Small World: Super Secret Spy Edition

Unearthed an odd bit of buried past the other day.

It started with one of those gawdawful Facebook "memes". Even ran into one of them? Blogging tends to get them, though I haven't run across one for ages.

This one was about "how you met me", and it was mildly entertaining hear from old friends and see who remembered how who met whom all those years ago.

But in the process a name came up; a person I knew many years ago and was slightly friendly with in a very passant sort of way.

Her name is Susan Leslie Ireland, and she was just appointed the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis. As such she is "...responsible for the receipt, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence related to the Department's mission to safeguard the international financial system from abuse and to combat threats to U.S. national security."

And I knew her when. Howboutthat?

Anyway, the interesting thing is that when we were in college together I remember her as a painfully serious, intelligent, darkly pretty young woman. She roomed in a group with a clutch of other very bright and clever women, many of whom acted in our college Green Room and, as you might expect, caprioled joyfully with the sort of creative lunacy that has characterized thespians since Aristophanes' time.

Sue - as she was known in those days - was not quite of the same metal as her sisters; "forlorn" is how one of my contemporaries remembers her. She never seemed as...vivid...as her hallmates. And she seems to have had a very fraught relation with them; another former classmate of mine recalls her saying, within earshot of those long-time rooming hall associates and companions "Those people are not my friends..."; a remark almost as sad as it was tactless.I will admit to crushing on her a bit, back in those times; even callow and stupid I had a bit of a thing for seriously smart Dark Ladies. And she was - and is, it seems - very smart. And, as her picture testifies, still Dark and serious.

But I was too immature, and she too otherwise-engaged, and so we drifted away.

But after her name suddenly returning to my attention what I recalled vividly was that several years after graduation we met for a lunch.

She was already working in D.C. in a covert position - I believe probably with the National Security Agency - and I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, a line medic for the 1/505th Infantry. I was headed north on a brief leave, called her up, and we made the time to meet at some indifferent lunch place somewhere in Georgetown.

She was still dark, still handsome, and very excited about her work. I was less hairy - still callow, but leaner, and harder - and gaining in both worldly and emotional maturity. So there we were; the young spy and the young paratrooper, sitting chatting on a bright sunny spring morning while a Reagan morning broke across America.We talked of ourselves, and the world's wagging. We discussed parachuting, which it seems that she had to learn as part of her own "basic training" in intelligence - it seems that even in the Eighties U.S. spies still hung on to bit of their OSS heritage. We talked about old friends, and future plans.

There was absolutely not a flint's worth of spark between us.

We enjoyed a pleasant spring day and parted with the usual promises to keep in touch and, as usual, failed to keep them. I went on to become a paratroop sergeant, and then, in succession, a graduate student and husband, a professional geologist, teacher, senior NCO, husband (again) and father.

Sue - or, rather, S. Leslie, as she prefers to be known - continued to find her way through the Hall of Mirrors; "Executive Assistant to the Director and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and in various analytical and management portfolios at CIA related to the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction....also detailed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense as Country Director for Iran and Kuwait." She also served as the "Iran Mission Manager" for the Director of National Intelligence.

It's strange to think of my old acquaintance as a Power herself; one of the Thrones and Dominations, a Beltway Insider, making reality, as the Bushies were wont to say, with the force of her knowledge, her judgement - one hopes - and her wiles at the subtle and deadly bureaucratic infighting in the halls of the great and the mighty.

But there she is, and, what's more, one of the "Iran Hands"; one of the fonts of intelligence wisdom on that contentious and troubled land.

And now, I wonder; what secrets is she telling to those seats of power?

Because had my life gone in other directions I might be one of those whose fate depended on that tall and serious Dark Lady. On what she said, and what she did not say, to those whose decrees sway the wide world.

To those whose words move armies and fleets, and who might well have sent First Sergeant Lawes plummeting out into the night sky over Qom, on the advice of the sloe-eyed young woman who thirty years ago sat across the cheap formica table from the young sergeant who was him, on that sunny spring Georgetown day, those fine eyes glowing as she described how much she had enjoyed the adventure of her brief "combat training" at Quantico, and the fearsome power she felt as the machinegun lept and thundered in her hands.And I wonder.

What will she say?

Crucifer

This is one of my former CC students as she looked the last Ash Wednesday.What I find interesting about this is that when she posted this picture she commented how it would be a test to see how people around her reacted to a public display of faith.

Here was my first thought; I wonder how many people were just confused?

I grew up a suburban Presbyterian in the Sixties. Suburban Sixties Presbyterians didn't do none of this forehead/ash/cross stuff. If I had seen someone wearing this symbol I'd have thought that they had been cleaning their chimney and missed a spot washing up afterwards.

