Look Away

The electronic yelping of the alarm brings me to full wakefulness in seconds.

But it takes minutes for me to remember where I am; the darkness around me is without feature, and for a moment all I understand is that the bed is not my own, and I am briefly panicked by the strangeness of the place I am in.Slowly light seeps into the darkness. I remember that I am in the Sandpiper Motor Inn in the small Oregon coastal town of Port Orford. I am the road to a job in the far southwest of Oregon.

It is well before sunrise on a Thursday morning. My head is clothy from bad sleep and my ass still sore from the five-hour drive the preceding afternoon and evening. And I have to be back on the road in less than an hour; I still have almost an hour to drive to my work.I'm here to look over the property of someone whose home - some sort of home, possibly a rental property or a summer house - has been damaged by some sort of landslide the previous weekend. It's business as usual for me; this sort of natural hazard is much of how I make my living.

For the homeowner it's a disaster, a nightmare.

For me, it's a living.

Sometimes we make our bread from the heartbreak of others.

In some ways Oregon reminds me of some parts of the Third World I've visited more than many of the other United States.

We have only one real "metropolis" here; you're either in the capital - in Portland - or you might as well be in Siberia. The further you get from Pioneer Square in Portland the poorer and more neglected much of the land becomes.

By the time you get to the furthest parts of the state; the stony deserts of Malheur County, the high dry hills of the Wallowas and the valley of the Snake River, and the rainforest serpentine mountains of Curry County, my destination today, you're either in the most spectacular of untrammeled wild places or the nastiest sorts of rural squalor.You can celebrate that or detest it; here in Oregon you cannot escape it.

The sky above Port Orford is still dark, but with the vague lightening that heralds the pre-dawn. A soldier would call it the barest edge of Before Morning Nautical Twilight, BMNT. The streets of Port Orford are quiet and still wet with the heavy coastal dewfall.The thing I always notice about the south Oregon coast is old.

Everything seems old, the places, and the people, because southwestern Oregon has very little for a young man or woman to stay for. There is no industry so a living is farming, logging, or fishing, the same triad that the first white people to these lands lived off.

But the land is mostly too hilly or too stony to farm, the valley floors too small to crop efficiently. Much of southwestern Oregon is underlain by the green serpentine rock that softens into a thin, meager soil that grows little and that sickly.

The timber is largely played out, or locked up in big corporate lands. The fishing gets poorer every season.

Little other than retirement or tourism - both pastimes for the old or the bored - still makes you a living down here. Mind you, the coastal tribes' casinos seem to be busy. I'm not sure if that falls under retirement or recreation. The number of fat recreational vehicles in the parking lots suggest the former. The Mill Casino; Land of the Lost Social Security check.

All the morning trade in the little coffeehouse is drawing Social Security for damn sure, other than the barista and I, and she seems less concerned about that than I am.

Her coffee is hot and caffeinated and that's really all that you can say for it. The smoked salmon in the cream cheese spread is rich bur sadly, it's probably from Norway. The great local runs fished out almost half a century ago.

I stop to snap a picture of the sunrise over Battle Rock. More than twenty years ago I stopped here on a sunny summer day, the first moment I put a foot on the ground of the place I have called home since then. There was an errant gray whale arcing from the shallow water of the bay, and the woman who was then my wife was charmed by the dark hills, the gunmetal ocean, and the great sea animal that seemed as old as both of them.I drink my coffee, and think of those times and these, and watch the sky pale to the southwest.

It's still barely dawn as I drive down the coast southwards through the rind of Coos County. Highway 101 is empty, the sky slowly paling above me but both the western horizon and the hills of the Coast Range to the east dark with lingering night.

I've never driven the Coast Highway at night without feeling the ocean over my western shoulder. Its not so much a genuine sensation as much as the thought of that immense, restless thing beginning there and extending so far away. Although I know where it is and what it is the Pacific Ocean always feels like it's looming far over my head in the night sky; not fearsome, really, but vast, endlessly vast, and in its great size a trifle frightening like a half-anticipated shiver at listening to a well-known ghost story.The little town of Ophir isn't really a town at all but an idea, the notion of a settlement now occupied by nothing but some sort of ramshackle store. Which appears to be closed and to have been closed for some time.I spend the morning doing what I love; studying the geology and landforms of a new place, trying to read the riddle in the rocks, the soils, the slopes, and the works of man that have so violently collided with them.The homeowner is unlikely to be pleased.

But I couldn't be happier. This is why I do what I do, this is why I love what I do - because it sets my mind, and my hands, and my knowledge against the bones of the Earth. I fell like I could sink into the soil and rock beneath my boots and hear the song the moving tectonic plates sing to each other as they pass, too faint for human ears, too slow for human lives, too huge for human strength.

About midday I get back in the truck to find something to eat and a cell tower in Gold Beach. I spent several weeks there back in the late 1990s, working on an ODOT contract. The little town has come up somewhat since then, when it was a hardscrabble coastal town in a very hard country. The stores look a little more prosperous, the people a little less straightened.But the Verizion cell service is out. Again. The locals accept this without so much as a real cuss word; the problem must not be that unusual. The illusion of connection with the settled parts of Oregon is so convincing that it comes as a shock to realize just how isolated this distal end of Curry County really is.

