Banners

Did you know that the City of Portland has a flag?

Yep. Here it is:Here's the thing about this version of the Portland flag; it follows all the "rules" of vexillology.

It's simple - just two lines or bars crossing with a diamond in the juncture on a green field. The pattern of the crossing bars mimics the junction of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers that dominate the Portland region. It uses no more than about three or four colors, doesn't use "lettering or seals", which the flag gurus consider too busy and fussy, and while it is distinctive it's bars and stripes are similar to the stripes of the American flag.

So by the ideals of people who "do" flags, the present Portland flag is just about perfect.

But...I don't like it as much as I liked the older version:Don't ask me why. I just like the '69 version better than the '08 version.

Yes, I know that it has the fussy little City of Portland seal in the canton, a big vexil-no-no. There's just something about that little bit of fiddly archaeism that pleases me. I LIKE that it has the Portland seal complete with Portlandia commanding her teeny little ships and plows.

But, then, I'm the sort of person who likes the old-school Prussian regimental flagsBECAUSE of all the fiddly little details - the crowned eagle, the scrolls with the battle honors, the various rays and flames and royal cyphers all over. I like fiddly details of that sort. They satisfy me immensely.

I like the fact that our Oregon flag has different images on different sides, and, yes, I like the fact that we have lettering AND our seal on the obverse:and our mighty Beaver on the reverse:(and we're the ONLY state that does this, perverse creatures that we are...) And I take an equally perverse pride that the vexillologists consider ours something like the 3rd worst state flag in the U.S. I have no idea who rates below us; probably somebody like American Samoa or Guam. I like the fact that the professional flag-wavers hate us for our dorky, fussy, un-vexillogical untidiness.

Not long ago the World's Worst Newspaper ran a contest to design a replacement for our vexillologist's-most-hated flag, and here it is:Does that or does that not look like the sort of thing that would win a newspaper design contest? All simple primary colors with the simple cartoon beaver minus his beloved log, and even a little star because...well, I have no idea because why. Because...stars are special or a reference to the Star-spangled Banner? Who knows? To me it looks perfectly idiotic.

Call me a curmudgeon, then; I like the little fussy touches on my city and state flags; in the archaic and unprofessional symbols you can see the people who came before us and their love of busy detail - living reminders that flags that stand for real people and real places are as imperfect as the people who create them both.

꿈꾸는 무슨이 오더라도 좋다

I am the last one awake and the only sounds in the little house in North Portland are the mechanical whirr of the laptop fan and, rather irkingly, the faint crunching noise the cable TV receiver makes. I have no idea why; there doesn't seem to be a need for anything mechanical within a cable TV receiver to make crunching noises.

But when you turn the television off and leave the cable on, the cable tuner makes this odd crunching noise.

I really wanted to say something to you tonight. I wanted to charm, or beguile, or rant. I wanted to write something that you'd read tomorrow morning - assuming anyone really DOES read this damn thing outside the small group of friends that meets here, and you know who you are - and spend the remainder of the day recalling at odd moments and turning over in your mind like a smooth-washed pebble in your hand because of the intriguing heft of it, the clean, cool feel of it under your fingers.I wanted to sit and really distill my thoughts and provide you with some object for thought, or moment of humor, or charm, that you could savor.

But I'm afraid I've got nothing.

Most of my thoughts are on my son's lost tooth, and my daughter's homework, and my wife's new exercise routine. On the coming two days without school at the end of the week, and how I'm going to get the locates called in for next week's drilling even though I don't have paint on the ground at this moment.

There's nothing in the news, or ABOUT the news, I really have any more intelligent comment to provide than Krugman does, or jim over at Ranger Against War, or Greenwald, or Doghouse Riley or a dozen other, better bloggers.

And because I'm still trying to lose weight right now I'm thinking about the fucking cinnamon graham crackers in the cupboard behind me and realizing that I'd practically KILL for a fucking cinnamon graham cracker and yet I won't get up and get one because I'm finally down to almost 205 from over 235 this past winter and want to get down to 200 by the New Year. But this ginormous part of my mind is taken up with thinking about fucking cinnamon graham crackers rather than coming up with witty and epigrammatic blog posts.

Have you ever had times, or moments, or even days like that? Where you have the feeling that you just want to do some great thing, something utterly brilliant, that you're a fraction of an inch, a flicker of a synaptic leap, a pennysworth of bread away from this immense deal of intellectual sack...and yet, you just can't seem to get there from here?Well, that's where I am.

And the odd thing is, I don't feel frantic or manic about it. I had a moment of panic, a moment of...whatthehelldoIdonow!...but that passed, and now I'm just jotting down random thoughts and readying myself for sleep.

