story 2

i feel slightly blessed because i crashed my bike a few days ago, and actually, it was my uncle's bike and i don't feel blessed because i didn't get hurt, although that was fortunate, but i feel blessed because my crash was the result of this series of amazing and improbable events. it was like the least possible outcome was the one that happened and it was awesome in the literal sense of the word awesome.

so anyway, i can ride a bike just fine generally and i would go so far as to call it my primary mode of transportation, at least around portland, but i was up in seattle for a few days with my cousin and we wanted to go for a bike ride, but my uncle had a new u-lock that we mounted to the seat tube of his bike frame before we left and that piece of information might seem trivial, but it is essential to the story and file it away as the first factor that made this crash so improbable. there was a cable lock on the frame, but we took it off and mounted this u-lock.

so we rode around seattle and sat in a park for a little while and then went down to this folklife festival with the standard menagerie of craft tents and food vendors and excuse me if i wax a little cynical, but there is something about a subset of festival-goers, the homeless-by-choice kids my age, that puts me off, like i understand the disgust with modern society and all, but isn't there an inherent selfishness in removing yourself from it? like you're part of this society whether you like it or not and if you think it is sick, how are you not going to try to make it well?

phew. but anyway, so we were riding home, me and caley, and we were on this bike trail that was built on an old railroad and i think it was called the burt gilman, or something, but i was following caley along the trail and he passed this guy towing his child by bike in one of those pods and this is where things start to get improbable. because a little earlier i was thinking "i haven't crashed my bike in a while" and also (and don't take this the wrong way, but) "i kind of like crashing my bike and i kind of like being hurt physically, not the act of getting hurt, but being hurt is like 'wow, my body is working to heal itself and what an amazing thing we are as humans that we can put ourselves back together' and also there is an immediacy to being hurt that forces you to be present in the moment and it isn't like i like the pain, i guess it is more that feeling of being where you are and when you are and what you are, right?"

but the u-lock hopped out of it's mount when i hit this potholed section of asphalt and i was right beside the man with the pod-child and i felt it or heard it or saw it dislodge so i braked super hard and locked my wheels, which is usually fine except the lock tumbled its way under my rear tire, so i was skidding along with my front tire on the ground and rear tire on the lock and it didn't take long for the asphalt to scrape through the plastic of the lock and down to the metal and so this scene was accompanied by this hellish screeching sound of metal scraping across asphalt. 

and the only reason i bring up the man with the pod-child is that i think it is a funny image and also because i only rode over the potholes because i had to pass pod-child man (and to his credit, he was very concerned with my well-being when he could have been upset that i had endangered his pod-child.)

now i want to stop and consider, briefly, how unlikely it is that a cartwheeling u-lock, that was at times yards away from me and my bike, could make its way under my rear tire. of all the possible outcomes, how unlikely is the one that happened? 

but the front tire was braking just fine still, the only issue was that now the back tire wasn't slowing down, and it wasn't like i had been riding that fast, maybe 15-20 miles per hour, but i barreled along for a good five seconds, enough time to allow everyone in the vicinity to wonder what horrible banshee was approaching and watch as my rear wheel swung to my right and slowly began to overtake my front wheel and i stayed upright until my bike was just about perpendicular to the direction it was traveling, at which point my bicycle, the object in motion, decided that the friction from traveling sideways, the unbalanced force, was acting on it enough to keep it from tending to stay in motion with the same speed and direction. and that is newton's first law.

so anyway i learned a valuable lesson as i skidded along the pavement and not about elementary physics, but now i forget what it is. maybe there are things that happen that we shouldn't try to assign a reason to.

dairy diary

i have such a hard time visually differentiating between the word dairies and diaries that, looking at them now i am not sure which means what. dairy and diary i can figure out though.

jetway tale 2

after the funeral (what a great opening!) and on the way home, the stewardesses called all those letters and numbers  (i feel like i’m in elementary school when they do, like count off as you board) and in the jetway there were all these birds perched down the length of it on top and their raucous cheeps and caws made me think sometimes we put them in cages, but really we’re the ones in cages, you know? because just look around at the metal walls keeping you in and soon maybe someone will give you peanuts.

jetway tale 1

so i flew to ohio for a funeral and i thought ohio might be the only state in the union that shared no letters with the word funeral and i spent hours thinking about it one night when i couldn’t sleep, but i told this to my cousin cole and he thought for 20 seconds and said mississippi and he’s right, so that theory was disproved but whatever, right?