On the way back to my worksite I round a corner and, for just a moment, I tap the brake in fear that one of the local housecats has misjudged its moment to cross the road.But just for a moment. Because there is nothing domesticated in the muscular angularity of the animal that jolts to a stop along the road edge. The stilty hindquarters points up the stub where the long kitty-tail should be. The way it moves is pure wilderness in motion; after that initial moment's confusion even I, who have never seen a wild bobcat, couldn't confuse this a animal with the familiar indoors pussnums.

The bobcat shoots my truck a look that says without words that it has no use for me or my ugly human thing, and then it is gone.

By the time I finish up my reconnaissance the winter shadows are getting long. The little valley is already shaded, and the welcome February sunshine lingers only on the topmost slopes. I slowly drive north again, through the non-town of Ophir and back to the coast highway, heading for home.Humbug Mountain challenges the slow wintertime rollers of the North Pacific like a spiked fist slammed down on the coast, her forests fierce with the twisted krummholz fashioned by the storms of January and March.Deep in the shadowed side the ridiculous gimcrack thunder lizards of Prehistoric Gardens are frozen in their glass-eyed roars; who the hell really visits this curiosity, I wonder, other than in a spirit of giddy mockery?But well before you encounter this silly faux-fierce sideshow you've unknowingly passed by the real terror of the coastal mountains basking peacefully in the afternoon sun; the Arizona Inn landslide, one of the largest of all Oregon's coastal mass movements, 32 acres of massively complex interleaved failure that has moved Highway 101 at times as much as 25 feet seawards and down.Too large to go around, too immense to control, the engineers and geologists of Oregon have installed miles of drains to dewater this monster and slow its inevitable creep towards the sea that relentlessly gnaws away at its toe.

There is no victory against this landslide. All we can do is hope to slow its motion, to postpone for another day the tearing and shearing of the coast highway. And in that, perhaps, is enough of a triumph. Gravity and geology have not been tamed. They will never be a house pet. But perhaps its enough to have sent them back into the dark woods to await another day.The long coast road spools out ahead of me, five hours or more. There is chowder and dark beer waiting for me in Newport, and a silent house where my beloveds sleep at the end of the drive.And above the vermillion sky the bright unfixed point of Saturn shines down on the unstill Pacific and the darkening purple of the dreaming hills beyond.

Some days...

...it just doesn't get any better.
Can you tell?

And there's even more today. Well, hurrah!

Morning comes too early

We really did have a lovely Sunday evening, and Mojo and I had a nice time together after the kiddos went to bed early (finally!) so I was on track for a pretty damn good weekend when some time around 1:20 a.m. I must have rolled the wrong way and managed to yank on the big nerve that's caught up in my arthritic left hipjoint.

Here's the thing; I've lost about 20-30 pounds - I'm as lean and fit as I've been in years - but that doesn't seem to make a lick of difference. My hips, both hips, now, are utterly wrecked, and they both contribute a degree of discomfort unlike anything I've ever experienced.

Doc Le has provided some pretty effective pain pills, but whatever this sciatic nerve thing is that is going on in my left leg cuts through them effortlessly. I rolled out of the bed and took one at 1:20 and then spent the rest of the night trying to get back to sleep without success. There was just no way to lie or sit without pain.

Finally at 5:30 I went out to the couch and got about an hour of sleep in a sort of semi-sitting position. But had to get up to go to work, so to say I'm working on some pretty decent sleep-debt is putting it mildly.

And the thing is all the sources I've read suggest that this - if it is some sort of sciatic-nerve compression related to the arthritic degeneration of my lower back and hip - has very poor resolution regardless of the type of intervention. Apparently surgery has better results in the short run but by 3-5 years is no better than PT, chiro, massage, or just drugging yourself stupid.

Again, I'm trying not to whine. But it's hellishly frustrating to have depended on my body to do what I told it to for fifty years and have it suddenly quit on me.

I think I'll go have a drink now, thanks.

A crown and 205

Finally!

I've been stuck at about 206-207 pounds for a week now, and yesterday I got on the scale and I've broken that weight all the way down to 205. Yay!The only downside is I can't have a candy bar to celebrate.

By way of contrast, here's Missy's friend Barbie, who has never had a weight problem, the skinny bitch.Missy was taking pictures of her Barbies and managed to capture this image of the loneliness of beauty, a crown without a princess;I think the girl has a gift for this photography stuff, neh? So here's the little fairy princess her ownself complete with her own crown - certainly she understands the danger of beauty and the beauty of danger.That's it - just a little bragging and some Barbies. I warned you that this would be a daddy blog every now and then, didn't I?

Oh, and I wanted to post something about this whole "losing weight" thing and the one real oddity I've noticed. But that'll be for later.

Blind Spot

I deleted a post today.

That's something I don't know if I've ever done in the history of this blog, and it bugged me enough to make me want to write about it.

Yesterday I wrote two posts about "Veteran's Day", one of which is still up, the Sassoon quote, and unexceptional as such. Just the usual sort of thing I think about on these "God and the soldier we adore..." sorts of "holidays".

But the other was a rumination on the lot of women in war, and made particular mention of the horrors visited on the women of Germany in 1945. And the very first and only comment took me to task, implicitly, for being a traitorous Hun-lover and explicitly for not mentioning all the nasty things that the Nazis did in Poland and Russia and the fascist Japanese did in China, the Philippines, Honolulu and Wake (Wake?) (and, rather ridiculously in my opinion, that the Al Qaeda thugs did in New York City - and the Pentagon, which is like giving the 8th Air Force shit for bombing Luftwaffe HQ - as if the murderous individual acts of nasty criminals were the equivalent of international war) along with the bad stuff that happened to "enemy" women.