And my second thought was; this woman is a genuine Christian; she is a devout, hard-working, compassionate young woman whose faith makes extraordinary demands on her. She is one of the few people I know who really tries to live her faith, with all the personal difficulties and hardships that represents. So I find it almost viciously ironic that she believed that she might be scorned for publicly proclaiming her faith in a gentle way, one that silently testifies to her beliefs without getting all up in your grille, without hectoring, without accusing, without confrontation, without finger-wagging of any sort at all...in a time when it seems like you cannot turn on a piece of electronic media without being confronted by some sanctimonious jackhole wagging his finger about some damn thing.And this is supposed to be what a peaceful carpenter's son laid down his life for.

Sometimes I wonder about humans. Really, I do.

The Mirror Crack'd

This blogging is an odd thing.

It really doesn't matter much in the sum of things. Just a little trickle of more noise, really, lost amid the greater noise of our cacophonous Information Age where we are carpet-bombed with light and sound until we shout just to be heard yet find ourselves one of millions of shouters whose voices drown each other out.

I wish I could pretend to have some trick worth coming to read, some facility within that produced some wisdom without, some internal depth that would translate into words on the screen that you would clamor to come to ingest them, and ponder them, and that would in turn provoke you to some great insights within yourselves. I can't.

I don't have any real insight into politics, or human nature, or sex, or warfare, or knitting. I have the contents of my head, and I take them out and air them here, in hopes that they will touch something in you. I don't know why I feel compelled to do this. Vanity? Probably; I'm a trifle vain of my own erudition and skill with words. But I haven't the skills to make a living at it.

Well, there's David Brooks, then.

Hmmm.

Let's say, rather, that I haven't the skill that should allow me to make a living at it.

But this odd little forum allows me to natter away without consequence, and allows me to at least pretend that someone or someones come to read my nattering. Looking back at last year I seem to be losing something; I didn't manage to find enough to talk about to match my postings for the year before, and certainly not from the Big Year, 2008, where I found enough materials lying around inside my skull for almost a post a day.

I'm not sure why.

Perhaps it was the official "end" of the Third Gulf War and the plainly-visible-to-everyone-outside-Victor-David-Hanson outcome (like "a dragon by the side of the road", as Bill James once said) of the Umpteenth Afghan War. Maybe it was the final, painful realization that my country is going to slide back into a half-assed sort of Gilded Age without even the prospect of enough dismal jobs in meatpacking and ironmongery to keep the parents of the future match girls and breaker boys in laudanum and cigarettes.

Maybe it was just preoccupation with the usual sorts of things we use as excuses for our national lack of political, economic, and social concern; work and family.

I don't think I'm done here. And I certainly want to thank and appreciate all of you who take the time to stop by, to read, and, especially, to comment back, especially those familiar friends and comrades; Lisa, jim, basil, Ael, Don Francisco, Pluto, Dee, Podunk Paul, Big Daddy, labrys, mike, Leon, Kevin...you are always welcome here, and welcomed. I hope to continue our epistolary friendship in the year to come. So this blog will be here, and I will be here, and, I hope, you will, too.

And I will continue to blab out whatever's in my head; poetry, and war, and love, and Korean in-laws, and kids, and ire at fucking Newt Gingrich, that vile staff-banging plutocrat, and soccer, and politics, and Portland, and the Northwest.

Oh, and I have eight more beers to review!

So, I hope, that even if I have nothing much to say I can say it well.

Welcome, friends, to 2012. I hope it finds you all well, strong, douce, and happy. And may we all leave it better, saner, happier, stronger, and kinder people than we enter it!

"On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road run by
To many-tower'd Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott."

~ Fred Tennyson

Gray Friday

It probably says something that yesterday I posted nothing about my family and friends on the day when we in the United States are supposed to be all thankful for our family and friends and, instead, posted a grim little tale of death and disaster in the northwest woodland 220 years ago.

"My days among the Dead are passed;
Around me I behold,
Where'er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old:
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day."

And, indeed, there are times when I feel closer to times and people long passed-away than my own time.

Not that I want to try and make some sort of geezer-wheeze about how Wonderful the Good Old Days were. One thing about knowing something about history is knowing that for most of history for most human beings life sucked immense pipe.Most people lived lives of unrelenting hardship, poverty, and struggle that were merciful only in their brevity. Parents routinely buried their children. Children regularly experienced the bright, brief agony of murder, rape, savage brutality, and horror when not simply chained to the grinding wheel of slavery and misery for as long as their bodies refused to grant them quietus.

"With them I take delight in weal,
And seek relief in woe;
And while I understand and feel
How much to them I owe,
My cheeks have often been bedewed
With tears of thoughtful gratitude."