The only thing of real oddity and interest that has occurred to me lately - at least odd and of interest to ME - is this odd series of dreams in which my wife and my in-laws are Korean.I have no idea where I'm coming up with this stuff.

My dream-wife looks very like herself except with Asian features; black hair, dark eyes, epicanthic fold. But she's recognizably "her" in both physical shape and personality

My dream-father-in-law is actually perfect as this gruff little hard-ass Seoul auto mechanic who never says anything except to cuss at me in Hangul. He even has his gray beard and with it looks like a mean ol' retired ROK master sergeant or something. He's kinda scary, but otherwise not THAT much different from his "real" self.

But my dream-mother-in-law looks and sounds like Maggie Cho's gramma ("Magare! What is aaaassss-maaastas? Is it maaastas of aaassss?") and keeps nagging at her daughter in ways that her very diffident real mother would be horrified by ("Dabbeeee! Why you eat SO much? You too faaaat! Look size you boobies, they big like zeppelins!" - I swear, this is actual dream-dialogue and I have no freaking idea where I'm coming up with this. My actual mother-in-law would cut her tongue out before ever mentioning breasts, let alone comparing them to ragtime-era German airships).

I've had something like four of these Korean-family dreams. In one of them my mother-in-law made us Korean pancakes - jeonya (저냐) and bullied the kids when they said they were "yucky".

In another she kept coming out in the back where my wife and I were in the hot tub (we don't have a hot tub IRL...) getting all tender and twining (which is where she made the breast-zeppelin comments) and kept making smartass comments about making another baby.

And in yet another they sat on the porch and spat sunflower seeds at the cats and made grousing comments about our house in Korean.

And now just talking about this makes me want some freaking bulgogi and pajeon. Fuck, dieting SUCKS!

Which reminds me - one of my favorite little webcomics, "K and J" seems to have gone dark. Worth a visit there even so, to enjoy the back issues where the artist tells the tales of his wife's Korean childhood-and-young adulthood. Sadly, I suspect that something bad has happened - marriage fell apart, guy was hit by a bus. Who knows? Destined to be another of those weird abandoned websites visited only by the electronic ghosts of former readers?

Here's a bit of bloggage for you; a group of WW2 enthusiasts trying to restore an old RAF command and control bunker near Newcastle. Just the sort of oddity that makes for good reading on a random sort of Tuesday night.And so to bed.

(Oh. The title of this post? You mean you don't read Hangul? Oh, sorry. Roughly translated, it means "What Dreams May Come". How could you not know that? Really, 당신의 유방은 zeppelins 같이 이다!)

With Their Shields or On Them

I'm sitting in front of the computer whilst the kiddos indulge in some truly reprehensible Saturday morning TV - a ritual as old as MY childhood, at least - and came across this Krugman column that ends with a comment that I thought went right to the heart of the discussions we had around here about what I considered the unfortunate narrowing of the social arc of military service in the U.S. circa 2011:

"If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."

The Krugman essay is in reference to the apparent difference between "conservatives" - who seem willing to shove any sort of public-figure misbehavior down the memory hole so long as the offending politician continues to vote for their regressive policies - and liberals, who immediately defenestrate their own "leaders" if the personal lives of those leaders vary from the public positions.But in the course of his post Krugman brings up someone I had forgotten; Ed Luttwak, who wrote back in 1995 that any hope the U.S. (and other Western societies) had of returning to a widespread national service was doomed by the replacement-level birth rates of their peoples. Luttwak's "post-heroic" societies had developed such an attachment to their children "...(b)ecause most couples have only one or two children, the loss of any in warfare becomes intolerable, and conscription becomes unthinkable..."(and)"...child-centered Americans (and Europeans and Japanese) will be forced to rely in the future on allies, mercenaries, and maybe robots to fight on their behalf."So; here I am, looking at my own precious offspring (one inert on the couch, the other somewhere in the back of the house - I can hear her chatting to herself there, anyway...) and wondering - would I give them up if my country demanded it not for existential defense, but for some abtruse foreign policy objective? Would I be "convincible" that burying my son or daughter for some transient geopolitical advantage in part of my country's imperial corona was worth the end of my own personal immortality?And I honestly don't know the answer.

But it certainly raises some difficult questions for me.

Friday Jukebox: Shameless Vidiot Edition

Heard this last night while the Boy was watching the "Cars 2" movie:Odd thing: I love the Weezer cover of this old Cars tune, and I loved that the Pixar people used it for a movie about cars.

But the actual movie?

Sucked pipe.

