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 |  Opinions are like Blogs, everybody's got one |
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Every so often I have a thought or two, I might as well write them here...they may be political thoughts (I hate war, polluters and thieves), or thoughts about American culture (which I wished we really had) or even religious thoughts (I don't play favorites)...but you're invited to see these thoughts of mine right here. Comments are welcome... |
| The Mayan calendar Okay this has nothing to do with the Mayan calendar, which has predicted the end of the world sometime in 2012 (not that far away). Perhaps I used the words "Mayan calendar" just to get your attention. Did it work? So the end of the world is supposed to happen in 2012. Somehow I always was hoping a bunch of cosmic batteries ran out around then and we were clever enough to change the anode and diode to some fresh ones, or maybe the process was automatic. The reason I felt this way was because I've always held to a circular vision of time (as opposed to the linear) and therefore the Mayan calendar would just recycle (hourglass emblem here) and begin again. This would leave the end of time way down the road, long past my temporary sojourn. How was I to know I'd live long enough to experience the end of time Mayan style? But as I said this has nothing to do with the Mayan calendar, except in as it's another end-time prediction. Perhaps this diatribe has more to do with endtime predictions than it does with the Mayan calendar, per se. Robert Frost comes to mind. Let me get my reading glasses on. "Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice." Granted his name is spelled "Frost", a chilling thought, that, but it also points out a most uncommon result of overheating. Which would be cooling. So what would happen if all this global warming turned out to spawn an ice age? We have to admit we're basically ignorant of long-term changes in our environment. Our scope of history is a rather slim slice of time's pie, earth-wise. In short, we don't know Jack about what happens when the earth's atmosphere overheats to the point of melting great sheaths of ice at both poles and similar environs. What if all this heat, carbon dioxide, methane gas soup, aerosol exudants, et al, produced the opposite effect from what we predict? The counter-intuitive effect, instead of heat we got cold and things began to frost over. This last year we in Oregon sustained a huge winter of snow, way more than we're used to. Two things could happen with all this snow-pack: One would be for a Chinook wind to blow in (Chinook winds are very warm) and melt it all in a matter of hours and we're flooded; the other option is for us to have a very mild summer where not much of it melts and then an early autumn snow season which just builds up more snow. It wouldn't take very many seasons like that to build up a good glacier and in perhaps less time than we think another ice age. But to get back to the Mayan calendar, perhaps we're overlooking something even more elemental than ice ages. What if melting all the polar and glacial ice produces an even more substantial change. What if it changed the polar alignment? The earth would go on ‘Tilt'. It's happened before. North is only an idea, capable of change. What do we really know about magnets? Not much, in terms of earth sizes. If the poles slipped to a new alignment, the entire earth would shrug it's shoulders. The shawl of atmosphere would slip, millions of people would be exposed to the cold of space, and I believe they'd be entombed in a freezer-tray of ice much like those ancient woolly mammoths were, and frozen instantly. The Big Macs they had for lunch hardly digested. So maybe the Mayan calendar (if I might reach a bit) is perhaps a predictor of a destructive event which has happened before and wiped out civilizations of the past, which is now poised to wipe out our civilization. The Mayan calendar ends. It doesn't tell us to look for the next installment. Finito, case closed, that's all she wrote, game over, man. But I have to think humans may live through it anyway, and maybe it'll be a positive step for us to deal with. After all, we've had it good for millenniums, with only the nits on our neighbors to rankle us, and your occasional tsunami, earthquake or volcano to interrupt our squabbles. So a good return to basics might be in order. Straighten out our priorities, so to speak. This won't stop your surviving Christians from seeking out their rapture, or the Islamic folks from trying to turn back the hands of time to a simpler, more prophetic era. Enough of all these people will be blessing their gods they survived, in spite of the billion who didn't, and they'll be piling stones up to build fresh temples. I guess I'm more of a Grecian bent about worshipping gods. I believe the Earth God Gaia is the one who'll win out, regardless of all the rest of our religious Panderings. We humans can be as short-sighted