mexico is poor but curiously feels less rustic, because of its culture. California is a golden place that is both beautiful and rotting. It is swarmed by armies of homeless, but is certainly civilized throughout. Colorado is civilization itself and as rich as Midas.

But here, even though there is less manifest homelessness than in California, outside of the pockets of prosperity it feels as if so many people are just slightly above being out on the street, and with no hope of it ever being different than it is.

It was never a rich state---its resources were timber instead of gold, for example. The scenery is beautiful but is outclassed in grandeur by the spectacles in its sister western states. But above all the industries that sustained its working classes have by-and-large just blown away into the wind. I got to see some of the very end of that old culture while I lived here.

The Grand Floral Parade---it would fun if it were a real floral spectacle, instead of just a memory of something that might have retro cool, when Portland was a really hick town. When I first moved here long ago, I was certainly blown away by the abundance of flowers in the Spring, but the Rose City monicker was an anachronism even in my day.

And I can certainly have more compassion for the hipsters that have made Portland their Mecca. After the parade on Saturday, I was standing in the parking garage looking across towards Nordstrom, and up towards the Paramount Hotel, I could see the public fountain in the big plaza by the place where the streetcar stops. I've been coming to this area for many years now and seen it just get more and more interesting and articulated as an urban environment.

On the sunniest Saturday of the year, at a particularly festive hour, the families that had come to see the parade were in the plaza relaxing. Children were playing in the fountain. I looked at the men and women. There was one guy who must have weighed four hundred pounds. He was running through the water without his shirt.  There were plenty of other specimens of folk with nearly the same body shape, both men and women, in similar kinds of joyful play.

It must be horrifying for some kids to grow up in this of environment. All they want to do is escape it. So they come to Portland and put on hipster glasses and hang around other people with whom they feel they can be themselves, in a similar kind of way. They listen and play music. Urbanity happens. Except for one day a year when have to let the riff-raff in for the stupid parade---a festival celebrating flowers that is less floral than Amsterdam on a typical Tuesday. No wonder they have to cap it off with a big naked bicycle rally.

One day Oregon will have a flower festival again without being ashamed of what it is.  They'll bring back the Rose City name in earnest, dust if off and wear it proudly. I predict the reason will be because of the desire to cater to Asian tourists, who actually like that kind of thing.

The Return of the Dallas Cowboys

Dana---that's my friend's name---was eager to hear about some of the adventures I'd been on since I'd last seen him, almost two years before that. Among other things, we'd both agreed that I wouldn't be able to fulfill my personal destiny until I had a bunch more money than I had at the time, which was not much at all. "It will change you, Matt, for the better, to have money."

I had agreed with him and we had set an amount that I expected to have the next time I saw him.  He asked about that almost right off the bat, before we even left the office to go to lunch. I had to break it to him that I wasn't to the mark we'd set yet, but in a way it didn't matter. I was stratospherically above where I was then. I had achieved enough to completely change my perception of myself and my day-to-day place in the world. "I've leveled up," I told him, "a few levels."

I told him that I had decided to not yet to make a priority of that first wealth mark, but instead to concentrate on my own idea of freedom, which was to have a modest but good income and be able to travel freely, as I have come to be able to do, and work from anywhere (at least in the United States so far).

Over lunch I told him something I've told others, that "the day I realized I'd achieved enough of income working remotely to be able to stay in decent budget motels indefinitely was the day I felt truly free for the first time."

Ironically, as I told my friend, I got my current job during my last trip to Oregon. Although I work for a New York company, my boss works (mostly remotely) himself from Portland, which is where he hired me, after I responded to a Craigslist ad. They couldn't find anyone in Portland to do what I now do, and had to hire a guy passing through in his Bimmer.

He took delight in my stories about hotels. But he thought it queer that I had bothered to spend so much money to stay at the Heathman simply for the Grand Floral Parade, which I gathered he thought was not worth the spectacle.

"I just had to see it," I said. "I had to cross it off my list."

"But why that?" he asked, .

"It's arbitrary I guess, but I suppose it was so I could maybe find some measure of closure  and never have to set foot in this god-forsaken state again."

That made him chuckle.

At the end of lunch, I told him about my plan to make Forest Grove one of my bases during this visit to the Portland area. Of course he thought it was a good idea, in part because it would allow us to get together again.

I told him the reason I chose Forest Grove was that I had spent last Christmas in Thousand Oaks.

"Oh, yeah, Cal Lutheran," he said. He esplained he had to go down there in college to rescue a high school classmate, a young woman, who had flamed out there and sadly later committed suicide.

"Yeah," I said. "We were right next to the campus. Everyone there still remembers that the campus was where the Dallas Cowboys had their summer training camp during their heyday in the 1970s. I went online while I was there and found out that the first place they had held their summer camp was Pacific University in Forest Grove. So I'm following in the historic footsteps of the Dallas Cowboys."

I should mention I don't care about professional football franchises anymore. The game is a nice spectacle, but I don't care which teams win, beyond rooting for the one with more gumption to win, and to root for a good game. But back when I cared about such arbitrary things, I used to really hate the Dallas Cowboys.

It can feel good in a way to turn the world upside down, to love what you used to hate, and maybe hate what you used to love. It's something I've gotten almost used to.