No. Me, I like indoor plumbing and central heating. I am thankful for things like the germ theory of disease, the study of anatomy, physiology, and scientific medicine, internal combustion, industrial clothing and foodstuff production. I like knowing that my children have a very good chance of seeing me take my dirt nap rather than the other way around, and that my chances of dying of typhus, appendicitis, in a Mongol invasion or during a pogrom, or for that matter in a nuclear war range somewhere from very unlikely to nearly impossible.I am thankful that I can rest for four days this weekend, than I am well-paid for the long hours I work when I do work. That I can work without a constant fear of injury or death, and know that the tools I use are well crafted and will not fail suddenly, maim, or kill me. That I can drive on safe streets, in a safe vehicle, in a safe city and not fear that the policeman I pass will pull me over either to shake me down or arrest me without cause.And I am thankful for the generations of human beings who fought ignorance and indolence, theocracy, plutocracy and oligarchy, and all the other 'ocracies that humans greedy, censorious, or brutal had - and in many parts of the world have - crafted for the misery of the common sod.

"My thoughts are with the Dead; with them
I live in long-past years,
Their virtues love, their faults condemn,
Partake their hopes and fears;
And from their lessons seek and find
Instruction with an humble mind."

But life is not all doings of the Great and the Mighty. I am thankful for my own, small bit of life as well.I am thankful for the irked look on my bride's face when she recognizes that I am willfully ignoring her rather than refuse her bidding outright. For the soft place at the juncture of her thigh and belly that is as warm and smooth as minky cloth next to a fire. For the way she sighs and the fine muscles in her shoulders soften when she slips into the darkness of true sleep beside me.For her wit, and fierce intelligence, and her loving heart. For the way she never loses hope that someday I will laugh at her dry wit.

I am thankful for the bright confidence of my children. For their easy kindness and their sulks, their happy gift for curiosity, their maddening questions on every subject I know absolutely nothing about. I am thankful for their strong young bodies that outrun my arthritic hips like the wind past a stone.I am thankful for my daughter's self-satisfied little smirk when she gets something right, and my son's shouting eagerness to tell me what I don't frigging know.I am thankful that I live among good people, warm, vibrant, engaged, energetic people. For my friends that exult with me in the tumult of the crowd and grieve with me when my thoughts turn to the little daughter I will never hold again.Who hammer nails with me, who call me on my bullshit, who may be close enough to embrace or who may be no more than a whisper of pixels on a screen. Truly, my never-failing friends are they.I am thankful that I have work that fills my hands and my mind and my heart with the knowledge of good service well performed.I am thankful that I live in the hope that I will not pass into the darkness without legacy; that my life and work will be remembered by those whose lives I touched, and that there wil be indeed no death where my spirit lives in those hearts and minds.

"My hopes are with the Dead; anon
My place with them will be,
And I with them shall travel on
Through all Futurity;
Yet leaving here a name, I trust,
That will not perish in the dust."
~ Robert Southey

So to you and yours, my friends - for those of you who come by this way ARE my friends - I will be thankful if your own day this day was full to overflowing with goodness and peace, with the love of those whom you love and the care of those you care for. That you will lay your head without fear and arise with hope and the fullness of a day of good work and hard play and those you love ahead of you.And with that I say: goodnight.

Face of the Tiger

"There was a young lady from Niger"

My hip is aching tonight, so when the little cat jumped up on my chest (she likes to climb on me in the night and sleep, and she's so small that usually I give her a pat or two and go back to sleep myself. But not tonight.) I got up, shuffled into the kitchen to drop some kibbles in her bowl, then to the bathroom, and then here, where we left the laptop on all night because it is developing some sort of boot-issues and Mojo needs to use it for work tomorrow.

And I spent an hour or so visiting some electronic friends.

Isn't that odd?

I am a great believer that we are really fairly consistent monkeys; I honestly believe that human behavior hasn't changed all THAT much since Sumer. So our hopes and hates, our dreams and nightmares, the way of a man with a maid or a mother with a child have more commonality than difference whether we live in little brick houses or in temple-cities.

But electronics really have made a difference in scope.

So whilst jim and Lisa are in Florida a continent away I can drop in on Ranger Against War, or Lisa's posts at Big Brass Blog, and see what they've been doing. Or e-mail Lisa and chat (always a worthwhile thing, since she is as wise as she is lovely). And Labrys, whose ferocity and intelligence are as great as the goddess she bear, lives almost in my pocket here in the Northwest and I feel like she's a neighbor although we have never met. And there's a whole damn digital bar full of cronies; basil, Andy, Al, Publius, Ael as well as the welcome random visitors over at MilPub.