as we wish, we're not really such great shakes after all. Shit will happen in spite of our so-called ascendancy among the animals. Wheel of Fortune, Great Mandala, call it what you want, we'll keep spinning off of it like kids flying from a round-about. Leonard Cohen wrote "We are so large against the sky, so small among the stars..." Ain't it the truth? We may think we can change things, but we aren't the prime movers at all. We're just the recipients of results and we're helpless to stop any of it. In 2012 the world as we know it is supposed to end. Lucky for me I've already lived a long life, I'd be pissed if I was a teenager and was thereby deprived of a lifetime of ‘American Idol', ‘Survivor', text-messaging and hip-hop. Bless our hearts and hope for the best! |
| I don't see my mother often, she and I live about 500 miles apart across a couple of mountain ranges. But lately every time I do see her, she is worse than before. My mom used to be the sharpest tack in the drawer, but she's losing it and now that she's in her eighties I doubt she'll get too much of it back. I started seeing it when my dad died about four or five years ago, now it's accelerated. Mom has gotten remarried to an old childhood friend (if not really sweetheart, at least on her end), she needed company, didn't like living alone. Roy and her together almost make up one together person, so maybe that's why they are able to cope with day to day living. The reason I saw mom the other day was because we both were at my sister-in-law's funeral. Mom only lives about an hour's drive from my brother, so she and Roy came over for the funeral and were then going to drive back to Boise afterward. I had a good chat with her, it was one of her good days, maybe. Mom is not to square on her old pins and I helped her out to the car when they were ready to leave, Roy following us. I opened the door and helped her in, while Roy opened the rear door behind her and got in, sat down and closed the door. It made me wonder if someone else had driven them over, so I asked: "Who's driving the car?" Roy said, "She is. No, I am," climbing out of the back seat to take his rightful place as driver. I walked away and hoped for the best. They made it home safely, which is good. But my brother and I are thinking the simple question "Who's driving the car?" doesn't have a simple answer anymore. |
| Love is a great big jumble. It means many different things to just about everybody. Love is not a gift you can tie up neatly and give someone, it's more like a work in progress. There is a saying: It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. To that I would say you can't have it any other way. Love will be lost, it is too dynamic to stay the same. And though losing love hurts (sometimes very badly), if you survive, you will come out of the experience much wiser. Face it, if it weren't for lost love, most poets would have no grist for their poetic mills. Our society wants us to believe we aren't 'whole' if we are not in a relationship. We should be striving to find that perfect somebody who completes us. This means we are incomplete without a love interest. I have experienced this completeness in the past and I also found it to be temporary. What isn't temporary is the learned ability to love yourself. If you have self-love going for you then you are complete. Perhaps that's the only way you should get into a relationship with someone else, because there is a very real possibility you can't love anybody else if you don't love yourself. And that is maybe the root of dysfunction, a lack of self-love. Right now I don't have a love interest in my life. And by that I mean someone I see often for companionship and sex. It would be fun to have someone and I never close the door to the possibility, but I'm not driven to go find it. When I first got separated and divorced from my last wife I was destitute without that companionship, it was something I'd gotten used to and I missed it terribly. But the truth is I was in no condition at that point to get into another one, I was damaged goods needing repair. The odd thing is when you finally get to the point where you don't need to be in love you are the most vulnerable to it and a likely target, too. The lack of needing love makes you very attractive for some reason. Perhaps it's magnetic. And maybe that's what love really boils down to, magnetism. One of these days I'll probably smack into someone I can't get away from. There's love for you, simplified. In response to "Invalid Entry"  |