 but i got in a plane and it was from oregon to illinois and there was a family of three in front of me and the kid was this skater kid, like ten years old and i knew he was a skater because he had his skateboard with him as we waited in the jetway. and i was looking at him and thinking he was pretty cool because he was full on in the skater mold like tight jeans and backwards cap that said “independent” or whatever (i made that up because i don’t know any other skater brands and that image adds an air of validity to this story). and his board was all scuffed up and the wheels were all worn down so he was clearly a little skater, whether or not his backwards cap said independent.

 so i’m admiring the little dude and he spins his board around, pivoting it on his toe and the pristine red bumper sticker facing me reads “abortion stops a beating heart”. 

and i think that’s not punk! in fact that’s not punk at all!

and the rest of the story only tangentially relates to the first part, but the kid loses control of his board, mid-spin (and by now my admiration for the little fellow is much diminished) and it goes crashing down onto his mom’s toe and she yelps and everybody looks at them and the father of the family is startled by the crash-yelp and he turns to look and in so doing, he knocks over his guitar so now the guitar crashes over onto the rare open patch of ground in the jetway and sends a resonating “bong-ng-ng” through our small steel world and to break the tension mom says “like father like son” and everyone laughs.

and the kid says “he’s not my father.”

something old, nothing new, borrowed or blue

(this is a story i wrote once that is entirely true, but it is reposted here so if you read it then you don't have to read it again.)

well i think that life is trying to teach me a lesson or that's how it appears, but let me try that again...

i fell through the ceiling, but that makes it sounds like i was traveling upwards, so no i fell through the floor, but the floor was the ceiling. and don't get all like "whoa the floor IS the ceiling, man," because that is not the lesson i think life is trying to teach me. and to step further back into the story, these squirrels live in my eaves and that in and of itself is fitting because i determined a while back that squirrels were my spirit animal and have even been known to have said "i don't think i could live somewhere that squirrels don't," but i didn't mean it literally. but squirrels literally do live where i live and so i wanted to see what kind of a door squirrels use to come into my house and i was wondering if maybe they had a doormat that says "welcome squiends" or something clever like that because those seem to be in fashion and almost always with a goose who is wearing a bonnet and carrying a basket. i don't know why. but i never made it to the squirrel door because i knew what was happening a split second before it did happen and this is not the only known instance of my clairvoyance, sometimes i know what i will say even before i say it, but my right leg burst through years of old wood and plaster and many hues of paint and my left leg hesitated like wile e. coyote in the air for a second before following suit (and pardon me for just realizing that expression has to do with card games!) 

if you were in the kitchen, and i wish you were, because i like having company, you would have heard some tentative footsteps followed by nothing, because there is a noiseless vacuum that precedes any calamity. then the levy of ceiling, holding back the mass of me would have burst forth, peppering you with plaster, showering you with splinters, pelting you with years and years of accumulated paint and not unlike the fabled yellowstone eruption that blanketed the modern day bible belt with ash and pumice, there was grit and plaster and dust on every shelf, plate and appliance, and definitely unlike the fabled yellowstone eruption, two hairy and bloodied legs protruded from the smoldering caldera. 

i don't know how many of you have tried to extricate yourselves upward from a jagged hole of splinters and rusty nails and fiberglass insulation. and never mind the squirrel audience. i know that i didn't want to drag the rest of me down it, the hole i mean, because the ten feet of air beneath me scared me more than the scrapes, and it wasn't the added pressure from having that added air above me that concerned me because i generally tolerate being in the kitchen very well. in fact it is one of my favorite places to spend my time. and so i decided to go down there the conventional way, since i like being there so much and i didn't have a whole lot better to do at that very moment, but i had to climb out of the hole first. and what is really funny and what you don't usually think about when you're walking around in any upstairs anywhere is i had no idea what i was above, no idea which ceiling exactly i had fallen through, so one of my first thoughts after i had a chance to inspect my handy work was "huh, i thought i was closer to that wall."

now i have fallen more than my fair share and that is why i am supposed to learn a lesson, but i want to take a moment to tally for you the times i have fallen, but good. i fell in a manhole, the cover dropped out from under me. i fell off a chairlift, because the bar went up and i was little and i just got off. i fell off a balcony that i was trying to climb down because the railing came off. now i have fallen through the ceiling, because squirrels. the culprit each time is complacency, they all happened because i took something for granted, that what i was walking on was solid, that the railing wasn't rotten, that when your dad puts the bar up, it is ok to dismount. and, oh, i could extend my realization to so many other literal events in my life, but the real temptation for me is to think that all of my metaphorical falls are a result of my complacency, and at first glance that might seem to be true, but it isn't and it can't be, because there is just no way that every negative event that affects me is my own fault. that is too buddhist. 

