Christmas, Present, With Bright Spinning Lights

"I can see your house from here!" I said, over the phone to my sister.

I was in the suburb northwest of Denver where she lives with her family.  It was night and the lights of the businesses and houses were lit. In the distance the foothills south of Boulder made a jagged outline against the dark sky. The places were familiar, but the view was very new and different. Instead of seeing things at ground level, I was high above the ground, looking down as if floating high in the air.

"You're checked in already?" she asked me.

"Yeah, it's nice here. My room's on the eighth floor. They upgraded me to one with a view of the mountains."

The Westminster Westin is the tallest building for miles. I had been wanting to stay here, and had been looking for the right excuse. Until now it had seemed an unnecessary luxury. But after the recent trip to Vancouver, I had decided that one good Westin deserved another. It would be a nice reward after the long road trip from Oregon, and the rooms at Christmastime were discounted to the point where there was little reason to stay elsewhere.

"Come in! and know me better, man!"

I'd started the morning in Steamboat Springs at the Rabbit Ears Motel, a local landmark. Everyone who has been to Steamboat knows the kooky sign that beckons travelers along the highway. Tourists love to take pictures of it. One might say that they've never seen the likes of it before.

It was my first time staying there. In the old days of my travel along this route, any motel was a luxury. Now of course it was the normal no-question thing to do. In fact, the Rabbit Ears was the easy budget option in Steamboat.

Despite its advanced age, the Rabbit Ears was nicely renovated, with comfortable modern rooms, flat screen televisions, and an ample continental breakfast comparable to most good Days Inn franchises.

The forecast that night had called for an inch or two or snow, but looking out the window the next morning, I saw the Bimmer heaped with at least six inches of powder.

Fortunately Steamboat is a ski town, on the flank of the mountains that catch loads of snow each winter. I was able to borrow a broom from the outdoor closet, left open in an inviting way, and cleared the car of snow in only a few minutes.

But the CDOT website said that nearby Rabbit Ears Pass, a notoriously nasty winter summit, was packed with snow and ice. Chains were mandatory for commercial vehicles.

That didn't sound like my cup of tea. So I decided to detour off U.S. 40 and take the state highway south to Tonopah, and then up over Gore Pass on the back roads.

Gore turned out to be packed with snow as well, but the grade is much gentler and there was no traffic. On the isolated highway I could negotiate my own pace, and not worry about anyone else on the road.

Even at my leisurely speed, on each sharp curve, or any time the car felt like it might be losing traction, I got flashbacks to my blind spin-out coming down from Cameron Pass a couple years back. That kind of experience---coming face-to-face with one's obvious imminent death in the most terrifying way, and then getting a reprieve as if it had all been a dream---stays with you in a visceral way. The rest of one's life seems like a luminous gift, as they say. I didn't need to repeat it, and I didn't want to press my luck again.

So what should have been a couple hour's drive into Denver, at least in summertime, turned into an all day event, especially after I stopped at a Starbucks in Dillon to send work emails and set up a conference call for the next morning.

My reward for this delay was that by the time I started up I-70 towards the Eisenhower Tunnel, the sun was low in the sky and the high ridge of the Rockies was lit with the supernatural illumination of the golden hour before sunset.  The Rockies are beautiful in summer, but covered with snow, and crested with the mist of clouds, they can make your soul ache from the overpowering beauty.

The traffic was heavy and slow on the other side of the tunnel. "Coming back from the mountains" is something that Coloradoans generally dread. But I'd seen much worse. By keeping a good distance between the Bimmer and the car in front of me, I managed to use my brakes only a few times all the way down to Idaho Springs, where the Charlie Taylor Waterwheel, still rotating from the Gold Rush days, was illuminated with Christmas lights.

The wheel is a cheesy old tourist attraction, but it gives me a warm feeling to see it again. It reminds of me my family's first trip out to Colorado, when the sights of the Rockies were delightfully exotic and "western."

After Idaho Springs there's only one small summit left---Floyd Hill. When you come to the crest, by the exit to Buffalo Bill's grave, one is greeted by the big yellow sign Truckers, Don't Be Fooled! You are not down yet! Immediately after that the majesty of the edge of the Great Plains and lights of the metropolis spread out before your eyes, as if you are coming to the edge of a continent.

Within an hour I was inside my warm hotel room at the Westin, standing in front of the large window looking at the lights of the cars going up and up down the Boulder Turnpike. The journey was over now.

But the Bimmer had one more trip for the night.

"So have you eaten dinner yet?" my sister asked me, over the phone.

"No, I was just about to head down to the hotel restaurant," I said.

She invited me over to share the leftover pork roast she'd made.

"The girls don't know you're coming," she said. "I'm the only one who knows you're here."

Fifteen minutes later I parked in front their house and walked up to the front porch When I rang the bell I could see my nieces looking out through the front curtains, confused. They opened the door, it took them a few seconds to recognize me in my winter coat and balaclava.

"Uncle M-a-a-a-a-t!!"

It was the sound I'd driven thirteen hundred miles to hear.

Visited by the Ghost of Countdowns Past

U.S. Highway 40, eastern Utah into western Colorado. The valley of the Green River. Highway of memories.

I've been down this route before, exactly three times, driving alone. Each time was at a watershed moment of my adult life. They were times I was experiencing some intense emotion. This emotion got locked into the road and its barren terrain, like a favorite song one hasn't heard in a long time.

This time, that inevitable intensity of the expected memory-recall led me chose this route only because it was the most convenient and obvious. I was not looking forward to reawakening the echoes of those chapters, even if it was for just half a day.  Nor was I was going to go out of my way to avoid it.

Each time I had traveled this route before, it was to go between Colorado and Oregon, or vice versa. The first of the four times was when I was 23 years old, in my first car. I was heading back to Salem after Christmas break. The car didn't make it all the way there. It's still sitting in the Nevada desert, as far as I know. An intense experience.

Now on this Sunday afternoon, I pass through the town of Vernal, Utah, where the familiar jovial pink smiling dinosaur greets me like an old friend.

Keep your feet on the ground...

Heading towards the Colorado border, the highway quickly becomes nearly devoid of traffic. The highway climbs over ridges and drops into isolated valleys, with not a single vehicle visible along the ribbon of asphalt that stretches ahead.

I am alone with my thoughts. The only sound is the steady engine of Bimmer in fifth gear. In this quasi-silence, the emotion-echoes of those previous trips flash in me in some chaotic order. They seem to compress my entire life into one panoramic view. It makes me feel connected to all those episodes, yet curiously remote from them at the same time, as if I am looking down at a mountain trail at the multiple switchbacks I have climbed.

On the long haul through the snowy wilds of northwestern Colorado, I am restless behind the wheel and wish for the day's journey to be over. I count the miles down in my head, and look for the progress measured by the mileage markers. At the same time I know that when I reach civilization again, I'll miss the isolation of this stretch of the road.  I alternate between spaced out thoughts, oblivious to the mountains, and then being intensely aware of my surroundings.

Finally in the late afternoon I reach the outskirts of the cowboy town of Craig, the eastern terminus of the most isolated stretch. In 2004, at almost the same time of year while returning from Oregon, I explored the downtown and took pictures to upload to Wikipedia, something I did a lot back then (I don't seem to be able to find the ones from that particular day---perhaps I never uploaded them, or they were expunged as inferior).

This time in Craig I decide that a return visit to downtown is necessary, to see if notice any changes from my previous visits. Most of the businesses are shuttered for the day. Only the tiny Chinese restaurant is open. Next to it, the prominent western themed bar and grill is now out of business, its quaint cowboy sign now in decay.

As I walk back to the car, a man stumbles across the wide main street, obviously a bit tipsy after an afternoon drinking. He notices me and pivots towards me on the sidewalk, the way a drunk person does.

"Hey," he says to me, "you want a cigarette?" He awkwardly holds out his open pack as an invitation.

I'm a little taken aback. This is not what I expected. He's not trying to bum a cigarette of me. Intead he wants me to take one.

"Oh, uh, no thanks," I say, putting a strained smile on my face.

I walk past him and head back to my car. The truth is that I didn't want to engage him in conversation. I didn't want to stand there the cold, perhaps listening to his Ancient Mariner's tale. But how much would it have taken out of my life, to do just that? Why not give him a few minutes of my time? Was I in such a hurry as that?