| I'm more of a lesser expectation kind of guy, every time I get great expectations they seem to fall short. Does that mean I don't set the bar up high enough? Probably, but I'm also more likely to achieve lesser expectations than I am the greater kind. Golf is one example. When you start to actually hit the ball and it goes where you meant it to you think, hey, I should be able to do this anytime. That is an expectation which will disappoint you, probably in the very near future (the next shot, for example). It's hard to measure consistancy when a great deal of inconsistancy is also in the mix. Golf is a great humbling when it comes to expectations. I'm also of the opinion I should keep my expectations low in my daily life. I like it simple, I've pruned down everything to that end. I can't expect a fabulous dinner, I have to prepare it first. Expectations have been boiled down to the essence of ingredients. Do I have the things I need? That's the question I seek answers for and it's no easy task to know what those things are. Perhaps there is where my expectations really are, I expect to be able to tell, finally, what I need. It's a completely different list from what I want. Wanting can become needing, ask any drug addict. The trick is to figure out how to want healthy things, which are the things we really need. By pruning down my wants and needs I've found the simplicity I crave. I didn't even know I was craving it until I began to achieve it. I expect I'll try to keep at it. I'm a fashion statement for comfort. Forget great expectations, just keep giving me the ordinary ones. In response to "Invalid Entry" |
| I haven't had a pet (besides house plants) for twenty years. They say I'll live longer if I have a pet, something to do with having a comrade, or perhaps more to do with having someone or something to take care of, I don't know. I look at it like a complication I'd rather not deal with right now. Since I have been going to Alaska to work (usually the minimum time is about a month) it wouldn't be fair to an animal to be continually farmed out for one thing, the other is where I live isn't conducive to having pets. I couldn't have a dog since there's no fenced yard and there already are too many cats in the neighborhood as it is (my landlord alone has about six or seven not counting the raccoons). I've thought about getting a kitty, but I don't like the litter box thing and a cat door would introduce every cat in the neighborhood to a kitty's food dish, etc. So I'll just keep my house plants who don't seem to mind when I go off for a month at a time as long as somebody comes in every once in a while and waters them. But there are dogs in my life I'm very fond of, in fact Betty (a black standard poodle) loves me so much I've been proclaimed a 'dog whisperer' because of her adoration. Betty doesn't take to many folks, but she warmed right up to me, go figure! And she never forgets me either even if I don't see her for months at a time. She is a sweetie. Another dog is pretty special too, Lhotze, who belongs to a guy I work with, so I spend a lot of time with her. She'll obey me pretty well if Locke isn't around and he's left her with me for the weekends occasionally when he couldn't take her with him for one reason or another. Lhotze is a black lab/chesapeake bay retriever mix who I've known since she was a teenager of about eight months. I've gone on long trips with Lhotze in pickup trucks and she invariably uses my leg for a pillow. She also has a trick she's very fond of, crowding me so I can't fasten my seat belt. She's very innocent about it but I know she's doing it on purpose. She'll lay her body on my arm when I'm trying to connect the belt almost every time. It's our little game. The last dog I had of my own was Chutney Boy, a golden retriever, who was so well trained all I had to do was make sounds at him to get him to obey me, or hand signals. The first time I ever put a leash on him he understood immediately not to do the sled dog imitation and kept slack in the line. I never took him to obedience training, I didn't need to. He's the main reason I've never gotten another dog, it would be too hard to replace the perfect dog and I don't want to take the chance to get one who wouldn't measure up to Chutney. So unless I move someplace else (and I've been here twelve years with no sign of moving) I'll have to do without a specified animal. I guess I'll have to just take care of myself instead of taking care of someone else. I could get a girl-friend, I guess, but that's a horse of an entirely different color. In response to "Invalid Entry" |
| The return to the home of the tufted puffin Several of us have made a December pilgrimage to the Bandon Dunes golf resort a necessary part of our lives, both for the golf and for the beauty of the surroundings. Most folks would consider it insane to play golf in December and in fact in most areas of the United States it wouldn’t even be possible. Oregon is different, Oregonians are hardy people and golf in December naturally appeals to us. This last weekend marked our third such trip to the land of the tufted puffin. To those who are not birders, the tufted puffin is a colorful seabird common to the central-southern coastline of Oregon and has been adopted as the official mascot of Bandon Dunes. We have come to call our yearly trek to Bandon the Doug Snelgrove Invitational, but we also recognize Doug’s similarity (kind of) to the bird, in that he likes