so the first thing i did when i got into the kitchen was pick up two broken slats and a piece of plaster and a shard of wood and i nailed the wood to the wall in my studio and i nailed the plaster to wall in there too. and the shard of wood. and i painted a skull on the plaster and crossbones on the slats and wrote "fear complacency" on the shard. and that is my lesson, and the word fear might count as hyperbole, but i couldn't fit "beware complacency", though now i see i should have tried. you should always try.

feasts

today i went for a run in the rain and there was a big raccoon running along the train tracks beside me and i looked at him and he had a cat in his mouth and i thought i really don't have any ingredients to make myself dinner tonight so i went to see a movie. when i got home i made myself polenta with cheese and chard.

i will post a story i wrote about squirrels in the near future so stay tuned and most everyone that could potentially be reading this might have already read the story so i guess i'll add some lies in to it.

(wait, that story isn't about squirrels in the near future, they are in the near past but i will post the story in the near future).

file under: chicken, egg

i can tell you which came first if we are talking about specific chickens and specific eggs.

jcb

i wanted to write something about my uncle, because he just passed away yesterday, but everything i started sounded so trite and my feelings for him were so complicated, i just couldn't seem to get anything down.

uncle jon had his problems and before you say don't we all?, i feel like i should clarify that he was an alcoholic and a second- or third-offense-drug-bust felon. there was a criminal threatening charge and more that hasn't and probably won't ever come to light. in recent years he was unnecessarily and almost nonsensically belligerent in social settings.

but before you write him off as a bad guy, know that he was a huge presence in my life. we used to play-wrestle all the time as grownups even. he became the cartoon characters he imitated and he seemed as happy to be imitating them as i was to be watching him. once on a camping trip when i couldn't sleep and he was the only one left out at the fire i threw little pebbles at his shoes and when he caught me i went out to the fire and we just sat there staring into the flames side-by-side in silence. he taught me to golf, but more like he taught me how to enjoy golf. and i don't play anymore, in part because i lost the youthful exuberance that is necessary to draw nourishment from the sport. jon though never lost it, i could still play golf with him long after i turned my back on the game, his enthusiasm was contagious. the man would kill a bottle of vodka or pear brandy or whatever-the-alcohol-du-jour a night, but i never saw him drink a drop on the golf course. i guess it was his escape. 

(and the pear brandy one time had a pear in the bottle, like someone put the bottle on the bough of a tree and the pear grew inside of it and that idea just lit jon right up. and there were flashes of light even in the darkness.) 

he owned a curious mind and he had the means and arguably the will to indulge himself in any way he desired and that was a dangerous combination. when i was at a loss for describing what he meant to me, a conversation with my cousin lead me to the revelation that jon was in some strange sense a martyr, and not that he wanted to be or maybe not that he knew he would be, but here was a man who tried everything that we think might bring us pleasure and let us watch what happened. he showed us that pleasure and happiness are not the same.

there is a super-hero in "the watchmen" called the comedian, who acts out society's worst impulses at their logical extremes and it isn't because he wants to be doing it, it is his way of giving back to society by shedding light on all the terrible shit that we do on a daily basis and never think twice about, by making us pay attention to what we are doing and how it affects other people. 

and jon played a similar role in the lives of my family, he wasn't intentionally hurting others, but his pursuit of pleasure left a tangible emptiness in him and people were hurt incidentally along the way. and who's to say he didn't plan it this way or at least understand the role he was playing? the man did everything we think we might want to do, everything we think might make us feel good and we all benefitted from seeing the results. 

he gave us someone onto whom we could project our own problems, he wasn't a scapegoat exactly, but we would point out negative aspects of jon's behavior or lifestyle that the we were noticing in our selves, noticing in each other. it was easier to feel like we could make a change that way, that we had to make a change. 

i loved him furiously though he was flawed and unhappy, but he showed just enough love, just enough wit and charm, he was engaged just enough to make everyone feel like he could change. maybe he understood the role he had to play or maybe alcohol just got the best of him, but he didn't change.

and here is what i know to be the truth: i brought a budding rose in from my back yard and put it in a wine bottle full of water right before i heard that uncle jon had died and it hasn't bloomed and i don't think it is going to, but when i round the corner into my dining room with my breakfast, i am still happy to see it.

hyphy

help i think my neighbors are going dumb. 

and when the clubs close at 2:30 on weekend mornings they roll up like some bay-area children of the corn in their candy-paint cadillacs and what is their fascination with those buicks?

the best was when this couple fucked in their le sabre, opened the window and threw some taco bell trash out and drove off.