As I drive away, I can see him stumbling through the park towards a nearby apartment complex. I regret not taking him up on his offer.

I've still got an hour to go, and most of it will be in the dark by now. As I pilot the Bimmer out of Craig, I turn on the radio. I no longer wish to be alone in my quiet thoughts.

But what to listen to? There are only five or six FM stations available in that part of Colorado. The mountains block propagation. Perhaps a country station? I reflect on how I can't stand classic rock. It grates on my ears to hear most of the songs that were popular in my teenage and early adult years, and which are still played on the radio.

It feels like a tyranny to hear them, as if I am some piece of fruit being squeezed for the last drops of emotional reaction. Musical performance was once ephemeral, a phenomenon of the moment. Now we seem locked into a permanent stasis of recorded events, a gross elevation of nostalgia to some kind of Bacchic religion of identical repetition of melody and lyrics.

As I poke the scan button repeatedly, moving through the stations until I've gone around the dial a couple times, I start to lose hope of finding anything I can listen to. Bah. Then just as I am about to shut off the radio again I hear a familiar jingle from long ago, the segue theme of an old national radio show that counted down and played the top pop music hits each week.

...and keep reaching for the stars.

"A-mer-i-can Top Fo-o-o-or-ty"

The voice of the famous disc jockey who hosted the show comes after the jingle.

"We're counting down the hits, from forty all the way to number one," he says in his jaunty way.

"At twenty-four this week on our countdown is the latest hit from the duo of..."

The show in that old format hasn't been on in many years, and the original host retired long ago. It's obviously a rebroadcast from years ago. But it sounds fresh and clear, and it feels like a radio broadcast coming through some kind of wormhole in spacetime.

"Spirit, what strange and familiar noises are these?" I bellow aloud, in my best Scrooge-like imitation of outrage.

I used to listen to the countdown show nearly every Sunday afternoon when I was in junior high school. Back then I was very much into following pop music, and keeping track of which songs were at the top of the charts.

After a few minutes, it becomes clear to me that the show is a rebroadcast of the countdown from late December 1978. That was the first Christmas our family spent in Colorado. We had just moved out there that fall from Iowa. I was in eighth grade. I probably listened to that exact show in my bedroom in the basement of our house on the north side of Loveland.

Colorado was still bizarre and new to me then. It felt like a alien place, with a strange culture that I didn't understand. It felt isolated from the rest of the world, a million miles from anywhere else. Loveland felt backwards and hickish. I was not comfortable in my new school and missed my friends back "home."

At once the show is both comforting and deeply poignant. I see the stupid teenager that I was. All of that drama from those trips up and down US 40, and the chapters of my life they demarcated were yet to happen. All of those decisions, steps and missteps, are ahead of me. Yet it is all far behind me at the same time. It all happened and is gone.

I'm struck by the irony of how much I like listening to it, and anticipating the next song in the countdown. Partly it is because many of the songs are ones that were minor or obscure pop hits, even by well known musicians. They aren't the songs you hear on the radio today. Some of them I haven't heard in over three decades. I find myself singing along to lyrics that I had forgotten that I remembered.

I can't stop listening. In the growing darkness, I float down the winding road through the canyon east of Craig, following the tail lights of a truck. The radio crackles as if it is fading out. I strain to hear the host, but the show comes back to life as I come around the next bend.

I follow the show like this all the way to Steamboat Springs, hoping there is a radio in my motel room.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Utah

Red asked me for a photo of the view from my room. I sent her this image from Wikipedia of the Tabernacle (foreground) and the Temple (background). I'm pretty certain this was taken from the hallway window right next to my door in the Plaza.

True to my routine, I spent the first day in Salt Lake City---a weekday---absorbed in work at a downtown Starbucks. It was a snow-globe kind of a day, with big thick flakes coming down, filing up the streets with powder. I did a very un-Mormon thing by drinking two large cups of coffee while working.

On the way out the door of Starbucks, a shivering homeless man asked me if I could spare a dollar. Like everyone I'm torn about giving money to homeless people, but in this case the little voice said to go ahead and do it.

I fished in my pockets. "How about five?" I said, handing him the bigger bill. That blew him away. I got an astonished and happy "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" in return. He sounded like a little kid, having just opened a present under a tree. I felt like I'd done the right thing in this case.

The next day was bright and clear---"Rocky Mountain Bright," as anyone who has lived in that part of the country during the winter knows. After work I indulged in a long stroll around the Capitol Hill district, culminating in a tour of the capitol itself. I'm sort of a connoisseur of American statehouse architecture. The exterior of the Utah capitol reminded me a lot of the one in Little Rock, Arkansas---starkly simply on a barren hilltop. On the inside it felt Italianate, with a roof like the Galleria in Milan, yet quite plain and simple---reminiscent of the Georgia capitol.

Salt Lake City is flush up against the foothills. The area around Capitol Hill, the streets and houses, reminds me of what Boulder would be like, if it were the capital of Colorado instead of Denver.

Of course I spent some time touring the LDS areas around Temple Square. Non-Mormons are not allowed inside Temple, so that was out of the question, but I fulfilled the requirement of doing something Mormon-touristy by going inside the Tabernacle, which is a non-sacred space open to the public. I sat in the pews and admired the giant pipe organ and the empty seats where the famous choir sits.

But I didn't go on any of the organized tours. I liked walking around, but I wanted to do it on my own terms without a sales pitch.

On Saturday morning, the day of the solstice, I checked out of the Plaza, somewhat wistfully leaving my room with its awesome panorama. Outisde, the snow-globe world had returned in the form of a new storm front. After a side trip up through the University of Utah campus, just for sightseeing, I drove out of town and got on I-80, heading towards Park City.

Park City is an old mining town that is a now a skiing center and is best known for the Sundance Film Festival. The monumental remnants of the 2002 Winter Olympics prominently decorated the town.

I killed a couple hours in the afternoon walking up and down the quiet streets (actually it was quite noisy from the snow machine going full blast at the bottom of the mountain). I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they can pull of having a film festival in that kind of place. There's only one proper theater in the whole town. I hiked up on the steep side streets, past the ramshackle ski bum cottages to the sprawling new mansions at the top. I wondered what Bob Redford stays when he comes to town.

I stayed that night at a very nice Best Western plus just down the road by the Interstate. In the morning it was once again foggy and snowy. There is a Murphy's Law of automobile physics, evidently, that windshield wipers will first give out directly in the line of one's sight. Or maybe it's devious planned obsolescence. But why does it happen on the driver's side first?

In any case, the old ones were making me miserable, with all the salt and debris on the road that kept obscuring my vision. I realized I hadn't replaced them since Massachusetts. So on the way through Heber City, I detoured to detour to an auto parts store to buy new windshield wipers for the Bimmer. A miraculous change---it felt like having a new car for twenty bucks.

Back on the road, I headed east on US-40, up over the summit of the pass. On the other side, it was the reverse of what I'd experienced eastern Oregon, where I'd suddenly gone from blue skies to fog. Now, coming down the valley of the Strawberry River, the fog was all gone and the day was clear and bright again. It was perfect driving weather, and the traffic was light enough to make it pleasant.

The recent storm had left a coating of several inches of snow on everything throughout the entire Uintah Basin---and I mean everything. The rugged terrain was uniformly white, and the trees were coated with that powdered-sugar looking snow, as if they were candy (unfortunately many were probably Russian Olive, a notorious invasive species).

Nevertheless it was breathtaking to behold. I kept feeling an impulse to get out and contemplate the tableau, but I had good road, and didn't want to disturb the fates, so I kept driving.

The ubiquitous soft white coating was so bright that it hurt my eyes. Without my sunglasses at hand, it gave me an exquisite headache behind the wheel.

Hence the title of this post. You thought I meant something else?

Mr. Hughes Goes to Salt Lake City

The street in front of the Temple in downtown Salt Lake City that evening was not only clogged with fresh snow,  but getting through each stop light required waiting for a clearing in the streams of pedestrians that were crossing the boulevard to the see the holiday lights in the square.

Unfortunately that's exactly where my route took me. Even though my hotel was right next to Temple Square, it was on the wrong side of the street, blocked by the UTA Trax light rail line. It took about twenty minutes just to circle around a few blocks to get to the parking garage.