to keep puffin’ on his pipe while he plays golf. What he puffs is not anything you can buy in a tobacco shop, and if any of the rest of us smoked as much of it as Doug does, we wouldn’t be able to stand up, let alone play golf. So far, Doug Snelgrove has not accompanied us to Bandon, much as he would love to, because the dates we’ve picked to go have been when he wasn’t able to go with us. But we’ve named our pilgrimage the Doug Snelgrove Invitational in his memory since he was the one who first came up with the idea. Maybe one of these years he’ll actually be able to go. The Bandon Dunes golf resort is a place that grows on you. It is the closest thing to Irish and Scottish links golf you can find in America. The courses are fiendish, the layouts are chock-full of hazards (from pot bunkers to sand-dunes to prickly gorse bushes) and the weather can range from frost delays to gale-force winds to monsoon rains, but we love it all and look forward to going again next December. The reason we go in December is because they have special deals for Oregon natives during the winter months. It ain’t cheap to play there the rest of the year, we flat can’t afford it, but during December we can play two rounds, stay in their lodge for two nights and get two complimentary breakfast buffets plus a sit-down restaurant dinner for about the same price as one round of golf at Pebble Beach. The downside is you make reservations without knowing what the weather will throw at you, the upside is you don’t care, being Oregonians. The Bandon golf experience has been written about in a book entitled Dream Golf, by Stephen Goodwin and in the book he makes many references to a favorite saying of the owner of the resort, Mike Keiser, “Do we like it?” Well, Mike, we do, in fact we like it fine. Going to Bandon and playing the three courses available is an unparalleled experience for many reasons. First among them is it’s all about the golf, the courses are spectacular, with gorgeous scenery, and also very challenging for just about any level of golfer. After playing at Bandon, the other courses we play seem tame by comparison. To be sure, many courses require you to think carefully about your shots and make you shape your shots to fit, but at Bandon you’ll be penalized if you fail to hit that shot perfectly, while at other courses the results of a mis-hit won’t be nearly as dire. In fact at the Bandon courses you may hit what you think is a perfect shot only to find out you’ve been had, the lay of the land channeling the ball into a diabolically placed sand-trap, for example, a trap you couldn’t see from where you hit the ball. The difficulties you encounter can be very frustrating, leading to thrown clubs (if you’re a hothead) or harsh words between dear friends, both of which behaviors I saw this last weekend. As any golfer will tell you golf can be a humbling experience, but at Bandon you discover new depths to humility. Never before have I been grateful to sink a putt for a double-bogey. During the summer I regularly shoot scores in the 80’s, at Bandon I’m ecstatic to break one hundred. I don’t know how many times I repeated my mantra of “it is what it is” during the weekend, but I learned to say it without tears, acrimony or fatalistically. What it was was reality, because I finally realized just how lucky I was to be there. Sure, I hated to hit bad shots, but the reality was not going to change them in any way, all I could do was go find the ball (if at all possible) and hit it again. Several times I hit miracle shots I didn’t even get a chance to see, wondering why my fellows who could see them were shouting until I finally got up to the green to see my ball next to a hole I didn’t even know was there. You can’t take golf carts on any of the courses at Bandon, you walk, and they are long, with many ups and downs. At the end of the round each day I was exhausted, today I’m stiff and sore, but also exhilarated. I can’t wait for next December, tortuous as it may be. Maybe next year Doug Snelgrove can come with us, finally, our own mascot, our tufted puffer. But even if Doug can’t be there, I’ll move heaven and earth to be there my own-self, I know I’ll need another lesson in that curious blend of exaltation and humility, and really what is a pilgrimage without a pilgrim? |