And then there's the whole Facebook deal. I wish I could hang with Britt and talk about her photography, or enjoy Carrie being serious amid her twinados, or kid India about her roller-derby hip (which is something like "keeper's-hip" which is what woke me tonight...) or hear Linda read her poems or fuss over Emme. But they live in New York or Texas or Arizona or California.

The thing is that with Al Gore's great invention we can visit whilst never moving from out of our chairs so far apart.

And that's a pretty terrific thing.

It doesn't replace going to the Thirsty Lion with my pals Brent and Julie to cheer the Timbers and hang out, or going biking with Devora and Ed, or playing D&D with Will (I swear, we will, soon, I promise!) and talking Portlandia with Meghan...but I value my Internet friends in their own way; not more, not less, just in another key, a blue note - because I wish we COULD be physically nearby. But their songs are part of the complex music that is my life.

And - as much as I worry about what seems to be my problem with keeping close to people I like - it's a pretty damn good life, a rich, strange, and varied piece of music.

"Who smiled as she rode on a tiger"

Which sometimes delights me. But which also sometimes amazes me - how did I get here? How did I deserve this brilliant, lovely woman and these smart, funny kids? - and sometimes confounds me.

And sometimes disturbs me.

Because for all that I love my life; my family, my friends, my work, my home and the place I have found to live and, I hope, to die, here in Portland and the Northwest I adore...when I look at my country I feel positively feverish; a hot flush of anger followed by a shiver of despair.

I think everyone feels that they are living in turbulent times. Peace and rest are for the dead; living people are always troubled. But I look around me and what I see is very ominous.

I think my nation, as a nation and as a people, is not socially, economically, or politically sound. For most of my generation (I entered the Army the year that Ronnie Reagan was elected) we have been dismantling the America I grew up in.

I know that America was not a perfect thing. I know it had many flaws, although as a son of a relatively wealthy white couple I wasn't forced to confront most of them. But it had a lot of strengths, too.

For one thing, it was much more coherent that it is now. We had our wealthy, and they pretty much ran the place (after all, those well-to-do planters, merchants, and attorneys didn't meet in Philadelphia to create some sort of paradise for layabout and yahoos, right?) then as now. But they were less distant, and you could still make a pretty decent way in the world even if your parents weren't in the yacht club.

A college education was affordable, much more so than it is now (I just talked to a Facebook friend from college whose child is looking into attending the small private school we payed something like $40,000 - pretty big money in 1975 - to attend and is looking at something like a quarter of a million over four years) and with a much better chance of leading to a decent job.

And the notion that taxes were the price of civilization was much more widely accepted. I've watched that - beginning with Measure 5 here in Oregon in 1990 - entire concept fray as a third of my compatriots take on the Leona Helmsley Philosophy of Life, that taxes are for the Little People.

And, of course, there's the Lesser Depression.

I know a woman, one of my former community college students. Brilliant woman; bright, energetic, persistent, decent. She's done everything "right", played by all the rules. Worked her way through community college, cared for her parents, took on tons of student debt to get her bachelor's degree...and she's got nothing. No job, not a hint of a job, and she's running out of time, and hope.

There's a lot of others like her, and that's just not fucking right.

In a better country her problem, and the problems of the others like her, would be a firebell in the night. We'd be frantic to figure out why all these people couldn't work, weren't working. And we'd be doing something to change that.

But we're not.

At least our so-called "leaders" are not. Instead they're nattering about deficits and fretting about taxing the "job-creators"

"Job-creators". So where's Suzanne's job? Where are ALL the jobs we're so tenderly shielding your wallets from, plutocrats? Why are so many of the young people I know working at Burgerville? Why are so many of the storefronts I drive past vacant?

Are you seeing what's wrong with this picture, you puling fucktards, you entitled bastards, there in your legislative offices from Portland to Salem to Washington D.C.?

No. I don't get the sense they do.

"They returned from the ride with the lady inside"

The news of the police reduction of the various Occupy encampments has struck me harder than I thought it would.

For all that I think the Occupiers have failed, I had hoped that their presence would have done something to change the way we in this country are talking. I had hoped that it would have shown that the populists of the Left had some kind of common ground with the supposed populists - the "Tea Party" - of the Right. That between them there would be a hope of swinging the national consensus back towards the People.

From history I understand that the United States has always been a contest between Those Who Have and Those Who Want. From the Framer's ideal of the rule of the deserving through Jacksonians-versus-Jeffersonians through the Great Schism over slavery, the labor-against-robber-baron struggles of the late Victorian times, the Gilded Age that ended with the smashup of '29 and the rise of the New Deal my country has always been the battlefield of those who believe that the nation is ruled best when it rules for the humbler sort against those who believe that those who have deserve to rule over those who have-not.