Well, that set me back on my heels.

And I re-read that post. And, sure enough, I did mention lots of places that the U.S. Army had fought in WW2, Vietnam, and the modern Middle East. Well, along with Brazzaville in the Congo and Coventry. And Hue, where the atrocities were visited upon the women of Hue by the communist invaders during Tet). But the bulk of the places I talked about were where the women of the enemies of our country had been subjected to atrocity.

And no question that while the hurricane of rape visited on Germany in 1945 was and is unequalled in modern history (the Germans themselves butchered their way through western Russia and the Ukraine but there is and never has been any suggestion of the sort of universal raping that was unleashed by the Soviet support troops in eastern Germany in the last year of WW2) overall the savagery visited on women in China and the other southeast Asian conquests by the Japanese Army, and in places like Poland and Russia by the German is orders of magnitude more bestial than anything the U.S. has visited on our enemies.

Was I, then, being overly harsh on my own nation for our conduct in war?

And, as I re-read that post, I think I was.

And rather than try and revise it or repair it I simply killed it.

Because what I would have ended up doing was trying to one-up the dead and maimed, trying to compare and contrast one atrocity against another, and that's beyond vile.

That's just despicable.

If any one thing has sickened me about war it is the unquenchable human need to trump the "enemy" suffering with one's own. You see it at it's worst in the eastern Levant, where the mutual atrocities visited on one anothers' innocents by Israelis on the one hand and the congeries of Arab states and entities on the other is endlessly paraded about to try and top the other side's grievances. So the dead of Deir Yassin or Gaza are used to try and justify the dead in a bus station bombing in Jerusalem or the kibbutz kids killed by Syrian shells or Hezbollah rockets.

All that is very human, and I am no less tempted than any other human, though I try to fight down the caveman instinct to simply assume that "Him hurt me because him bad". Some enemies ARE "bad" - the Nazis were as "bad" as any human ideal ever was. But many are just that - enemies because we want something they have, or because they want something we have, or just because we BOTH want something and can't agree to share it.

But I wondered...do I have a blind spot to "enemy" atrocities? In all my attempts to "see both sides" do I come down harder on the evil done in my name, in my country's name, than TO my country and my countrymen? Am I a secret traitor, a Hun-lover, a terrorist-hugger?

And I had to sit and think about that for a long, long time.

And here's what I think.

I think I AM harder on my own country, on my fellow soldiers, than on our enemies. I think I do stress the shame we do more than the shame done to us.

And if that makes me a treacherous enemy-embracer, then I'm OK with that.

And here's why.

Because here's the thing; our enemies often ARE our enemies because they believe and do some pretty vile and despicable things. Our history is as blotted as any nation's - we pretty much screwed the natives, and the Mexicans in the 1840's, and the Hawaiians and Filipinos in the 1890's, and the folks in Latin America pretty much all the time.

But we've also fought on the side of the angels, and more often than many nations. The fascist Japanese, the Nazi Germans, the communist Soviets or North Koreans or Chinese, the takifiri Islamists - those groups and the people who belong to them explicitly reject the notions that all men are created equal. That there should be liberty and justice for all. That people should be free from religious tyranny, from organized oppression. All the things that MY country stands or says it stands for, and I take my country at its word. And in fighting them we ARE doing a good thing in the larger sense.

Their acts, and those of their armed forces, are consistent with their beliefs; they did, and do, vile and inhumane things to weak people, women, and children, that they could have spared had they chosen to do so. That they did not disgusts and angers me, but neither surprises nor enrages me because it betrays my beliefs. I believe that those systems are vile and by their actions those who do their work confirm my beliefs.

At the same time I am proud of the promise of my own country, so when I, or others of my own breeding, do things that don't live up to that pride I am ashamed. And that shame brings with it rage at myself, for not standing up against those acts, or at those who committed them.

That is unfair, in that I am holding my own to higher standards than I hold my enemies. But I believe that in this sense our Constitution and our announced values ARE a suicide pact; if we fail to uphold them, if we judge ourselves not by our own professed values but by our merits relative to the worst beliefs we can think of, then we have indeed committed suicide. We have killed the best and the most hopeful within ourselves and our nation. I hold my nation to a higher standard as I would hold myself to a higher standard, or my own children. I would be more merciless to myself or my son for cheating, or lying, or stealing, or killing, than I would a stranger.

So if we, my country and I, kill innocents, even in error; if we torture our helpless chattels; if we seize and hold even the guilty without trial or, worse, without any sort of accountability or law whatsoever; if we do worse than we could because others have done even worse then we are guilty of not just crime but mistakes. We have made the fundamental error of losing our and our nation's ideals.

And that matters.

Because the United States is nothing if NOT an ideal. We are not Germany or France or Cambodia, a nation because of the language we speak or the way we look or the place we live in or the God we worship. We come from many places, speak many tongues, think and worship and believe many different things.

What ties us into one nation, indivisible, is the beliefs in the great words written into our national birth certificate; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

And if we forget that and become the sort of people we have chosen for our enemies and visit among them the sorts of cruelty they would visit upon us, then we are, indeed, in danger of perishing from the Earth. And while I live, I will resist that to the extent I can. And therefore I see no value in judging my acts, and those of my fellow veterans, by the worst mankind has to offer.