I've been wondering if it was even possible for the little desk-lamp to MAKE a bad picture. Apparently so; not awful, just long, slow, and a very pedestrian mashup of race-car and spy movies without any particular flair for either one.But the song kicks tailpipe.

Hey, hey, It's a Sunny Day

Last weekend we had a sunny Sunday

Sunny.

Do you understand what a wonderful thing that is?

We're deep in autumn here, and in the Northwest that means rain. And the winter is fast approaching and that means constant rain.

Tomorrow, for example, we're set to have a typical Northwest late autumn-early winter day; sunrise at 7:25, sunset at 5:30, overnight low, 42F, afternoon high, 46F.

It's a wonder that none of Lewis and Clark's GIs sucked the musket muzzle after 184 days of THAT shit. I've lived here twenty-one years and by February I'm twitchy and tend to make funny noises when I hear the gutters fill up. I can't imagine what it must have been like to experience our Black Months with no warning.

But it was sunny Sunday. Sunny, I say!The thing is, I've been working a LOT of long days; early mornings, late nights. This means that Mojo gets stuck with a lot of childcare. And as adorable as our little urchins are, they're also the sort of hard work that five and eight also are, and so when I can I like to try and give my bride some refit time. So Sunday I stuffed the kiddos into "Bob" the white Subaru and took them away.

We did All Things Kid; went to Chuck E. Cheese, went out for lunch at McDonalds

(or as our friend the Poet likes to call it, the Icky Clown House, which I consider pure genius and far above the sort of nickname that I recall from when my college chums and I thought we were being witty - "L'Arc dOr" and "Chez Ronald's" and that sort of thing)

and then off to our local hobby store to look over Pokemon cards. We ended up in the Hollywood district of Portland so the Young Padawan could go to his jujitsu class, and that left just Little Miss and I to pass a couple of hours together.And so we did.

We sauntered across the street to the Whole Foods market where the Girl found a teeny shopping cart Just Her Size and proceeded to have a wonderful time pushing it about.These "Whole Foods" places - you may well have them, I think they're a national chain - have all sorts of oddities and quarks. We dove deeply into the Asian aisle for some of what Missy calls "seaweed" - the dried nori she snacks on - and into the juice aisle for fresh apple cider. We came across a "nice lady" who gave us some delicious plum jam (from Hood River to the east up the Gorge) on a vanilla cookie, so of course we had to find some of that jam and those cookies.

Lamb, and some craft beer, and a couple of apples later we were heading out the door but stopped at the little tea kiosk (a coffee bar would be too...mainstream...for Whole Foods in Portland) for some savory oolong. Taking our paper cups we crossed back over the street and found a tiny parklet between the main road and Peep's gym to sit and enjoy the warm sun and sip our teas."This tea is spicy!" Missy reported. "I like it, but the tea at dim sum is better. Because it comes from China, like me."

So I had to tell her the story about her adoption, and how we met her. And she told me about how she knew Chinese words. And we looked up at the blue, blue sky through the saffron-yellow leaves above us. And talked about clouds, and dinosaurs, and why some birds are fat.And as I held her dear weight over my heart I felt the weight of the knowledge that this little girl was only mine for a moment.

And that our artless talk and random time together would slip away like the heat leaving the cup in my hand.

And I wanted to stop time, just stop it, and sit there forever in the slow autumn sunlight with my little girl on my lap, and hear her funny little voice, and stroke the anthracite sheen of her hair and just love her until the stars burnt to cinder and the world ended.And then we finished our tea, and I tossed her up on my shoulders, and she rode above my head all the way down to pick her brother up and go home.

Hallalujah I'm a Bum

Just an addendum to the preceding Halloween post, since I was thinking about Halloween in general and my childhood memories of the night in particular.

One constant during the Halloweens of my youth was something we called "Trick or Treat for UNICEF". It was an annual fundraiser for the UN Children's Fund, and pretty much every year one or two of my friends - typically the ones whose parents were a little more crunchy granola than mine - would forego the sweeties in order to solicit coin for the poor kiddies overseas.It was ubiquitous, and most adults kept some change handy by the door for the UNICEF kids.

Several years ago my bride came across a hardbound atrocity entitled "Jack the Bum and the Halloween Handout" deep in the remaindered bin at the local Goodwill. It's a truly appalling confection of late Seventies "New Yorker"-style humor that I'd pitch back to the maw of Goodwill in a heartbeat if I could except that my daughter loves the dickens out of it. But the macguffin in this turkey is that Jack, who is looking for a "hot cup of coffee" (a short dog of wine being, apparently, unappealing to the choosy urban pioneer) finds out that if you say "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" that people will give you MONEY.Mind you, our boy Jack doesn't want to take money from hapless kiddies in India - he just wants coffee. And he's been sleeping under a bridge or something, so he has no idea what UNICEF is, or why people give you money for saying "trick or treat for UNICEF".