And being emotionally as well as politically a sort of have-not I know which side I favor.

So as much as the Rise of Reaganism has been personally and politically painful for me I understand that it's just the latest veer of the political wind.

But lately that wind seems to bring me a wintery loss of hope.

Because it seems too much like first icy gust of the perfectly terrible storm. An economy that has been sustained for decades by bubbles has burst. Our tax and tariff policies - enacted by thirty years of politicians trained to believe that getting cheap plastic crap into the country was worth letting jobs flee the country - don't encourage domestic manufacture. The last "recoveries" have been largely without rebuilding the lost jobs. There are now too many Suzannes out there, desperate for work, burdened with debt.

And our politics has become perfectly toxic. Where once "conservatives" believed in things like low taxes and small government as philosophy they now believe in them as religion. There is no compromise in them; they want it all, and are willing to go to literally insane lengths to get it. And "liberals" who once believed in the ideals of this country as expressed in the great words of its birth certificates have lost their willingness to fight for those ideals.

We were seduced by our long post-WW2 domestic tranquility into thinking we'd outgrown the dirty deeds we did dirt cheap back in our younger days. But those ways were still there, and when the vermin we elected eleven years ago reintroduced us to them we turned out to be all to willing to accept them.

We aren't horrified by the idea of torturing our captives; we're debating it. We no longer retch at the idea of assassinating unwitting opponents in lands not our enemy; we ignore it. We don't recoil at the notion that we should be a land where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Or, at least, "we" - the bulk of us - don't do anything about it.

So it seems to me that we're sliding down into perilously bad economic times, times that have the potential to be bad for years, at the same time that our politics has become impotent to do so much as agree that those bad times are upon us, much less do anything to arrest the slide.


"And the smile on the face of the tiger".

So. Here I sit. Warm, at peace, well-fed, content. Surrounded by a houseful of peaceful sleepers (other than the little cat, who has climbed into my lap as I type this and is making it very difficult to write) in a silent, dark neighborhood that I love, in a city and a part of the world I cherish. Enmeshed by a web of friendships with good people; fine, decent, lovely people who make the world a better place merely by breathing in it. In a country richer, more powerful, grander than any that has risen glittering from the Earth since the mud-walls of Sumer and the marble columns of Rome.

And yet tonight I look out into the night and I feel the hope for my children, for my nation, for the next ten years fading away like the stars before the coming dawn.

Anamchara, on her Birthday

As when a beauteous nymph decays,
We say she's past her dancing days;
So poets lose their feet by time,
And can no longer dance in rhyme.
Your annual bard had rather chose
To celebrate your birth in prose:
Yet merry folks, who want by chance
A pair to make a country dance,
Call the old housekeeper, and get her
To fill a place for want of better:
While Sheridan is off the hooks,
And friend Delany at his books,
That Stella may avoid disgrace,
Once more the Dean supplies their place.

Beauty and wit, too sad a truth!
Have always been confined to youth;
The god of wit and beauty's queen,
He twenty-one and she fifteen,
No poet ever sweetly sung,
Unless he were, like Phoebus, young;
Nor ever nymph inspired to rhyme,
Unless, like Venus, in her prime.
At fifty-six, if this be true,
Am I a poet fit for you?
Or, at the age of forty-three,
Are you a subject fit for me?
Adieu! bright wit, and radiant eyes!
You must be grave and I be wise.
Our fate in vain we would oppose:
But I'll be still your friend in prose:
Esteem and friendship to express,
Will not require poetic dress;
And if the Muse deny her aid
To have them sung, they may be said.

But, Stella, say, what evil tongue
Reports you are no longer young;
That Time sits with his scythe to mow
Where erst sat Cupid with his bow;
That half your locks are turn'd to gray?
I'll ne'er believe a word they say.
'Tis true, but let it not be known,
My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown;
For nature, always in the right,
To your decays adapts my sight;
And wrinkles undistinguished pass,
For I'm ashamed to use a glass:
And till I see them with these eyes,
Whoever says you have them, lies.

No length of time can make you quit
Honour and virtue, sense and wit;
Thus you may still be young to me,
While I can better hear than see.
O ne'er may Fortune show her spite,
To make me deaf, and mend my sight!

("Stella's Birthday 1724" by Jonathon Swift)

Connecting in Real Life

Real-life Meetups Make the World a Better Place

When I first heard about "Meetup," I had no idea why or how it started, but it sounded like a neat idea. Then a few days before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, an email arrived from Meetup co-founder and CEO, Scott Heiferman. I was so impressed, I asked if I could share it — but in order for it to not get lost in a sea of 9/11 posts and reflections, I wanted to let some time elapse.