| My left thumb Sounds like the start of some new movie, like “My left foot” maybe, a natural movie to be reviewed by the “thumbs up” guys on TV. But alas, it’s not a movie, it’s my new way of life, it’s all about the thumb. Over twenty years ago I worked at a lumber mill, and my job was to cut big boards which necessarily needed a big saw, in this case a 24-inch radial arm saw. For the uninitiated a radial arm saw is on a slide, and the operator pulls the screaming behemoth saw through the board. A 24-inch saw-blade will make a cut that’s about a quarter-inch wide, which is called the blade’s kerf. When my glove slipped off the board I was cutting and my thumb went into the hungry saw, the kerf didn’t leave anything to sew back on, the end of my thumb was just gone, vaporized. When I got my glove off and looked at meat where the end of my thumb used to be it was a shocking experience. It continued to be a shocking experience for quite some time, especially when I hit the end of the thumb (which was slowly growing back, like a lizard’s tail, I guess) on something, or with something. The thing about a thumb is, it’s always in the way. We brag, we humans, about the advantages of the ‘opposing thumbs’, yet I had the opposite feeling about my thumb, it opposed me, it was a disadvantage rather than an advantage. But it did grow back nicely, if not exactly the shape it was before the accident, then close enough to look pretty darn normal. I will admit it stayed kind of tender, for example smacking it with a hammer would cause the air to turn blue around me. To tell the truth I’m not sure if my right thumb would hurt as badly were I to hit it with a hammer, the hand holding the hammer rarely gets smacked by it. So for twenty years my new thumb and I have done many things together, and I thought we were getting along pretty well until I did the cabin job up in Alaska earlier this fall. Then for some unknown reason, the thumb jumped into the table saw. A little deeper this time, the tip of my thumb was left to sew back on, probably thanks to a smaller blade with a narrower kerf. Maybe thanks isn’t the word to use. Let’s say instead that there was a possibility the sewed back section of the top of my thumb would reconnect with the rest of the thumb. Apparently, though, I’d cut it too deeply, and the end of my thumb, now blackened and dead, will have to be surgically removed or just slough off naturally. Once again my thumb will have to regenerate or be shorter (if I were a hitchhiker I might find it useful if I didn’t have too far to go). Once again I’ll be smacking my thumb against everything, it will be a struggle to button my pants and shirt, I won’t be able to shuffle cards, but worse yet, I have to wait until it heals before I can play golf. Right now I’m all thumbs, or rather all thumb, I’m clumsy and inept and I can’t believe how often I’d been using my thumb without even thinking about it (I obviously wasn’t thinking about it when I put it into the table saw), because now I’m thinking about this thumb all the time. It occurs to me that lizard tails only grow back once, if it’s lost again, the lizard will then go by the name of “Stubby.” If this is true then my best strategy would be to dump the analogy, because I really want my thumb back. I would even be willing to promise my new thumb not to stick it in any more saws, though I can’t go so far as to promise I won’t smack it with a hammer. You can’t promise a perfect world to a new thumb, just one with some considerations built in for safety hopefully, after all cutting it off twice is really two times too many. And besides I’d rather my co-workers didn’t take to calling me “Stubby.” |
| I just got word yesterday that an old friend, of more than thirty years, had committed suicide. When I first got to know Oaks, he was a happy-go-lucky stoner. Dressed continually in overalls, he possessed a ready and infectious laugh, and if he didn’t have a joint lit, he was rolling another one (in later years he suffered from emphysema, his doctors attributing it to many years of smoking leaf non-stop). Oaks had grown up in Illinois, in a small town. The family business was a gas station, he had gone to work there as a child, pumping gas and hanging around with the old guys near the pot-bellied stove. It seemed to me to be a colorful past, perhaps even a little Norman Rockwell-ish, the young boy listening to the old men telling lies to pass the time. But as Oaks himself grew into middle age, he began to blame his father for what he now looked back on as child slavery. He had done poorly at school, and trying to take some college classes he failed again, all because of being stunted by having to work at such an early age, or so he reasoned. He confronted his father about it, but he wasn’t able to forgive him, even after the old man had grudgingly admitted it might be true. Oaks’ brothers and sisters thought he’d been too hard on the old man, should put the past behind him and move on, something he didn’t appear to be able to do. This was my first clue that Oaks might have slipped a little bit, he’d always been pretty level-headed, emotionally anyway, but now he seemed a half-a-bubble off level. Since we both were interested in writing, he began to send me some of his to read. At first they were just stories about his past, high-school parties (with overtones of John Cougar Mellancamp, or Bruce Springsteen, full of cars and underage drinking), and some journalistic renditions of traveling in South America. The thing all his stories had in common was how drugs had woven themselves into his history. I told him his stories were fairly well-written, but he should try his hand at fiction, maybe, to try and take