But my patience was well rewarded. The Plaza Hotel, at first glance from the outside, was everything I wanted it to be. I had booked my three nights in Salt Lake City with the explicit purpose of being as close to Temple Square as possible. The hotel even advertised that it was directly next to the Latter Day Saints family history library, for convenient research. To paraphrase a famous Utahan, this was the place.

When I was growing up in the Midwest, my family was very left-wing and progressive, especially for that era. As such, political correctness was a family rule. There was no tolerance for any kind of speech that might denigrate any group of people---with one solitary exception. In my family it was allowed, even encouraged, to hate Mormons. My parents even had special derogatory names for them.

There were always a few Mormon kids in class, and as such it was a little bit tricky making friends with them. They seemed to live in a closed world, at least in my imagination. But I never had any bad experiences with them. The worst incident, if you could call it that, was in fifth grade when I moved to a new school. Back then I was active in Boy Scouts, and so I had to look for new troop in my school.

One of the kids in my class---a Mormon---said there was a troop that met at his church and that I was welcome to join. Meeting in a church was normal for Boy Scouts, so I went along to a couple of the meetings.

But the meetings were not like the ones that met in the basements of Lutheran or Episcopal churches. We didn't talk about camping and hiking much. Instead we met in a conference room in the church and basically learned LDS doctrine. I wasn't put off so much as bored by it, so I quickly found another troop.

But the good part was that I got to learn a little bit about the religion, not only the doctrine itself, but the way the Mormons sell their religion to others. It can feel as if you have walked into a used car dealership, as when I was accosted my some missionaries in downtown Austin and patiently gave them my ear while waiting for the bus. Or when I visited the Mormon Handcart Historical Site in Wyoming, which is run by the Church.

But I was always free to terminate the interaction and leave, of course. They didn't try to stop me. I've been subjected to much worse.

It's easy to make fun of the Mormon mythology---it sounds a bit like the origins of Superman---but who hasn't joked about how there should be a religion based on celebrities or fictional characters? The Mormons actually pulled it off, in some ways. The fact that it is fused into Christianity is the problem for many folks. Those who hate Christians hate the Mormons especially as "super-Christians," while other Christians hate the Mormons as a supposed perversion of Christianity.

Now in the Internet age, where everything is exposed on Wikipedia, it's especially trendy to mock the Mormons. But isn't that what the great counterculture hero Blake said we should do---creatively invent new mythologies to replace the old, and stale (and thus oppressive) ones?

All of this has made me more curious about the Mormons in a contrarian way. In recent years, during a phase in which I immersed myself in a study of American history, I became fascinated by the LDS Church as the manifestation of a uniquely American type of religion. It seems to be particularly indicative of the time and place at which it sprang into being---the 1840's in western New York State, the cradle of many offbeat American phenomena (that's partly why it often strikes me as an offshoot of Freemasonry).

Of course the history of the LDS Church isn't always stellar. And I am aware that many people have terrible experiences with the Church---young folks who have a hard time breaking away, for example. The Mormons also have a tendency to take over entire communities when they start moving in, and the results are always happy. But like I said, I've been fortunate to have had only positive or (at worst)  mildly annoying experiences with them.

So in a way I count myself a "gentile" friend of the Mormons. In this regard, the aspect I tend to admire most is their unabashed and practical approach to worldly success. This to me is Exhibit A in the "Amercian-ness" of their religion. They have made a literal doctrine out of the kind of practical self-help that goes back to Benjamin Franklin and runs up through Andrew Carnegie and the modern-day infomercial prophets. I figure there are worse things than having some of that rub off on me as inspiration.

This was especially true a couple years back when I was working at a tech start-up in Fort Collins, helping to develop a cutting-edge biodata collection and analysis system. It was an incredible piece of technology, and at the time I thought it should have made all of us multi-millionaires.

But the owners and founders had a vision of how the product should be marketed, and it simply wasn't working, after several years of frustration. The founders were Tibetan Buddhists, as it happens (there's a substantial community in northern Colorado).

I have nothing against that per se, but I learned along the way that because the founders believed in re-incarnation, they seriously didn't mind if they failed in business in this lifetime. They would reap the rewards in the next one, or down the line.

Really it was a classic case of company founders being unable to let go of the reins when it was time. But because of this floundering of marketing, a civil war erupted within the small firm. The dissident faction was led by an elder LDS member and his ex-Mormon daughter. They wanted to find a way to make money on the technology right now. Guess which faction I sided with?

Despite the similarities, I am manifestly not the reincarnation of Howard Hughes

At the time I used to joke to myself that I felt like Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire who in his later years holed up at the top floor of the Las Vegas Hilton surrounded by Mormon bodyguards. They were the only people he trusted.

Unfortunately this insurrection in our start-up was not enough to save the company from going bust. It was just as well. The technology was a little too much spyware-ish for my ethical qualms, even at the time. I decided I'd have to make my fortune some other way.

So when I got to the Salt Lake City Plaza that evening, I was looking forward to a few days of urban winter relaxation, and soaking up the vibe of the LDS Church in my own particular way of travel osmosis. I could use the inspiration. I figured there were worse kinds of influences, heading into the new year.

The folks at the front desk were very friendly and efficent. It took only a few seconds for them to process my reservation and send me on my way to my room, which was on the thirteenth floor of the hotel.

They pointed me to the elevators, and after retrieving my bags from the Bimmer, I went back inside and pressed the button to open the elevator doors. On the inside panel were the buttons for the floors, as usual. The highest floor number was 13. I pressed it.

When the elevator doors opened at the top floor, I began searching for my room. As I did I became a bit excited. Could it be that they have given me the top-floor corner room, the one that looks right down into Temple Square?

Yes, in fact they did. When I opened the door to my room and saw the view---the brightly lit Temple and the Tabernacle next to it, as well as the Utah capitol dome up on the hill, I dropped my duffel bag on the floor and raised my arms with delight.

"I AM Howard Hughes!!" I said to myself, with a big grin on my face.

Minus the long finger nails, of course.

Hearkening to the Gospel of Business Success

To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these. These will lead him to victory. --Thomas Carlyle

As I approached the outskirts of Boise, with the opaque white fog now turning dark in the unseen sunset, I remembered that the motel I'd booked that night in Meridian was a Motel 6. A couple weeks back when I made the reservation, I'd figured that would be sufficient for a night on my own.

But it was below twenty degrees out, and I'd been driving a long time that day. I wanted to relax in a warm comfortable bed. Suddenly I regretted not booking a Best Western Plus.

But as it happens, my worries were unworried. It turns out the Meridian Motel 6, just off I-84 on the west side of Boise, was one of the new Motel 6 properties with the brand new style of rooms---a large king-size bed and a flat screen television. And just like the one in Santa Barbara it had TCM. If all Motel 6es were this good, I'd probably make it my go-to place. The Best Western next door was twice the price, but I would have felt like a sucker for booking there.

The next morning the temperature was frigid, and the fog was just as thick. After grabbing breakfast at the Shari's next door, I had to scrape ice off the windshield of the Bimmer while the engine idled. I had no reason to stick around Boise, and the day looked awful.

Moreover I had a conference call for work in the early afternoon, so I had to figure out in a advance where to stop along I-84.

I had thought the drive west of Boise would be the easy part of the trip, completely on the Interstate along rolling hills. But it turns out it was extremely unpleasant. The thick fog made weaving in and out of the thick stream of semi trailers a harrowing experience.  I kept both hands on the wheel and my eyes glued on the road, thankful I had brand new tires.

I pulled off the highway at Mountain Home for my conference call, detouring off the Interstate to find a local independent coffee shop that thankfully had working wi-fi and power outlets. The coffee wasn't bad either.

For the rest of the day, crossing Idaho, I decided I needed something more than my normal silence so I set up my Macbook on the passenger seat of the car and played the audio book of Jon Taffer's Raise the Bar, which I'd recently bought on Audible.com.

I found it extremely entertaining to listen to his advice about running a bar. Actually it's as much about people and relationships, as it is about the bar business. Taffer's basic approach to business boils down to something he calls "reaction management."