I have to stop now or I'll go into a catatonic state like the epileptic scientist lady in "The Andromeda Strain" when the red light flashes. But suffice to say that in the Sixties and early Seventies you couldn't swing a black cat without hitting some costumed kid with one of those little orange UNICEF boxes.

But not anymore.

And I have no idea why.

I haven't seen a UNICEF trick-or-treater for decades. Hell, I honestly don't remember the last time I had one come to the door, and I've been handing out candy on the last day of October since the middle Eighties.For some reason the little people don't come looking for Halloween handouts anymore, and that has me wondering what the heck happened to this odd little part of my childhood; it's not often that something just stops. But this tradition has, and I wonder - anyone out there know why it did?

Candy

For the third year in a row my children worked the University of Portland dorms for Halloween.First, let me say that I'm not sure why, as much as I get more surly and less festive every December as my kiddos rocket about in an advertising-fueled orgy of greedy anticipation, I get more happiness over watching them get equally greedy for sweets and all things spooky every October. But by Thanksgiving I'm already snarling at the latest repetition of "I hope Santa brings me that Mega-thruster Barbie with the Bolt-on Wings!" whilst I practically melted when my daughter cuddled up to me Sunday mornings and sighed "I can't WAIT for Halloween!"I'm not consistent, okay? But there's something about the Night Before The Day of The Dead that works for me. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.One part of it, I think, is that the kids are active participants in the holiday at the end of October. Christmas is all about passive greed; Halloween is all about doing things; making the house "scary", choosing and re-choosing the right costume.This year in keeping with his obsession with All Things Warlike the little man was a soldier. I didn't have the heart to tell him he looked like a post-Mission-Accomplished Iraqi child-conscript in his little five-color desert cammies and coverless Kevlar. He felt himself very martial, and raced about with his toy M-4 (minus the muzzle-end of the barrel, which somehow our friend's son had managed to snap off before he lent it to us...) blazing away at the Enemy Hordes.Little Miss went with the traditional; a fairy princess. The delightful thing about these small people is that unlike us putative grown-ups they are unwilling to endure the ridiculous to keep up appearances. So when the little silver slippers hurt her feet I suggested that sometimes fairies went for comfort over style and she changed over to her little tennie-runners without demur.

Sadly, however, the cruel predation of childhood has not changed, either. She left her garish fairy wings at home after "some big kids laughed at me". It's probably fortunate for our conceit of childhood that as adults we tend to forget the deliberate hurts that we inflict on each other as children.So it was with sparkly crowns and small arms we went over to the University to hunt for loot; Daddy (limping on his bad hip, which was playing up abominably), Sergeant Stryker and his companion, the Ammunition Fairy.The dorm halls brought back assorted memories of my own college residence halls, although many of the young men and women of the Catholic college on the Bluff had gone to far greater lengths than I and my contemporaries would have to entertain the minor children of townie neighbors. Many of the girls were in costume as well, although here Missy is thoroughly unimpressed at getting a photo-op with Ariel the Little Mermaid herself; I was impressed that the co-ed Ariel's attention to detail that extended to matching-mermaid-tail-aquamarine toenail polish. Either a future attorney general or the first female archbishop of Portland.We passed through the crowded halls following the Boy's nose for sugar. He was like a human sugar-hound, and we seldom missed a rich vein of loot. The students were very patient with all this hoo-raw, and, of course, the young women all cooed over the little girls.

I wondered as I listened to the happy glurge; is this feminine sentiment (the young men seemed as immune to sentiment in general as young men usually pretend to be) a fond memory of girlhood passing, or an eager anticipation of motherhood yet to come?Whatever the reason, Missy's amour-propre was restored by the number of compliments she received for her little costume. She WAS adorable, and even the callow youth of North Portland could see that.Eventually she tired of her pilgrimage - her brother, tireless Diogenes of Candy that he is, continued on with his friends - and I led her home. She went up to one doorway ("I don't want to go to any more houses where I don't know anyone", she declared after that) and then handed me her treat-bag and skipped alongside my uneven stride, chattering artlessly as all around us little groups of spectres, heroes, athletes, and household appliances scrambled shouting through the darkened streets.Portland Halloween is often a sodden business, but Monday was clear and chill. The drifts of yellow and orange stirred in the night wind whose cold kiss promised the end of autumn and the coming of winter. But the lights of our house were warm, and the scampering footsteps of my daughter's homecoming were in perfect time with the contentment in my heart.