So rather than argue who was "worse" I deleted the first Veterans Day post. The issue of that post was the suffering of innocents, and I see no value in judging the suffering that my nation has wrought in my name by contrast to the suffering that despotisms and degraded fanatics have wrought in the name of their beliefs. The only standard I accept is the standard my nation has set for itself. If you choose another, that's your business. Start your own blog and advocate for it, or join the gang over at Powerline or Little Green Footballs; they seem to love the "more rubble, less trouble" ideal of foreign relations.

I will continue to use this space to insist that we hold ourselves to the standards I believe we stand for; that ALL men - and women - are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even those whose leaders would attack us and deprive us of those rights. Even our enemies. And to criticize myself and my country if we choose to take the low, dirty road because it's easier. That if we are to be defeated, let it be by the enemy's arms and not by the self-murder of our own ideals and the promise that has the potential to make our nation a truly pridesome thing among the nations.

And if this be treason, I will make the most of it.

Far Overhead

The date of my arrival on Earth as an individual was marked, according to Wikipedia, by "...panic overt(aking) the American public, which created an enormous sense of vulnerability regarding the United States' ability to defend its territory. Adding to this fear was the element of surprise...which left the American public in what was observed as a “wave of near-hysteria"

I wasn't responsible. Really. I wasn't.

It was this guy...

"Простейший Спутник-1"

...better known as Sputnik.

Funny, in a way; the birth of the Space Age (or at least the Space Race) the same day as my own. And here we are just over half a century later with the Space Age reduced to a sagging badly-maintained space station loafing about in high Earth orbit with no particular purpose and nothing to look forward to except obsolescence.

I hope this is not a personal commentary as well.

Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce called Sputnik's radio signal "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority."

No one ever described me quite so poetically.

Well, damn.

My Soviet counterpart lasted 90 days. The radio transmitter fell silent in early November when the batteries went dead. The satellite's low orbit decayed through the autumn of 1957 until on 4 JAN 58 the object re-entered Earth's atmosphere and was consumed in a fire that probably lasted no more than a few seconds.

The reentry is not reported to have been observed.And here I still am.

Little PS-1 might just have been responsible for much of the modern world. It stunned the U.S. public and jump-started much of the Fifties and Sixties science boom in my country. The Wiki entry says that Sputnik-1 "...would eventually invent the Internet, upon which this page is published, NASA, and an increase in U.S. government spending on scientific research and education. One consequence of the Sputnik shock was the perception of a "Missile Gap." This was to become a dominant issue in the 1960 Presidential campaign"

Which leads me back to last night.

As I was driving home I got to thinking.

Who am I?

What am I doing, and why?

When I was a child I dreamed like a child. Except I dreamed that I would shake the world, that I would leave a name that would echo down the years with a grandeur and a whispering, like Hulagu Khan with his pyramid of skulls.

And then I grew up into the real world.

But when I was a younger man I still had at least some pretensions to playing a part on the world's greater stage. Not inventing NASA or the Internet, perhaps, but as a soldier I was involved in events that changed the way the world wagged, for better or worse. I went places and did things that, in their small way, impacted those places and things. I had notions about the world and my ability to affect it, and those notions, while exaggerated, made me at least believe that I was changing the world and the lives of the people in it.I spent a moment yesterday reading about the people who are "occupying Wall Street". For all that I think they are a quixotic and forlorn hope they are, at least, acting out their beliefs and those beliefs - that my country is and continues to be fallen into the hands of malefactors of great wealth and that only by prying that wealth from the levers of power will there be any chance that the Lesser Breeds such as I and my family will have any chance at having a say in our own futures beyond mere random chance - while my part is to sit and read about them and then go home to my dinner.

I think about myself today; slowed, domestic, exercising myself in the public fora through nothing more than this pallid electronic medium...and contrast that with the younger man in his jump boots and aid bag.

I think about joining that group in Zucotti Park, about more; about the kind of men who fought the company thugs and the National Guards for the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day, who fought the FBI and the state troopers for civil rights, who fought the British soldiers for liberty and law.

And immediately think; but what about my family?

Who will work to pay off their mortgage, their schooling, their food? Who will help them with their homework, find their stuffed pets (my son just awoke crying that his small stuffed manatee had swum away somewhere in the bedding. At eight years old. At two in the morning. Sheesh.), who will help my bride through her transition to her next job if I am arrested, if I lose my work fighting the banksters...if I'm suddenly not there, who will be?

Thus does domesticity - and my own fears - make a coward of me.

Don't get me wrong. I've had a hell of a fucking good half-century-and-four. I've lived well and foolishly, loved badly and immoderately, sampled life here and there and liked the taste of it. I've seen the sun come up over the Red Sea and set into the mountains of Panama. I've caressed the naked skin of the woman who has borne our children, and felt the fear of violent death and the elation of its passing-by.

And I have, I hope, more yet to come; pride, and passion, the work of helping my children to grow strong and good, in fighting (still...) in what ways I can to make my house, my city, my nation, and my world more honorable, more equitable, more honest, and more realistic places than they might be without my mite's worth.

But I wouldn't be human, and I wouldn't be who I am, if I didn't regret not being...more than I am.That I didn't invent the Internet or pile up my pyramid of skulls no longer troubles me.