Back in Portland I'd been talking by phone with my friend Greg S. in Memphis. He runs his own import business to the Far East, and went through many occupations in his youth, including being a bartender in Atlanta.

"So you going to open a bar?" he asked me.

"I hadn't really thought about," I said. "But now that you mention it, you think I should?"

He said it might be the thing for me.

"Yeah, Taffer said that you shouldn't become a bar owner if you like hanging out in bars, and I don't really like hanging out in bars, so maybe it would work for me down the line, when I stop traveling."

He said it was a good way to lose a lot of money.

"Yeah, I'd only do it if I had some other source of income," I said, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Greg got a laugh out of that.

While listening ot the audiobook, it took a longer than I planned to get across Idaho. I stopped a couple more times along the Interstate, including at a McDonald's in the little town of Burley, where I bought a cup of ccoffee so I could send some work-related emails using the wi-fi (I was in Starbucks no-man's land). By that time the fog had begun to clear thankfully.

By the time I got the Utah border, I was far behind the schedule I'd planned for that day, and fatigue was catching up with me. After sunset I had to cruise south past Logan and the other nearby towns while following a string of red tail lights on the freeway. I don't like driving at night. In that respect I'm like a traveler through Old Transylvania. I like to be cozy inside by sundown. Thankfully the speed limit in Utah is 80 mph, and I pushed the Bimmer up towards almost 3000 rpm to make good time (I usually keep it below 2500, to make it easy on the old engine).

As I approached Salt Lake City, the lights grew elaborate along the sides of the roads---housing developments along the mountainside, and the sparkling Christmas-like splendor of oil refineries. It felt almost magical, although the thick traffic felt like a video game.

At last I neared downtown. I could see the white rounded outline of the Utah Capitol building. Beyond that were the tall contours of the buildings of Temple Square.

This was cue. I got off at the next exit. I could see the jagged pointed tops of the Temple itself. I followed the signs that led me right towards it, drawn like the proverbial moth.

Foggy Mountain Snake-down

The road east of Burns crosses the flattest part of the Harney Basin and then begins to climb up the mountains. I stopped for gas at the tiny hamlet of Buchanan. The sole business was one of those old-looking gas stations with a single pump under small covering---like something from old Route 66.

When the proprietress emerged to pump my gas, she apologized that she would have to go back and forth inside, because she had customers. She was wearing a fancy western shirt and a big metal belt buckle.

In the meantime I went inside and found it was a large western jewelry and knick-knack store. I looked around until the gas was done pumping. This fill-up would tell me well into Idaho, so this was probably going to be the last time I would have someone else pump my gas for a while.

The day had been bright and beautiful, but ten minutes after getting back on the road, at the top of Stinkingwater Pass, it was well fogged in. I figured it this was because it was the top of the mountain, but as I came the other side into the narrow valley of the Malheur River, the fog just kept getting thicker.

It was socked in that same way all the way down the lonely unpolulated river valley for the next hour, curve and curve beneath the fog-topped bluffs. I didn't really mind. It gave me a chance to let my thoughts unroll.

After an hour, I got to civilization again near the town of Vale, which sits in the agricultural valley along the Snake River near the Idaho border.

Vale actually has a Bates Motel, believe it or not, and it looks exactly like you would expect it to. It could well be the set from the Hitchcock movie. Needless to say it was not on my agenda for lodging.

Vale is a town that time has passed by, at least the downtown. The buildings are nearly all vacant, although they seemed curiously renovated, rather than dilapidated. It's as if someone decided "rebuild it and they will come back." I wish them luck. Like I said, with universal connectivity, the golden of the small towns may be yet in the future.

Then it was another short drive into the town of Ontario, which is sort of the "capital" of this area of Eastern Oregon along the Snake River. Here is where my journey on side roads came to aend, as I planned to get back on I-84 for the rest of my journey that day.

By then it was obvious that the entire valley of the Snake was fogged in hard. On the Interstate, I had to keep my eyes glued on the road, navigating between the many semi trucks. Even though it was still daytime, I could see no trace of the mountains or the terrain beyond quarter of a mile from the road. It could have been the middle of Kansas. I'd spent the entire day looking forward to getting back to civilization, but I already missed the isolation of Central Oregon.

That's the way life is, isn't it. The perfect road trip is always the one you just took, or the one you're about to take.

Sometimes if you're lucky it's one you're on right now. It happens.

Sometimes a Great Bookstore (In Burns)

U.S. Highway 20. Central Oregon. Just empty road stretching to the horizon.

I'd been along this road before, many years ago, also in the middle of winter. It was dark then, and I was heading the other direction. Now it was blue sky. The Three Sisters bid me farewell in my rearview mirror, just like Mount Hood did. Looking backward, the highway seemed to go right in between North and Middle Sister, like passing through some kind of snowy Tolkeinesque gate to another world.

Driving through areas like this tends to evoke a primeval fear in me. What if my car breaks down out here? But perhaps that fear is exactly why I come to such places. It's my own private moon shot. I'm far off the grid. No cell phone coverage. Triple-A response would be tricky.

The road descends downwards into the Harney Basin, the most northward extension of the Great Basin. The lake in the basin was literally named "uphappiness" by the old French trappers.

It's not what people usually think of, when they mention Oregon, but this quarter of the state, stretching down into northern Nevada, is probably the most isolated section of the continental United States.

Every thirty miles is a roadside gas station. Each such place feels like an isolated planet, it's own little unique world. I like to stop and go inside, an excuse just to explore. I wind up drinking many small cups of coffee that way. Nearby these places are ominous historical markers, mostly about the about the Meek Cutoff, and the people who died foolishly coming this way as a shortcut on the Oregon Trail.

The hours go by in silence, with no radio or music, just the thoughts in my head. There are few cars in front or back of me. I drive a hundred miles without having to pass anyone, or having anyone pass me. It's what I call having good road. In conditions like that, I'm loathe to stop, since when I get back on the highway, often I find myself smack behind the only huge truck within twenty miles. Why tempt it? Just keep going.

Finally after several hours I reach Burns, a small town that is practically the metropolis of the region (and the one after which this fictional character is supposedly named). Lack of cell phone coverage, and the fact that this is the middle of the week, means that I have to stop at the McDonald's on the edge of town to use their wi-fi. I trade a couple emails with people in New York and California while eating a fish sandwich.

Then I pilot the Bimmer into downtown, looking for an excuse to stop and explore the main street. A used bookstore catches my eye---practically a must-see in a town like this. I always like to explore their foreign language section for hidden gems, old useful grammar books that have found their way into such places.

Inside the store is a simple mess of shelves and boxes, as if someone is moving everything around. I wonder how long it has been this way. A white-bearded man calls out to me from the back, a welcome.

"Just looking around," I say.

He gives me a brief layout of the place.

I'm practically looking for an excuse to spend money here---it feels like an admission price. I love contributing to the local economy of such places, especially after dropping six bucks at McDonald's.

I decide on a few paperbacks, including a well-worn copy of Sometimes a Great Notion. I figure I'll put it on my Oregon reading list, even though it's about the coast, not about this part of the state.

The proprietor motions me to the back, where his crowded desk serves as the counter. He's playing solitaire on his old Windows PC.

He inspects my books, and punches codes into an old system.

"Classics," he says, looking at my selections.

"I once met Ken Kesey," he said. "That was when I lived in Eugene. His family owned a creamery in Springfield."

Of course he's not talking about this place. Or maybe he is.

Gigabit Prineville

The next morning I checked out of the Econolodge---a pleasant one night stay. I could easily have stayed another night, especially with TCM.

In the frigid clear December morning I drove down the highway to the edge of town and found the Starbucks, where I put in some work on the day job.

I was surprised to find a Starbucks in a place like Prineville. It's somewhat on a touristy route, and not far from Bend, which is a resort center and ski town with all the amenities of life at this point, so I guess it makes sense.

Still I couldn't help be thankful that it was there, and that I could pursue my normal work routine, even out in the middle of the desert in a cowboy town. All of this seems like somewhat of a miracle to me still.


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Prineville is one of those places that I could not have imagined living in, in my wildest dreams, back in the old days. I would have felt completely cut off from civilization. After all, I enjoy being connected to civilization. But the ubiquity of the Internet---and essentially we have arrived at that point---has changed everything, as much as the coming of the railroad and the telegraph did. In fact, it may be more a revolution in that although those previous innovations brought a connection to civilization, the Internet has practically leveled the entire experience.  