His message reminded me of two things: the tragedy of 9/11 changed life forever in the United States, but some goodness resulted; and the importance of real-life, or as my friend, Jake, likes to say — "tangible," connections need nurturing in order for each of us to thrive.

Scott's message:

_______________________________________________

Scott Heiferman, CEO
and co-founder, Meetup

Fellow Meetuppers,  

I don't write to our whole community often, but this week is special because it's the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and many people don't know that Meetup is a 9/11 baby. 

Let me tell you the Meetup story. I was living a couple miles from the Twin Towers, and I was the kind of person who thought local community doesn't matter much if we have the internet and TV. The only time I thought about my neighbors was when I hoped they wouldn't bother me.  

When the towers fell, I found myself talking to more neighbors in the days after 9/11 than ever before. People said hello to neighbors (next-door and across the city) who they'd normally ignore. People were looking after each other, helping each other, and meeting up with each other. You know — being neighborly.  

A lot of people were thinking that maybe 9/11 could bring people together in a lasting way. So the idea for Meetup was born: Could we use the internet to get off the internet — and grow local communities? We didn't know if it would work. Most people thought it was a crazy idea — especially because terrorism is designed to make people distrust one another.  

A small team came together, and we launched Meetup nine months after 9/11. 

Today, almost 10 years and 10 million Meetuppers later, it's working. Every day, thousands of Meetups happen. Moms Meetups, Small Business Meetups, Fitness Meetups... a wild variety of 100,000 Meetup Groups with not much in common — except one thing: 

Every Meetup starts with people simply saying hello to neighbors. And what often happens next is still amazing to me. They grow businesses and bands together, they teach and motivate each other, they babysit each other's kids and find other ways to work together.  

They have fun and find solace together. They make friends and form powerful community. 

It's powerful stuff.  

It's a wonderful revolution in local community, and it's thanks to everyone who shows up. 

Meetups aren't about 9/11, but they may not be happening if it weren't for 9/11.  

9/11 didn't make us too scared to go outside or talk to strangers. 9/11 didn't rip us apart. No, we're building new community together!  

The towers fell, but we rise up. And we're just getting started with these Meetups.

Scott Heiferman (on behalf of 80 people at Meetup HQ) 

New York City

September 2011

_______________________________________________

I spend more and more of each day on my computer and mobile devices. On a recent weekend away from the Internet (AT&T provided no service to the area) I traded off driving in order to use my iPhone until the moment I went off the grid. 

Scott's email is a reminder to all of us of the importance of our connections to others. This past month I made an effort to spend some quality time with friends, and really be present. Getting together face-to-face takes a lot more time and energy than firing off an email, making a phone call or posting a tweet, but for the added effort, the reward is huge.

I'm glad Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels exist because it means no one ever has to "feel" alone. But 10 years after 9/11, maybe it's time to venture out into the real world, take a chance and engage. 

Meetup seems like a really cool place to start.

_______________________________________________

Real face time with friends the past month:

Doug Plummer

Dave Morris

Sean Gardner

George Zaharoff, Piccolo Zaharoff, Cindy Chin

Linda Criddle

Kathy Gill (l.)

Chris Pirillo (l.) Chris Widener (r.)

Glen, Paula, and Vic

Chris Burget and Lori McNee

Padrino

"Father's Day"C'mon, really?

For all that this silly day is some sort of ridiculous scam, I have to say we had a pretty nice weekend. Saturday was rainy, so we went to our beloved Rose City Gymnastics for the open gym. The littles love the heck out of this place and so do we; they jump, balance, flip, and tumble, and we help where we can and applaud when we should. It's a terrific way to spend a drizzly Saturday, and for ten bucks it's quality fun!From there we went to our Powell's Books (with a stop at L'Arcs D'Or for the Boy, who luuurves him some Mickey D's fries. I hate to admit it, but I like 'em myself in all their greasy, salty goodness. No joy on my Chilton's Guide, tho, so it was home for a quick stop and then out to meet our friends Meghan and Will at the Saraveza "Bottle Shop and Pasty Tavern", and, sure enough, they had a bloody incredible selection of beers in the bottle, and the beef pasty was hot, rich, and good.From there we parted company, me for home with the kiddos, Mojo to the Expo Center to watch some kick-ass Portland Roller Derby sport. Little man's well-loved after-school-care teacher was there, skating under her nom-du-derby of Kickassidy, and tho Mojo said she did, indeed, kick ass it wasn't enough for her team to handle the Break-neck Betties, this year's Rose City Rollers champs.I stayed in with the kiddos; Peep played his "World of Tanks" MMO game, while Missy and I watched "My Little Pony". Yes.