But still, in these quiet early morning hours, I can't keep myself as I sit at my darkened desk in my silent house from straining, just a bit, to hear the faint beep-beep-beep in the night sky far overhead.

Straightedge

I'm 54 today.

It's just another day - I was up in the West Hills drilling a soil boring this morning, stopped by the shop around noon (I did treat myself to a sushi stop for lunch...) and then legged it across the street to drop in on of our construction projects for a check. At the moment I'm taking a break from writing up a soils report to post this.

I'll be back later tonight with some more reflections on twoscore-years-and-fourteen, but right at the moment, thinking back over the people I've been and the place I've gone, y'know what I was reminiscing about?

Straight razors.

It started with a brief visit to my friends Maia and Q here, where our heroine and her husband Mike visit an old-school barber shop in their home in Colorado. As part of the treatment the barber gets out the straight razor to shave Mike, and I was instantly transported back to the Division barbershop on Ardennes Street back in the Eighties.Because back in the day I still had hair, and I got a big kick out of getting a flat-top #1 cut that made me look the spit of my old man in his Navy crackerjacks back in 1944. And the best part of the whole gig was the big finish, where the grouchy old Army barber got out the shaving gear.

He would heat up the lather and strop the straight razor, and then it was all hot shave cream from ear to ear and down the back of my neck.

But before I could relax into the smooth heat he was there with the blade.

There was always something electrifying about the kiss of cold steel along the back of my neck. Maybe it was just the zing of cold after heat...or maybe it was knowing that one slip and things would get messy real quick. But I loved the clean feeling it produced, laying my nape and sidewalls down to the skin.

He never did slip, and I always tipped him high and walked out feeling like a real hard boy with my beret pulled down to show off the high whitewalls.

Well, time and genes have combined to give me whitewalls all the way up, these days. And I do my own trimming at home with an electric razor. I never found a barber outside the service who used the old straight blade after I left the active service. One of the barbers trimming my kiddo's hair told me that it's now against most state regulations, what with fears of AIDS and other blood-borne diseases.

Too bad.

Funny, all the things you do and those you enjoy; the cold steel shave up the back of the neck would seem to be an odd thing to miss. And yet, of all things, I do.

Nightfall

I'm sitting in the cab of the truck getting paid for sitting in the cab of the truck.

Not precisely. The part I get paid for happens every ten minutes for three hours, when I get out and read the water level in the plastic pipe stuck into the hole my drillers ground into the cobbly soil of Southeast Portland last night. The water is leaking sullenly into the ground, apparently no happier than anyone else in the neighborhood that it is slowly sinking into the outer southeast.

So I have a lot of time to get paid for sitting, or reading, or just watching the passing show as the warm late September afternoon fades into a chill early autumn night.

Southeast 122nd Avenue east of the Interstate is a glum assortment of run-down houses, shabby apartments, sagging shops and, increasingly the past several years, vacant storefronts. Many of the signs - almost all of the newer signs - are in a Babel of non-English languages; Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish. None of them look very excited about being here.

This is no boulevard of broken dreams. This is where you live if your dream never was, or will never be.

The lot I'm parked in was a filling station once upon a time. The pumps are long gone, the tanks yanked, only the old service island canopy remains a tattered and peeling reminder of the time when the southeast was the newest part of Portland, our eastern frontier, creeping out into the woodlots and farm fields of eastern Multnomah County.

But it's also a reminder that Portland has always shoved its unloved and unwanted out east in front of it, the dirty foam edge of a slow-moving wave. The Russian kids working the tire store that occupies the old filling station are just the latest detritus. I saw them in the classroom at the community college where I taught bewildered by their incomprehension and sinking in debt, in the down-at-the-heels East Portland parks playing soccer in their tight shirts and leather, smoking in the drizzling rain.

I wonder if they think they're in the Land of Opportunity?

I wonder if they care?

A highballing Portland police car speeds down 122nd to the bar on the second corner down with a fire truck close behind. The casual anger in the cop's body as he goes inside says a lot about what he expects to meet down here, as do the bored looks on the fire crew as they follow him; another barstool crash down at the Peanut Farm.

Another night of hard drinking amid hard lives.

They barely give the pregnant girl in the parka jacket and miniskirt a look, even though the wheeled suitcase she's tugging along, the tiny dolly wheels skittering and hopping over the rough pavement, is almost as heavy as she is.

Three kids, out way too late on a Thursday night, dodge past all of them in a little flock as noisy and heedless as starlings.

I sit in the truck cab with my reading glasses perched idly on my nose and look out on this part of my country, my home city, like a lost tourist in a land as alien as an Asian desert and as bleak.

The Dealer Folds

The ortho and I both looked at the black-and-white picture on the wall.

"So you can see the deterioration here, and here. Both the condyle and the acetabulum are involved. There's just not a lot left to work with."

I could see that. Yes.

Last year I began to notice some difficulty reaching my right foot.

Nothing sudden, or startling. But it got difficult to bend my right leg at the hip, and I found that I had to perform an odd contortion of waist and knee to do simple things like tie laces or trim nails.

Have I mentioned that I have this knee problem? I think so. It's my parent's fault. Really; I have a congenital knee malformation called "patellar subluxation"; my kneecaps look outwards, are turned towards the outside of my legs. This has caused the outside of the kneecap to wear on the outside of the knobby parts of the leg bones (the condyles) and has reduced the bony parts of my knees to a pretty tattered state. I can jog briefly, and walking is usually fine, but running more than a short distance will result in a sleepless night of sore knees and Motrin.