Certainly the young hipsters of Portland would still find Prineville deadly boring, but I've long since passed the phase of needed such a multitude of fun urban experiences, day in and day out. That being said, I still prefer Portland for now.

Yet it makes me wonder about the future of such places as Prineville. We have gotten to used to the idea that these places are drying up and blowing away, as the agriculture of these areas becomes more mechanized and the family farms disappear. But maybe that's not what is going to happen at all. Maybe at some point folks will decide that these towns, being now so connected to the world, are a perfect place to live, given the lifestyle one can now have there. I could see that happening. But who knows?

And Prineville certainly has its advantages too, things you can't find in Portland (including this place where I stopped for a visit).

After working for a while at Starbucks, I gassed up the car and headed out of town, into the high desert plateau, away from all traces of civilizations, taking a short cut towards U.S. Highway 20.

About twenty miles down a lonely side road, under an awesome winter blue sky, I found myself constantly craning my neck to absorb the stark beauty of the rugged snow-covered Three Sisters to the west.

It was a shame not to stop, I thought, so at the top of a small pass I parked the Bimmer and got out to stand by the guard rail, looking out in bliss towards the Cascades. There was not a sign of civilization around me, and no sound but the near-silent rusting of the breeze across the snow.

I checked my cell phone---no coverage bars at all. Just the way I wanted it.

That Nice Old Cowboy Kind of Feeling in Prineville

My destination that evening was Prineville, a small cowboy town near the geographical center of Oregon. I rolled into town just after dark. As a treat, the giant orange full moon was rising above the rim to the east.

I'd booked a night at the Econolodge, the budget end of the Choice Hotels brand. The lobby was pleasant. I rang the bell and a woman from the Subcontinent came out and greeted me, obviously the proprietress. She was very friendly and helpful. Sometimes I dread seeing an Indian person behind the counter---a some of the independent motels it feels like an unwelcome I'm a trespasser in their house. But this was not the case here. Everything was just fine by me, even though the motel was a bit old. It could use a remodel at some point down the line. Having a national flag like a Choice brand means things have to be a certain standard.

No complaints, and---TCM! It fulfills my general observation that the smaller the market, the more likely you will find that channel on hotel cable systems. Partly this is because Comcast and the other big systems that dominate large markets have bumped TCM up to a premium channel.

I indulged that evening in lying on my bed and re-watching Meet John Doe (1941), one of the movies that Capra made for Warner Brothers during his hiatus from Columbia. It's probably Capra's most overtly political movie, made right after the start of World War II. As I've mentioned before, I'm a big Gary Cooper fan too. He was actually a real cowboy who became an actor.

For dinner that evening I dined at the Barney Prine steakhouse, just half a block away. From the hotel, I simply walked down the alley and entered the back. But I think I need to institute a new rule, to always use the front door.

Coming in the back, I was greeted by no one except the stares of other diners. I had to track down the waitress at the bar and wait patiently while she chatted with the bartender for a couple minutes until I could interrupt. They looked at me confused. "One for dinner please," I said. Nevertheless the steak was passable. That's all I'll say.

Being in Prineville gave me flashbacks to another cowboy town where I'd visited the local steakhouse---Williams, Arizona, where I'd stayed at a Super 8 last February. Moreover the terrain in that part of Oregon is strikingly similar to the plateau of northern Arizona, and the scattered patterns of snow were nearly the same.

That was a good feeling, since I had been missing that feeling I had when I was driving around Arizona in aimless fashion.

One often has a tendency, after an intense extended travel experience, to believe that to recapture the feeling, one needs to duplicate that same path, over the length of time, with the same intensity of immersion.

My observation is that this is false. It is often quite possible to reignite the feeling one had in certain place by a brief visit to a similar place. Trying to duplicate the original experience often is counterproductive. Instead it is best to stumble upon some place that evokes the same kind of feeling, as Prineville did for me. In such cases, one only needs to be reminded of that previous feeling. It's still all there, inside you. It never went away. You just needed to remember how to access it, and how vivid it is, when you experience it.

A Quantum Leap of Curiosity into the Central Oregon Desert

At The Dalles, seeking to eke out the Northwest experience a little longer, I lunched on a Tillamook cheeseburger at Burgerville. Quite appropriate, since it turns out that this particular franchise is on the very eastern edge of their territory. Afterwards took a walking tour of downtown, as I like to do in any small town that I visit
But when I got back in my car, I did not get back on the Interstate. Instead I got on US-197, heading south into the desert heart of Central Oregon.

It's such an immediate change of terrain, so different from western Oregon. I had chosen to detour away from the river while crossing the eastern part of the state because I had only recently been up and down the entire Columbia Gorge the previous summer. I'm ever curious about what a new route will look like, and I like to use what might be another typical Oregon-to-Colorado road trip to see areas of the state that are new to me, or which I haven't seen in a while.

Driving along US 197 into the empty hills, one has Mount Hood smack in one's rear view mirror much of the time, like a sentinel bidding you good-bye. It's startling to look up and see it looming there. Going further south, you can see the high Cascades spread out to the west---Mount Jefferson and The Sisters, as well as the smaller peaks. You can't ever see them this way from the western side. Being on the eastern side seems like being "backstage."

As I piloted the Bimmer of the seemingly endless waves of ancient volcanic hills, and and down in the valley of the Deschutes River, my mind turned back again to physics.

Recently a Facebook friend, someone I've known since high school who is now a medical doctor, put up a wall post specifically soliciting my opinion regarding this NBC news web article on quantum entanglement, one of the "spooky" phenomena of modern physics discovered over the last century.

The contents of the article were nothing new and groundbreaking, but it was fun to answer his post nevertheless. Here was my response:

As you can see, I basically punted on furnishing an intelligent physics comment. Instead I posted a small anecdote from my first year of graduate school in Austin. That's because I really don't know much about the subject matter of the article. In a way, that's a shame. I wish I did know.

The professor in question here is the late Bryce DeWitt. That's not a name known to lay people, but he was well known as one of the giants of the field of quantum gravity, along with his wife Cécile. They were the hoary old couple of the Relativity Center on the ninth floor of RLM. I was more than a little nervous that time I went into his office.

As it happens, I was not there to ask him about physics per se, but to seek information about physicists to contact in Moscow, since I was about to leave on a long summer trip that would take me through Russia. At the time it was still a big deal to go there, and it was very hard to find out information from the other side of the world. Basically I was going blind, except for information from Let's Go.

Back then I never would have dared to wander into DeWitt's office on my own initiative (although I did pull some gutsy stuff like that at times on my ow). Instead the visit there was suggested by another professor I knew who assured me that DeWitt would welcome the chance to help me about this. Physicists of the old school saw themselves as international collaborators in the scientific mission, and there was a sense of noblesse oblige about helping people make contact with each other.

Whether it's a weakness or strength, of my characteristic traits is that I tend to follow the advice of people I respect. The advice Prof. DeWitt gave me is among those times.

Certainly I was already inclined towards the direction I followed, but in any case, I decided soon after that meeting to forgo trying to understand quantum mechanics in a deep way while I was still in graduate school.

Instead I decided I would focus completely on non-quantum physics, in other words, what is known as classical physics.

In the eyes of physicists, there are essentially two realms of nature---the classical and the quantum. Physicists often use the phrases"on the quantum level..." and "on the classical level..." while talking about nature.

Basically the classical level is the macroscopic world, from the extremely large---such as clusters of  galaxies, including all of astrophysics---down to the level of every life, and then down to the microscopic level of how atoms bump into each other. It includes all of the physics prior to the year 1900, including all of electromagnetism up until that point.

The classical level is the world of Newtonian mechanics---the billiard table universe, in which all of cause and effect plays out in a completely deterministic fashion. In the classical viewpoint, if a phenomenon is apparently random, it is only because of use of approximation, or missing information.

Classical physics even includes much of the revolutionary physics of the Twentieth Century. For example, Einsteinian relativity---the description of very fast motion near the speed of light, and of very intense gravitational fields---is entirely classical. Our current theory of gravity---Einstein's General Theory---is still purely classical.