I admit it, all right?

OK?

I fucking like "My Little Pony".

For one thing, the little buggers are hilarious. Here's Rarity (the "fashion-girly" pony) finding her own way of dealing with her captors, the nefarious Diamond Dogs. Oh, and extra points for the gratuitous David Bowie reference, by the way:The people responsible for the new "My Little Pony" clearly have no intention of playing it straight. So nearly every episode we watched - and that girl loves her some ponies, so we watched a LOT - had some sort of little sting in its tail, whether it was the defeat of the Diamond Dogs through power whining, or the utterly unhinged antics of Pinkie Pie, who is some sort of holy fool of a pony, a Loki and a Coyote of all things four-footed and cute. She's at her best when she sings or when she gets excited - she rockets around like a hamster huffing nitrous oxide. She's a freaking riot.See what I mean?

Anyway, we had fun, and so did Mojo.

This morning I got a Father's Day present from the kiddos, and Mojo cooked a yummy breakfast, and then I went to do my own Father's Day good deed for our friend Christine and her oldest son. He's fifteen and starting to get bit by the automobile bug. So we took Stinky the Honda Civic down there, did the brakes (a fun, easy sort of wrenching to start with) and then went for a stick-shift lesson on his quiet street. Young man did well, and we all had fun; Mojo and Christine chatting, E and I wrenching, Peep and his pal the Poet playing Xbox, and Missy cavorting in the floor-jack box and doing art projects.

After another quick trip home I went downtown with my friends Brent and Julie for dinner and the Timbers-Red Bulls match. Good food, exciting match (tho we should have made 3-1 stand up instead of letting the bastards escape with a point...) and then home to bed.So. Maybe this whole Father's Day nonsense isn't so bad after all.

As Pinkie Pie herself would say; ya gotta care.

Cool Things in North Portland; Marching

Busy weekend.I won't bother you with the playtime at the pool, or the lawnmowing (although the new electric mower kicks ass like a crazy monkey) or the terrific Saturday evening I spent with my friends Brent and Julie - and about 400 other Timbers Army supporters - down at the Thirsty Lion to sing for our Boys in Green (who came away from Qwest field with a hard-earned point thanks to Futty Danso and his brilliant header).

There's just too much there, and it's mostly home and kiddo stuff, anyway.

Nope, the highlight of the weekend was the 49th edition of the St. Johns Parade.

First, if I may, a bit of local history.

The only source I could find for the history of the Parade was the May issue of the "St. John's Review", a ridiculous local fishwrap news and advertiser that serves primarily as the ego-polisher of one Gayla Patton, who is the notional editor of the birdcage liner. Whenever I glace at it it seems composed largely of advertisements for local businesses and whatever oddball local news Gayla and her friends can drag in.A fellow named Speirs writes local history, including the piece from which I siphoned most of the following information.

Jim Speirs has never met anything made, born, or thought of after 1971 that he's enjoyed or approved of, and most of his writing is a slavering paean to the wonders of living in North Portland when men were men, women wore pumps and pearls, cars ran on real gas, and all these damn dirty hippies, ungrateful college punks, noisy negros, and scary wetbacks lived somewhere else.

But aside from that the man knows his North Portland history.According to Brother Speirs, three residents of the North Portland area, led by the manager of the local Savings and Loan, got the idea of a "a parade and neighborhood cleanup" some time in the late fall of 1962 or early winter of 1963. Apparently the notion was connected with removing "mounds of trash" which, again according to the redoubtable Mr. Speirs, "...was spewed throughout the neighborhood with careless abandon by private citizens and public municipalities..." (which is a pretty good sample of the guy's prose. I said the man knows his North Portland history - he just doesn't write it worth shit...).You see, since early in the 20th Century, St. Johns had the only landfill in Portland city and there seem to have been a lot more people who had trash to dump than had the buck to pay to put it in the landfill. So the northern end of the St. Johns peninsula, including what are today Chimney and Pier Parks, and several now-vanished locations such as the old Kaiser shipyard housing areas near Marine Terminal 4, had become, again in Jim Spiers words, "a huge mound of stinking trash".These North Portland civic boosters managed to get the then-Mayor Strunk (who lived up here, perhaps the last Mayor to do so) involved in the project, "Operation Cleanup", which consisted of a week in which the dump was free to all, and a concerted local effort to clean the illegal dump areas around St. Johns.According to Speirs, the entire business woke the rest of Portlanders up to the mess that was happening in St. Johns (he claims that garbage trucks came from as far as Kalama, Washington, to creep into the side-streets like North Taft to illegally dump their loads) and the resulting furor eventually resulted in closing the landfill.