So I thought this might be some sort of complication from the knees. Until this winter, when the stiffness and loss of range of motion began to be accompanied by pain in my right hip.

It started as just a soreness after a hard day at work, or playing soccer with the kiddos. But by May it was a constant soreness than ranged from a barely detectable hum when I sat quietly or walked slowly to a startling sort of wince if I tried to run or kick.

Finally in June I went to see my internist.

Like every American today I can't just "go to the doctor". I knew perfectly well that I had some sort of skeletal problem; likely related to age, hard, use, and deterioration (which didn't stop me from occasionally indulging in lurid nightmares about bone cancer or some other gawdawful fright) but clearly beyond the purview of a general practitioner.

But - also like every American today - my medical life is controlled by a massive bureaucracy. Not a government agency that I could petition for relief, but an insurance company that operates like a Sumerian god; opaque, dictatorial, and random.

So to appease the Gods of Blue Cross off to Dr. Le I went.

I love Le. She's this shrewd, no-nonsense character that talks like a B-girl from a Vietnam movie.

"What you do? Mess this up?" she said, poking me in the hip. I winced.

"Yeah, doc. I think I got a bum part and I need to go to Third Shop for an overhaul. You know a good bone wrench?"

"You go see Doctor Langwire. He hip man, Portland Ortho. He check you out."

Sure enough.

So with my all-important referral slip in hand, I spent a sunny afternoon having my leg manipulated by a physician's assistant and getting an x-ray. Which the doctor and I were both looking at now.

"If you were 75 or 80 there would be no question." the orthopod looked me up and down, "I'd be recommending a new hip. Yours is among the worst I've seen, and that includes men in their nineties."

"But..." I already knew the but, having read the little "Total Hip Replacement" brochure, the one with the little old man on the cover.

"Hmm. Yes. But the level of activity possible with a replacement hip would be very restrictive for an active man in his fifties." The doctor paused and looked at the x-ray again. "And there's the issue of functionality; a replacement today would probably mean another before you were seventy. And second replacements tend to have complications, especially if the person, again, intends to remain active."

Complications.

Yeah, I'd read that, too. Hip replacements aren't what you tend to think; you don't go skiing the next week. They're really quite fragile, you have to be extremely careful about things like inverting your leg or the thing will dislocate. Dislocations run about 5-6%, and, remember, we're talking mostly about old gaffers in the seventies throwing a hipjoint out shuffling down the grocery aisle to pick up some stool softener.

"Honestly, doc; what would you do."

To give him credit, I think he really thought about it.

"Well, I'd lose some weight". We both looked down at the thickness around my middle. I like to think of myself not so much as...fat...but as "dense". But I'm fat; I've lumbered around 230-240 for the past decade, ever since my knees really packed in.

"And I think I'd exercise to the best degree possible. And I think I'd try and keep my original hip as long as I could. Because when it becomes too much to go on, you're going to lose a great deal of what you can do now, and never recover that. You will be able to walk again without pain, though. Which at that point might be worthwhile."

I thanked the man, and walked out of the big, airy office in the old Pearl District brickstone building, and got in the work truck, and sat behind the wheel for a long, long time.


I don't want to make some sort of big tragedy out of this. I can do most things just fine. I have a terrific job, a wonderful family, I make a good life in a city I love. If you pressed my I'd have to say that the past nine years - my married life with Mojo and our kids - have been the best years of my life.

But my body is starting to fail me, and that's never happened before.

And I will admit; I abused the hell out of it, me, and the U.S. Army.

I threw it around, and piled heavy loads on it and told it to go past the point where it told me it was ready to stop. I made it bend and stretch in ways it didn't like, and hurled it against hard objects until it protested by swelling up and whining creakily. In my twenties, thirties, and forties I walked and ran further and faster than most Americans do in a lifetime; I climbed everything from hills to mountains, lifted and carried, squat, knelt, and sprawled. I played contact sports for my own entertainment that towards the end would see me with ice packs on both knees.

But every time I asked it to work or play for me, my body always responded. Not always gracefully - in fact, I'm to grace what Republicans are to compassion, an utter stranger - but always.

And now it's starting to just quit.

The doc was right. I'm not ready to become an old man, shuffling along at a slow walk for exercise, worrying constantly about making a sudden turn or sharp movement that will produce the instant screaming agony of a dislocated hip.

But the options are not good.

There's something called a "hip resurfacing" that offers a better joint architecture and a lowered chance of dislocation, and I need to look into it. And I'm not bragging myself when I say I have a pretty high threshold of pain, and I think I can go a fair bit before it becomes too bad for me to take.

Oh. And the last time I weighted myself I was down to 217.

So that's something.

But the damn plain fact is that I've been dealt a pretty shitty hand. I'm a 53-year-old man with the right hip of a sickly seventy-year-old. There's nothing I can do about it, and I can't even really whine about it, since it gave me a better run than most Americans before abuse and my fat ass packed it in.

It's the hand I have, and I just have to play it out.

But I don't have to like it.

And I don't.

Home from the Hill II Electric Boogaloo

The house is silent except for the rattle of rain on the barrel-lid outside the front window.