The quantum level is generally the world of sub-microscopic phenomena. Quantum physics is necessary to describe how electrons behave in the orbits of atoms, for example. It is also necessary to describe some of the behavior of light, wherever light needs to be modeled as photons, such as in lasers.

The hallmark of quantum level is that it is not deterministic but probabilistic. The universe on a quantum level plays out in a statistical fashion. Predictions of future behavior can never be made with certainty. This is not due to approximation or missing information. It just is the way things are, at least if you buy the prevailing interpretation of quantum physics. This famously bothered Einstein, who was fond of stating "God does not play dice." But Einstein lost the debate on that point.

One of the assumptions of physics over the last century is that laws of quantum physics, not classical physics, are the true fundamental rules of nature. In this view, classical physics, including Newtonian theory, is an approximation for the case of macroscopic conditions. Underneath it all, one asserts, the rules are always truly quantum in nature. But how to reconcile these two two realms?

This has led to great frustration in physics for many years. Generally physics has been mired in the mud for decades trying to grope with this reconciliation between the classical and quantum worlds, but of which seem to work perfectly fine within their province of validity. Fusing the two into some master theory has simply not been possible until now. By the way, string theory (cough, bullshit, cough) is one of the established attempts at line of thought in this direction.

If you peruse the research of theoretical physics over the last half century, much of it has been along the lines of trying to unifying classical and quantum mechanic by developing a quantum theory of gravity. That's what Bryce DeWitt was involved in. He passed away in 2004 without seeing the establishment of such a theory. But that's not really his fault. Instead it's a deeper issue with that whole line of thought, an issue I seemed to intuit back then without delving deep into the existing theory.

I never bothered to even begin to approach quantum gravity in graduate school, even though it was where most students in the theoretical side of things tended to go. I shied away partially because I didn't think I knew enough about old fashioned classical physics yet---e.g., the detailed intricate clockwork universe of planetary motion.

Also, frankly, as I mentioned, there was something about the whole approach to quantum gravity that bothered me. There were so many smart and talented people working on---why hadn't they figured it out yet? Maybe there was something more deeply wrong about the whole approach. The fundamental equations of physics, both classical and quantum, had a breathtaking beauty in their mathematical and philosophical simplicity. Yet all the existing approaches to quantum gravity were extremely complicated on both counts. Folks assumed that once that the right theory was found, it would indeed be simple, but it the mean time, it seemed very complex.

For these reasons, I decided that in graduate school I wouldn't even try to compete with all that effort it what was supposed to be the "cutting edge." Instead I would spend my effort becoming a classical physics ninja. I would get really sharp at it, and that's exactly what I did, until the fundamentals became as accessible to me as basic arithmetic. At that level, one can begin to be creative with theory. One can begin to poke it, bend it, and explore possible wrinkles and consequences.

Thus my dissertation and the book I authored with my adviser W.C. Schieve is one hundred percent classical throughout.  My adviser originally found it odd that I would go this route, but I found a classsical niche that no one else was exploring, and just ran with it. In the end, he was highly satisfied with the line of thought we pursued, and I felt I had accomplished the mark I set for myself.

The topic I explored back then was, to be sure, an extreme fringe case of classical mechanics---the study of how multiple particles systems interact when the particles are moving past each other at speeds near the speed of light. But it is nevertheless completely classical. It was a tremendous privilege to get to spend a couple years of my life thinking deeply about such things.

But the assumption that I had back in Austin was that some time down the road, I would eventually get around to a study of quantum physics in earnest, such I could be creative on that level as well. One day I would be seasoned enough to make the leap to the quantum realm.

Now, as I mention in that Facebook post, it is almost ten years after that arbitrary age at which Prof. DeWitt suggested that one might attempt the deep understanding of quantum theory in earnest. But not only have I not yet mastered it, I barely even tried, as I have dropped out of the physics community altogether. This was by my choice, to be sure. Physics eats up your life. Simply put, I had other things to do for a while. I don't regret my choice.

But while driving up the gorge, and heading out into the desert, it occurred to me that classical physics actually somewhat bores me at this point. This is a good sign. I recognize this attitude as exactly ennui that my elders had back in graduate school, whenever I signaled my interest in classical physics. To them, the classical realm was passé. Even if all classical phenomena were not yet explained, the philosophical underpinnings were well known. The quantum realm was still the unexplored frontier of the mind.

To me, this means that my plan to absorb a deep knowledge of classical physics has truly worked. Not only was I successful back in the 90's with my research program, but now the knowledge of the classical realm has had a good long time to remain fallow in my mind, and to gel as part of my permanent world-view and understanding of nature. Finally I feel as if I have the proper mindset of the physicists of the year 1900, who saw the quantum world with fresh eyes of curiosity, and with eagerness to understand it.

This makes me now wonder about quantum entanglement, the subject of my layman friend's post. What is it really about? Curiosity stirs in me to understand it on deep level. The next time a friend asks about this, maybe I'll be able to give an intelligent and informative answer, rather than simply telling old stories from my youth.

The Physics of Gorge Navigation

When I left Portland yesterday morning, downtown was socked in with fog. The streetcars were noisy out my motel window. I walked out to get coffee and had to pick my way through a crowd of bundled up workers getting off the train. By that time I'd already put in a bunch of work, answering emails.

As I sat in the coffeeshop looking out into the grey city, I felt a complete happy inertia. I could have been perfectly happy just staying in Portland through the holidays, in the same lazy way that I had simply kept extending my stay in Santa Barbara last December, and then meandered down the coast to San Diego. There is something so nice about just letting yourself go on cruise control this time of year.

But that wasn't my plan, of course. The road awaited, even if I wasn't so keen on getting underway, and the many miles that lay head, over multiple days.

I drove out to Troutdale, on the east edge of Portland, and put in a few more hours at the day job at a Starbucks. I checked the oil in the Bimmer, topping it off with some STP, following the advice of Luther Hune, the octogenarian in Marieta, Ohio who had saved my car the day in overheated in 2008. Later that evening he invited me to dinner at the VFW. I wonder how old Luther is doing, if he's still around.

Then I drove across the street to the Shell station, telling the woman in the orange safety vest to top it off. It was the first time I'd put gas in it since early October. That's how little I'd driven it lately.

I headed up the gorge on the Interstate, where the road winds along the very edge of the river, which was slate grey under a sky of the same color. The clouds were so low that you couldn't even see the tops of the cliffs above.

Then just as I got to Hood River, about an hour later, all at once the sky cleared. And by all at once, I mean just that. Within a quarter mile on the freeway, the sky went from completely overcast to clear blue. The river was sparkling blue as if it were mid summer---even better because the leaves were off the trees allowing a better view. The cliffs on the Washington side were like a post card.

By this time the Bimmer had warmed up. It takes a while on the road, but when it gets into its groove, there is nothing like it. It's a whole different kind of experience to drive it.

I was glad I was on the road. Inertia is like that, isn't it? Newton's First Law doesn't really apply to human beings, as I used to tell my class back in Austin. It only applies to passive matter, which has no volition of its own. If it's valid in any respect in regard to human behavior, it is by analogy alone,  of course, as so many things in physics are. Sometimes that can be a hindrance, when you are trying to understand mechanics. Momentum and energy are, after all, terms coined by physicists for measurable, observable quantities. But everyone uses those words before they ever study physics.

But it's fun to invoke those rules in a popular sense, isn't it?---a body at rest...a body in motion. Sometimes it seems like the perfect thing to say. And it certainly was a good metaphor for my state of mind yesterday afternoon, as I raced up the gorge in the Bimmer, weaving along the base of the cliffs, heading towards east The Dalles.  Even when I got there, and was hungry for lunch, I really just wanted to keep going.

Victory in the Pacific Northwest

Last night, my last night in Portland for a while, I sortied from the Value Inn after dark and walked down the hill, looking to grab a bite to eat. The air was thick with moisture and warmth. I was quite comfortable in a simple down jacket and a baseball cap, skipping along from block to block all the way down to Burnside and back.

Portland has many great restaurants, but that quarter of downtown is rather deserted on a Sunday evening. Even the food trucks along Fourth Street were closed.