him out of what seemed to be ruts to me. As far as I know, he didn’t try fiction, and the next thing I got from him would be what I consider the ramblings of a mad man, disjointed, fantastic and deadly serious. Diatribes against society, Christianity, anybody who has ever done him wrong or might, the way his mind was jumping around reminded me of a schizophrenic person. This last summer he kind of hit the wall, mentally, ending up in a psychiatric ward for a while. With medication they finally got him back to an even keel, and when I spoke with him on the phone, he sounded sane again. I stopped worrying about him. I am surprised by his suicide and also not surprised at the same time. Like all suicides it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Oaks is not the first of my friends to commit suicide, just the latest, and the thing they all have in common is how troubling they are to me. I’ve been through some tough times myself, and like most people thought of ending it all, yet the example before me of someone who actually has ended it all makes me realize I never was that serious about it. Suicide speaks of a desperation no one else can share, perhaps I’m too prone to share my desperate times with others to get caught under its wheels. Rest in peace, Oaks, I don’t know what else to hope for. The documentation of your madness, scrawled over many pages, I have gathered up and will throw away. I prefer to try and remember you in a better light, not as a man ridden with demons, but as an honest, decent, happy person who was once a good friend of mine. Rest in peace, my friend. |
| I just got back from Alaska, Prince of Wales Island, to be exact, an island priding itself and resting its hopes of tourism on the glories of the rain forest. The company I work for had a contract with the Forest Service to build a small cabin, presumably where folks can enjoy looking at the rain forest out of the windows, while listening to the drumming of raindrops on the metal roof. Prince of Wales Island gets from between 160-200 inches of rain a year. The Forest Service had provided a gravel pad for people to park their vehicles, and about a quarter mile of trail had been hacked out of the dripping trees down to the cabin site. We camped in tents on the gravel pad, which would be a wonderful way to test the waterproof qualities of tents, specifically the question of how long any tent could go before it started getting wet inside, because it isn’t if, it’s when. The tent will get wet inside, leaving the camper, me, in a continual battle to keep clothes, sleeping bags, etc., if not dry, at least just damp rather than sopping wet. I camped in the rain for a month and a half. At the moment, the allure of camping is lost on me, the thrill is gone. Luckily, we had a wall tent with a woodstove in it, where we could dry off after a day of mucking around in the rain forest, cutting trees, pulling stumps, digging up roots and making holes for the water to fill up (a word to the wise, before you pour any concrete into the holes, try to bail out as much of the water as you can). The wall tent was also our cook tent, the three-man crew taking turns making dinner (usually some form of burritos). After dinner we would sit around the fire and look at each other until it was time to trudge through the rain to our wet tents and go to bed. At first, some nights we would play chess (the only game we brought), but I made a bad choice right away and beat the other guys up so badly that soon they didn’t want to play anymore. One of the guys started calling chess “whup-ass” as in “whup-ass, anyone?” The cabin itself turned out beautiful, the six skylights interrupting the metal roof’s ability to shed water don’t leak yet, the woodwork around the windows and doors looks very nice, the cedar log design is quite lovely. Just when the cabin became a perfect place to stay in, we have to leave. The day we struck camp it rained continually, by the time the gravel pad disappeared in the rearview mirror I couldn’t have been any wetter. The next day, in the Super-8 in Ketchikan, I turned up the heat in my room and pulled my very wet tent out of its bag, actually succeeding in drying it out for the first time in a month and a half. Being from Oregon, a state known nation-wide as being wet and rainy, I have to say our climate is kind of dry in comparison to Prince of Wales Island, and I’m glad to be home. We have a number of beautiful areas to go camping here in Oregon, but I don’t feel I’ll be visiting any of them any time soon. |
| I'm taking off Monday for Alaska, to build another cabin in another remote area. I'll try to connect when I can via the internet cafe route. I might be overfull of poetry about beauty and such when I return, I might not, Alaska doesn't promise me anything and I don't hold her to it. In any case, this venue of my blog would be where I chance to tell about my journey, travails, etc., if you want, stay tuned... |
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