Portland has resumed it's autumnal grays and browns, albeit with the lingering savannah-yellow color of the late summer lawns. You should know that a green lawn in Portland is reserved for the enclaves of the feckless Well-To-Do; a sturdily hip urban Stumptowner takes pride in his or her sere expanse of waterless yard as evidence of an unshaken commitment to conservation in the Mediterranean climate of northwest Oregon. Let Laurelhurst and Bridlemile remain green through September; in North Portland and Sellwood we stand condescendingly amid our own miniature African veldt, humorlessly proud of our own superior ecology.I'm home again from a week working out of town.There really is something to be said for a home; not just a living space, but a well-loved surrounding that enfolds people, objects, and activities that define the place you are most defined by.

Or perhaps it is a facet of maturity. I spent most of my young adulthood in a search for the exotic. I find that on the descending branch of adulthood I enjoy the familiar as much or more than the novel.The wild land of the Olympic Peninsula is a stark magnificence. There is no gentleness, no softness there; the deep tangle of forest and brutal vertiginous mountains glower rather than beckon. Even as a place for work they are a beautiful surrounding, and I enjoyed my time there this week, seeing new places and doing new things.But it is now, in the quiet gray of dawn, with my family asleep behind me, that I find my heart at peace and my soul content.

No, I don't want a little cheese...

Can you believe the summer is almost over?Me, neither.



Part of it is because it's been crazy busy. And another is because it arrived late, so it only seems like we've had an actual month or so of summer.It's been strange, too, in that although I don't get the sense that my company is all that busy in terms of actual work coming through the door (we're still taking really small crappy jobs we would have passed on, for one thing) but I've been working crazy hours. Out at five, back at nine, that sort of thing. Lots of dirt-nannying, which pays great but can be absolutely insane. Let me give you an example.



We have a job in downtown Portland doing a four-story building (so the foundation loads are fairly respectable) and the site is a typical inner-urban Portland city block, meaning that it's been built and re-built over the past 100 years and most of the crap that came from the buildings that were demolished earlier was just hucked into whatever convenient hole the laborers could find. So there's anywhere from two to about seven or eight feet of really nasty fill on the top. Brick, concrete, glass, dimension lumber, fly ash, charcoal...you name it, it's in there. Plus the stuff has a nasty habit of hiding open voids underneath a veneer of soil, a perfect footing-trap designed to produce ugly post-construction settlement.We found all this junk when we did the soil investigation and my engineer, not surprisingly, recommended that the contractor hog it all out and build on the native.



The contractor, also not surprisingly, is being pushed by the owner to minimize the overexcavation, so his superintendent is trying to cut back on the amount of this jumky fill we take out.



Completely unsurprisingly this leads to a certain tension between the general contractor and me, even though we both supposedly work for the owner.So the other day the excavator dug out one of the foundation footings and there in the bottom of the hole, sticking out of what otherwise would be native-soil-looking yellow silt, is a head-sized chunk of asphalt. Unmistakeable, just-pried-out-of-your-driveway asphalt.



The super sort of looks sideways at it and says in as confident a tone as he can manage;



"That looks like native soil to me."



I actually think I goggled at him; I know I must have had en exceptionally odd look on my face.



"Well, in that case." I replied, "we're going to have to completely revise our estimate on when early humans started using asphalt paving..." He had the decency to look ashamed.



We dug it out. And the other three feet of assorted brick, lumber, fly ash, china plates, glass bottles and assorted shit that somebody had pushed into a hole back in 1946.



Honestly! I may have been born at night, but I wasn't born LAST night. I wasn't sure who to be more embarassed for, him for trying me on or me for looking foolish enough to make him think he could try that on me.What else?



We had a nice visit from the in-laws in July, who got their fill of their grandkiddos and, I suspect, perhaps a little more than their fill. Our house is barely large enough for us four, so when the grands turn up they usually find a hotel or motel, but this was a month and the cost would have been ridiculous. So Mojo found them a rental place up near Kenton. And the sad truth is that it is nicer than our home. The kids loved the hot tub; I liked having the hot tub to entice the kids to stay with the grandparents.



We did get to stay over there a few nights. Any more and I'd have been too tempted to ask the landlord for a straight-up swap.There's been a little bleakness, as there always is in any sort of life. Mojo's employment is getting precarious, and we're looking at various ideas for post-gas-company paycheck days. And something's going wrong with my hip.



I don't want to sound dramatic about this. I've spent a lifetime abusing my legs. I was born with something called patellar subluxation, in which your kneecaps are canted outwards rather than sit straight on the front of your legs.



The old orthopod I went to see ten years ago when they finally began to hurt enough to slow me below the minimum time for the APFT run told me that as a draft board physician in the Sixties he wouldn't have let me within a rifle's length of the infantry for the very reason I was seeing him that day. Plus I played ten years of soccer and twenty years of squash on them, not a very healthy idea for malformed kneecaps.



So over the past five years or so my run has degenerated a sort of an angry, jerky shuffle, and when I kicked the soccer ball about with my little guy it was with the painful knowledge that I would regret the playtime later.



The ortho had a very sensible attitude about my knees.



"The two options for you are a replacement or a repositioning surgery that has a high incidence of subsequent failure. The replacement will work, but if you have it today (and I was in my forties at the time) you'll need another in twenty years, and rehabilitating a bilateral knee replacement at sixty won't be much fun. If you wait until you're fifty or sixty the technology will have improved enough that they'll last long enough for you to take them with you to the grave."