I wound up grabbing a sandwich at the deli in the first floor of the apartment building across the street from the hotel. CYAN---a handsome gold LEED-certified building that towers above Fourth Street in postmodern splendor. Ironically it was where Red had her first apartment in town.

Along the walk I indulged in an admiration of the lights on the tall Christmas tree in Pioneer Courthouse Square. It was almost six months since I'd arrived in town and stayed that first night at the Heathman. The next day I'd walked down to the same square and admired the floral layout that had been placed there in honor of the Rose Festival, making a giant heart. Going back to see the lights on teh tree felt like the perfect bookend. Summer becomes winter. Day goes into night. Roses become colored lights.

Six months have flown by, as six months always do, as one gets older. Yet I feel in a completely different place in life than I did when I arrived here last summer.

I had come here this time with an agenda of rebooting my Oregon experience, and getting back to place in my life where I was forward looking, instead of full of regret about the past. Being here, I wanted to experience joy again instead of pain.

A couple years ago, the last time I had visited Portland, I was in a very contracted place in life. I felt as if my soul were punctured and leaking from multiple places. I had a plan to turn things around, and regain the Holy Grail, as it were, that seemed so remote in the past, a relic of happy times squandered.

In June, I had told myself that I would not hold myself to anything here, that I would leave town after a couple days if I felt like it. But I had wanted to find a reason to stay, and I did.

My impression at this point is that my plan succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. It took a great force of will, and catapulted me into a new deepening of faith, but it worked. Where once joy was elusive, it now seems to flow through me like an electric current. I seek challenges and struggle on a whole new level. Even as my eyes are widened every day to the suffering in the world, I feel a great inner peace.

I feel big as a mountain, as a character in an old movie once said. Quite a propos here, I think----one last private inside joke before letting go of that old self forever.

See you in 2014, PDX! Joy and Peace, and you know I mean it!

Getting Back in Shape PDX Style

Dropped Red off at the airport this morning, then drove her Ford Focus back to her place in Hillsdale.

After packing up my own things, and vacuuming out the Bimmer, I locked up the place and drove out of the parking lot, with a trunk filled with my gear and a duffel bag full of clean clothes.

With so much in the trunk, the Bimmer had lost a touch of the springiness from the day before after getting new tires. But it still felt nice on the road.

I headed along Capitol and merged onto Barbur heading north along the river. Sunday traffic was light  A few minutes later I was crossing the bridge over 405, into the crowded urbanity of downtown.

A few blocks later I pulled off onto Mill Street, just beyond St. Michael the Archangel Church. I circled the block and parked along Montgomery, in front of the front door of the Value Inn. Today's journey was short indeed.

It was only mid afternoon, and the front desk was unmanned. I had to wait five minutes until the clerk showed up. The forms were old school---I actually had to fill out my name and address, as well provide a five-dollar cash deposit for the electronic room key.

After checking in, I found myself where I am now, lounging on a king size bed, looking out the window at the beautiful buildings of Portland State across the street. Five floors up, inside the glass box of a structure, students are churning their legs on a row of treadmills. Every once in a while, a street car comes by, rounding the corner by my room.

An empty pizza box sits on the night stand. The tube is on. I open my laptop. When the wi-fi comes up I realize I'd forgotten to ask for the password upon checking in.

Cripes, I'm out of practice at this.

They Do Me (and the Bimmer) Right in Tigard

Saturday. Took the Bimmer in for a new set of tires today. Yesterday I'd gone online and looked at reviews. The American Tire in Tigard seemed to be well-regarded.

When I went to their corporate web site and entered the details of my car, it gave me a single choice of selection, 195/65 Falkens.

So I call up the shop and their guy answers. I ask if they have those in stock. He says they don't. They'll have to get them from California, special order, and it will take until next Wednesday.

I tell him that's too long, that I need them sooner. I'm about to hang up, and he says "well, that's a speciality tire, you know. We can put 185's on that car, of course."

It turns out they have plenty of those kind, and I know that's what I have on the car right now. He seems to think I wanted 195's for a special reason. I tell him it's only because that was the sole option on their web site.

"Maybe the Obamacare people made the web site," I tell him. He laughs. We have a connection.

The next morning I pilot the Bimmer along the wet winding roads through the hills, then onto Barbur Boulevard until I get to Highway 99 in Tigard. The American Tire is along a wide stretch of 99 as it passes a bunch of strip malls, fast food outlets, and a Fred Meyer.

It's the exact image that people in Portland think of, when they use Tigard as a synonym for the kind of suburban commercial development that so many Portland residents have purposefully fled. My friend Adam has a particularly funny way of pronouncing "Tigard" in the provincial manner of locals.

But Tigard's exactly what I'm looking for today. The half dozen bays at American Tire are full with activity. I walk inside and talk to a young dude at the counter. Turns out he recognizes me from the phone call. He brings up the multiple options for my tires on the computer screen and shows it to me. I follow his suggestion and by the "best" option---a set of four Yokohamas. It comes to a little over four hundred bucks.

As I'm swiping my debit card, I mention that I'm glad to have a new set, especially since I don't have a spare anymore.

"It got stolen off my girlfriend's porch while we were on vacation," I tell him. I'd blown the tire hitting a curb on NE Glisan a couple months back and waiting to get a new set. The movers had taken it all the way across the other side of Portland, only to have it taken while I was in Hawaii. I'll have to get a new wheel before I can replace it, I tell him.

After I wrap up the initial business of payment, I give him my ignition key, and warn him that the interior door handle is tricky. "The interior is all busted up," I tell him. "But the engine is still amazing."

In reality I know I don't have to add that last part. Everyone loves the Bimmer. I almost start telling him about the time five years ago in Marieta, Ohio, when the car overheated in hot weather. It was pouring out steam as I limped into a gas station. I feared maybe the engine was shot. Literally within two minutes, as I was standing staring at the steam gushing out from the hood, some guy walks up and offers to buy the car from me for cash right on the spot. I'm glad I didn't take his offer.

I head out the front door of the tire place, planning on walking the short distance down 99 to a nearby Starbucks to kill time while they do the install.

While I'm still in earshot of the front door, I hear my name called. It's the guy I was talking to, leaning out the door. He says he call sell me a new wheel for seventy bucks, and he'll mount the best tire left on my car for free. I tell him that sounds like a great deal, so I go back inside and swipe my card again. It's a big load off my mind to have a spare again.

I go down to the Starbucks and write a blog entry (the previous one to this, about Por que no?), and then return after an hour.  He sees me approaching and finds the paperwork for the job.

"You're all set," he says. It was pretty much as smooth as it could possibly go.

I go out to my car and see the brand new Yokohamas on it. On the front seat is the new spare. It turns out that he gave me a new tire for that, probably one of their cheaper 185's, instead of mounting one of the crappy ones on my car. Of course, as I mentioned to the guy, I'll still have replace the missing BMW emblem that fits in the center of the wheel. I'm sure I can get one online.

Driving back along Barbur I can feel the grip of the car on the pavement. I can't believe I was getting by on the old ones. The Bimmer leaps out in first gear like a lion. It feels as if the engine is rejuvenated, just from the increased acceleration from rest and the tightness on the road.

For those few miles, it's like having a brand new car---a freaking amazing one floating on a cloud. Everything about the car seems better. I'm pretty much the most satisfied guy in the world. It's one of those moments when can't think of anything else that I could possibly want, that money could buy.

Toasting the Winter of Fourteen With Purple Cocktails

"I miss East Portland," I said to Red.

We were standing in the dark on the dirty sidewalk in front of Por Que No?, a taqueria along Hawthorne Boulevard. Like many hip and trendy places to eat and drink in this quarter, there was a line out the door to get in and order at the counter.

Fortunately the frigid temperatures of the past week had receded. It felt almost balmy, even though we could see our breath clearly.

I did indeed miss East Portland. Just being there again reminded me of that. The west side is beautiful in its own way, but when you live on the East side, you are never more than a short drive away from dozens of interesting places to dine.

We'd certainly taken advantage of that fact over the summer, when Red lived in Laurelhurst. It was an easy option for dinner. Now getting to anything on the Eastside during the late rush hour was a huge pain in the ass. The river is a formidable barrier to traffic. Trying to cross the Ross Island Bridge at that hours requires the patience of getting out of Brooklyn into Manhattan.