It's now a nature trail.Seriously.

Anyway, the first one of these parades kicked off on May 25, 1963. I have no idea what it looked like or who marched in it. I suspect that it wasn't that different from this years, with various politicians, bands, civic organizations, car clubs, and rodeo queens.It was preceded by a "Talent Show.

And a "Cowboy Breakfast" served in the parking lot of the local Safeway.

I swear I am not making this up.

What the fuck this public feed had to do with cowboys I have no idea; there couldn't have been an actual cowboy within the municipal limits of St. Johns, and I doubt if the meal consisted of cowboy, either. I've been to that old Safeway, and other than smelling vaguely like a very old cow it wasn't remotely Westerny or cowboyish. Not so much as a cowgirl or cowkid. I don't get it.

We'll just have to chalk that one up to the Sixties' fascination with all things wild and woolly but they did serve a pantsload of hotcakes and sausage that morning.Thinking on the entire business I find it funny as hell that the entire idea of the Parade has absolutely nothing to do with...well, anything, really, other than cleaning up great heaping mounds of nasty shit. It neither commemorates nor celebrates anything, has no historical regional or local basis. Although it's sparsely advertised as the "first event of the Portland Rose Festival" I don't know of anyone who really knows this, or really cares much if they do. There's supposed to be a "theme", although nobody lining the street could tell you what it is or gives a shit about it.Come to think of it, tho, it's perfectly North Portland that the entire Parade is the brainchild of a freaking St. Johns Rotarian bankster who specialized in home loans for St. Johns. I especially love that he had a weekly radio show called, ingeniously, the "The Bob Hazen Show" (the man was a fucking marketing genius), which, according to our scribe Mr. Speirs "...broadcasted weekly programs extolling the desire and benefit of North Portland properties." I know the feeling; I've felt the desire of North Portland properties myself.The whole early Sixties Parade farrago and the stalwart worthies who ramrodded it sends our boy Spiers into an orgasmic paroxysm of suckupitude. I can't reproduce it; you have to hear it from the man himself;

"What these heroes of North Portland couldn’t have known is what an incredible gift they were giving to St. Johns. They couldn’t have dreamed that their efforts would forever change their community; that they were at the cutting edge of history and would help give residents a new sense of pride.

They never thought in terms of getting credit, nor did they think they were in any way special. They were giving to the point of exhaustion, selfless in their efforts, and unaware that the hours and days that they toiled over would forever and permanently change the face of St. Johns. Like so many heroes from other situations, these people simply shrugged their shoulders when you expressed disbelief at their efforts. They responded with words that are seldom used in today’s world...words like “it was the right thing to do,” or “North Portland needed our help,”...or something so jaw dropping and amazing as “anyone could have done it”...and they never failed to give praise and credit to others!"

Well, okay then.Now in all seriousness, Hazen, Dunn, Benshoof, the Levetons, and the other organizers of the original Parade did do a hell of a good thing; it sounds like North Portland really WAS a hell of a nasty mess back in the day, and they got up and helped make things better. Whether they used all those words seldom used in today's world...well, I guess we'll have to take our man's word on that. Home loans might just possibly have been involved.We may never know.But last Saturday's St. Johns Parade would probably have appalled them. The marching bands were all from local middle schools or even elementary schools, and their "uniforms" were matching T-shirts, at best. The Boy Scouts straggled along in a gaggling clump that would have had them and old Baden-Powell weeping bitter, bitter tears at the state of the former sons of Empire.

The straw skimmers and ice-cream suits of the Royal Rosarians, our very own Kiwanis-Lions-Rotary Club would have reassured them.But what they would have thought about the marching pregnant mommies from the Children's Relief Nurseryor the yoga float, or the piratesor the steampunks..?Well, the reassuring thing to me was the very slack, chaotic, unmilitary lassitude of it. There was no danger of being energized to go invade something or fight someone; this was as far from massed troop units and the regimented splendor of a military parade as can be imagined. Even the leading color guard was a packet of shambling sheriff's deputies who seemed consciously out of step, like children deliberately defying their father's attempts to make them walk like grownups.There may be many things about today that trouble and discourage us. We may have wars abroad and unemployment at home. We may be a society as divided by wealth, and ideals, as any time in our history.But, for me, to sit on the lopsided trash can savoring the fine greasiness of the Signal Station Pizza's bounty and to watch the richly odd, untameable, freakishly unique, foolishly serious little parade pass by was to feel myself sink deeply into my community, into the workaday hours that are St. Johns, that is the North End, that is Portland, that is my home.And was to realize that this is my home. That for all the many lands and many seas I have passed over, all the places I have lived and the people I have lived them with, it is here that I have come home to; here is my heart of rest.