So I've put off the knee replacements and, shy a few days where too much exercise ballooned them up and required an icebag and an acewrap, have never regretted it.



But this past autumn my right hip started binding up on me. At first that's all it was; just the loss of range of motion. I had a hard time trimming my toenails, or getting my foot into my skiboots. And I noticed a dragging sort of weakness when I wore my work boots; it was like my right leg had about half the strength of my left.



I assumed that it had something to do with my knee problems, and I would knock down some Motrin when it got bad, and in a day or so of light work it would go away.



But at some point this winter it stopped leaving.



Now it hurts, in some form or another, all the time. It varies from a dull ache to a biting little stab when I turn my leg the wrong way. I have developed a visible limp, and whatever's wrong with the hip joint causes me to walk in some off-kilter way that puts strain on the right knee, which has noticeably worsened, and on the muscles of my right upper leg and butt. By the time I come home from work they're hard as an iron bar and ache like a sunofabitch.



I really hate talking about this. It doesn't do any good, for one thing, and it sounds like I'm whining and asking for sympathy, for the other. And I'm not, really; this is just a thing. It's not leukemia, it's not COPD, it's not a brain injury. It's just pain, and people live with pain all the time. It's not crippling, and I go to see another orthopedist in a week that will tell me that I need to either get opened up so that they can remove the arthritic calcium or whatever is marring the hip joint can be scraped off, or I will need a hip replacement.And that's fine. I don't like either the surgery or the rehabilitation afterwards, but if it means that I can walk again without pain? That's a good thing.



I just thought I should mention it, being as that it is sort of hard to escape. Chronic pain, like a hanging, concentrates the mind wonderfully - but only on the pain. And I have a fairly high threshold of pain; I can't imagine what this is like for people who cringe at papercuts.



So...am I whining? Maybe so.



But it's a fine whine, and I like to think I served it up in an pretty glass.

Funny Papers

When I was just a lad I loved to draw.My early cartoons featured dinosaurs, rocket ships, and lots and lots of soldiers. They were of value only to my parents, who probably still have them around somewhere.

As I grew older I kept drawing, my skills got a little better, and the dinos and rockets disappeared. The soldiers, however, remained until I eventually grew old enough to become one myself.As a soldier, one thing I found is that when not actually soldiering one ended up with a lot of spare time.

This could be filled with partying and drinking, and while I enjoyed the partying and drinking I found I wasn't very good at them.

But drawing?

Drawing I could do.

(If this one seems out of place with the others, I did this as part of a series for my then-girlfriend involving famous ancestors of hers, usually in some sort of compromising position - there was one of her "ancestor" in Lexington, 1776, with Paul Revere pawing her bare breasts and leering "Now, let's see...were these two if by land or two if by sea?" with the redcoats leaning over the Dutch door. This was her descendent as Star Wars Princess. Laugh if you will, but she enjoyed them, and laughter is as potent an aphrodisiac as poetry or jewelry. Fuck Kay - many a kiss begins with a chuckle. Anyway, that's why this one's here...)

Posted to Panama back in the final days of the expiring Canal Zone era I had even more time to draw, and I did.

For a while I even put out my own little paper, a compendium of vanity and nothingness I called "Evac Section Newsletter". For years I thought I had lost all trace of this stuff until whilst pawing through my military paperwork folder I came across a file that had a bunch of these old drawings in it.

I don't pretend that these odd little comics have any more value than the old dinosaurs and rocket ships. But they do, to my biased eye, have a certain charm, they were a part of me back in the day, and the youngster I was then is still part of me today.

If nothing else they are an artifact of a time, and a place, that has vanished like the Etruscans; the American occupation of the Panama Canal Zone, circa 1986.So I will post up one or two of these things every so often, as much to amuse myself as anyone else. I hope you enjoy them, but if not, just remember that there's all SORTS of worse stuff published every day. Just check the magazine rack the next time you check out at the supermarket. Trust me. And just think; these may well turn out to be the Pompeii-wall-paintings of Panama in the Eighties, as well as a momento mori to the wide boy I was in the flower of my manhood.Ah, but I was a roaring cartoonist of a fella then, a regular broth of a boy! Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait,dammit!

Nos somos Timbers

I'm utterly whacked, it's 1:15 in the morning, and I have to get some sleep.But I can't.Because tonight was one of those times when you feel like your skin is electric; you are shot full of energy like the glowing filament of an incandescent light. As tired as I am I'm still floating and I haven't come down.Because 18,000 other people and I made the old Civic Stadium rock and roar like it was a living creature and a thunderous one, at that.Because something as simple and fundamentally silly as eleven men kicking a ball made the heavens open amid the thunder of drums and the songs of thousands of voices.Because for just a moment, the brightly-lit turf seemed so green, so pure, that you felt like if you could step out onto it you could run and run and never tire. That you could sing and shout and your voice would never crack and never fail.Because the supporters sang their love of the Game, and the Team, and the team took that love and made it a force, gave it hearts and lungs and legs and sent it flying into the night sky and left us all shattered and hoarse, reveling in the love, and the joy of victory hard-won, and the almost-frightening power of the voice of that love that rose up over the darkened city, over the streets and bridges, over the rivers and the wooded mountains and the cold peaks glimmering under the stars until the daylight returns to awaken us all to our daily lives again.Because...There's a party in Portland;Nobody's sleeping tonight.