The Hawthorne neighborhood in particularly is an epicenter of casual interesting Portland nightlife. Across the street a new Portuguese restaurant had opened up. Red mused about it, and the woman in line in front of us overheard her and jumped in to explain.

"My mother-in-law is from Portugal," she said. "The food isn't really Portuguese, but it's pretty good anyway."

Inside the decor of the restaurant is a heterogeneous collage of hip Mexican religious iconography---Virgen de Guadalupe portraits of various sizes crowd the walls. The place was packed, of course.

It was about a ten minute wait to get up to the counter to order our food. I got the standard Taco plate, which I'd gotten the last time we were there, last summer.

The Summer of '13, as I'd come to call it with affectionate memory.  "When are we going to go back to referring to years that way?" I like to ask people. When we finally do, then it will feel normal again, as if some kind of state of emergency has been called off.

Red's colleagues from her school were already there, and had seated themselves in the far back, at a tiny table. It was quite cozy getting the four of us in there. They had already arranged drinks for us by text message---a pair of pomegranate margaritas, served in large beer glasses. Both the food and the drink were worth the drive and the wait.

It was a convivial evening. It was nice to meet her colleagues, one of whom may be one of her recommenders for her residency next year. We had to call it an early evening, because he had to go home to cram in some continuing education credits via online courses by the end of the term. Such are the trials of keeping one's medical license.

As it happens, he was planning on going to Rio for the upcoming carnival. He invited both Red and me to join him there, and began pitching the idea to us. It's a longshot, but if I wind up in Brazil at the end of February, you'll know how the idea was hatched.

Confessing My Tumblr Sins in Multnomah Village

It turns out that the Starbucks in Multnomah Village is not really in an old refurbished residence. It just looks like it from the street. Damn those corporatist types for pulling one over on me.

It was a short drive in the Bimmer up over the ridge from Hillsdale. That puts me already in the hole,  because I chose not to walk here in the freezing rain along roads with no sidewalks.

I found ample parking in the impervious cover asphalt lot in back, on the slope of a wooded hill. It's almost a form of rape, when you think about it.

The quaint independent coffee shop one block away, where I should be spending my money, has exactly three tables, all of which invariably occupied by folks camping out with their laptops. But that's no excuse. The wifi's good enough there, after all. And the coffee is better, to be sure. I could stand outside under their awning and work, if I really wanted to.

Inside the Starbucks were plenty of tables today. The place in filled with red decor advertising their seasonal drinks and their Xmas blend of coffee. There is no one in line but me. Three youngsters behind the counter. A tall bearded man, straight but with feminine mannerisms as many young men now, flirts with his bespectacled nerdgirl coworker.

"If I instagram someone, then that means we're friends," he jokes, using some level of irony beyond my perception to understand. She laughs at his joke.

He's very helpful, suggesting I purchase the Xmas blend. Nerdgirl warms up my chocolate croissant. As I take my drink to the table by the window, I reflect on how "instragram" has joined the pantheon of Twenty-first century Web 2.0 verbs. Quite a milestone for that site, one not easily bestowed (no one "yahoos" after all). I reflect on how we need a meta term to describe the verbization of social media website names. Googlization?

I'd already plowed through a bunch of the day's work, so I take a bit of break while drinking my corporate coffee. I open my Macbook and bring up the Tumblr in Action subreddit, which has become my go-to place to learn the post-post-postmodern neologisms that are being coined by the youngsters at a pace beyond the ability of my analog Gen X brain to keep up. Many of these terms seem to be related to an evermore fine-grained differentiation of gender, or some form of identified oppression based thereon.

I'm particularly fascinated by the evolution of pronoun usage. I haven't mentioned this yet, I think, but my latest personal project involves an online language-learning tool, which I'm been building as a hobby on and off for the last couple years. It's my own version of building a boat in my basement in my off hours. I've been debating with myself how I should treat "ze."

Of course, my real problem, from the point of view of Tumblr, is that (trigger warning) I'm an oppressive heteronormative homophobic patriarchal cis-scum shitlord, as I can learn from actually reading any of the Tumblr posts linked to on that subreddit. And despite this recognition of my fallen state, my manfeels still count for less-than-less-than-less-than zero. Fortunately that actually makes my life very simple, since I really have only one allowed course of action at this point: STFU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

Yet somehow I continue writing this blog. As the Tumblristas would say: Wow. just wow.

And despite my constant microagressions and unceasing mansplaining, Red still seems to like hanging out with me. Or least that's part of my headcanon.

OK. I guess I've checked my privilege enough for now (if such is possible). It's time to finish the day by doing a little more work on my day job, writing computer code. It's such a drag, really, since what I do drips with  rape culture in every keystroke.

If only I could use a feminist programming language...

 Meh, it turns out I am.

A Portland Village of a Different Kind

One of the big differences between east and west Portland is that the rolling semi-regular grid layout of the east side means that in most cases, the neighborhoods are rather loosely defined, blending into each other in the way that they do in, say, Midtown Manhattan.

There are exceptions, of course, such as Ladd's Addition, where the street grid is broken in a distinct recognizable way, but in many cases, the east-side boundaries between one neighborhood and another are based on more subtle differences or historical convention at this point. One notices the boundaries only after having lived in that part of town for a while.

On the west side, things are very different. Even in downtown, where the streets are often gridlike, the pattern is broken enough, and the streetscape heterogeneous enough, that it is easy for even a new arrival to notice where one area begins and another begins.

Here in SW Portland, among the West Hills that run along the river, it's even more extreme. There are no grid steets here, except on a micro level. The boulevards wind in spaghetti fashion, sometimes intersecting the same streets more than once. Driving for more than a mile, finds oneself pointed in every direction of the compass, without ever using one's turn signals.

As a consequence, the SW neighborhoods have boundaries defined by the crest of ridges. Each neighborhood can be a distinct valley. It's obvious when one is transitioning from one to another.

Last night after Red got back from her clinic shift, we hopped back into her and drove the short distance along Capitol Highway (which is not really a highway anymore, just a normal two-lane artery), over the ridge to the nearby area known as Multnomah Village. Although it shares the appelation "Village" with the suburban lifestyle center called Bridgeport Village, the two places couldn't be more distinct in character.

Multnomah Village is essentially a residential glen among the hills anchored by a quaint one-street ancient commercial area that one would take at first glance as a small upscale boutique town. There's an independent bookstore, an independent toy store, several gift stores, commercial offices, a Thai restaurant, a tiny independent coffee shop, and even Starbucks located inside an old converted residential house (which I have yet to visit).

One the other hand, MV remote and relatively inaccessible from I-5 and other true highways, so there are few of the types of car-oriented businesses one sees even here in Hillsdale, which has a true strip mall as its anchor (albeit one with an independent natural foods grocery).

Our destination last night was a place called Renner's Grill, an ancient bar along the main street of the village. Its script red neon is prominent as one approaches. Since 1939.

I'd been to Renner's recently by myself enjoyed a cheese burger at the while the regulars watched in misery as the Ducks lost to Arizona on ESPN. It's a tiny but cozy place, with closet-like restrooms and low ceiling.

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It turns out Wednesday is Bingo night, so the place was packed. We were lucky to find two bar stools right next to each other by the door. The shelf behind the bar was crowded with donated toys for  Christmas, and blinking colored lights gave the place a very convivial feel.

Even though it felt like an old dive bar, packed with hipsters and regulars, the service was impeccable. And despite being ancient, it seemed clean and well-run with a spirit of pride. We both agreed Jon Taffer would approve. 

For one thing, even though the place was packed, one of the staff members noticed our confusion looking for seats and ushered to open stools. The bartender was very patient as I explained that only drink dark beer. She put her hand on mine as she said that if I didn't like the one she recommended, she would take it back. The owner/manager came by to check up on our experience, and spontaneously explained why it was so busy that night.

The burgers and fries were delicious, served attractively on baskets with red and white paper. Moreover the atmosphere so nice that I even loosened up, overcame my usual standoffish grumpiness, and conversed with the woman on the stool next to me, who had struck me up for a conversation after the guy on the other side of her had been rather creepy and asked her if she was a cop. Actually, as I told Red, I had thought the woman was a tranny until she talked to me and I heard her voice. This is, after all, still Portland.