Friday Jukebox: Far, far away edition

This is because I'm on my third day of two weeks covering a grading job in Medford, down in Oregon's Dixie. I'm fairly dirty and tired and bored of eating bad food and living out of a suitcase and it's only the third fucking day, ferchrissakes. I tried to think of something more uptempo and realized I just wanted something slow and kind of dreamy and sad.



Here come the priests, each one wailing and bemoaning
Lordy, they got their heads bowed down
Here come the madmen, they're too excited for atoning:
"Burn the mosque," they're shouting, "Burn it down!"

Hard to believe that Carly wrote that something like forty years ago. Damn.

It's been something of a difficult autumn for me. The Boy is ever more difficult, apparently because he has some variation of "attention-deficit disorder" which, apparently, also makes you kind of an asshole. The real irking part is that he's only an asshole to my Bride, who is the sweet, loving parent (as opposed to the irascible, impatient, demanding, um, well, me...) and who has busted her butt to try and make things easier for him. Well, he's burning that bridge like a torch in the night and driving his little sister - who is a really loving little soul - completely out of patience with him.

The real problem with this is that my presence - even if I'm not looming over him in a sort of Evil Stepdaddy sort of way - seems to turn the little bugger's Asshole down to background noise. It's when I leave for an extended time - as I have now - that Satan's Child comes roaring back out. It drives me nuts, because my Bride takes the hammer and there's nothing that I can do.

And just in case I didn't have anything to feel sorry for myself about, my right hip has decided that being a small, nagging sort of irritation isn't really fun, so it's gone flat-out, full-throttle, shove-the-shank-in-and-leave-it-and-cripple-the-sonofabitch. I can still walk, sort of, with a really awful torquing sort of motion that resembles nothing so much as Igor in the old Frankenstein flicks. But it hurts, hurts like a bastard. I don't even want to talk about putting a sock on my right foot; sometimes I've been that close to tears as the simple act of putting a tube of cloth on a piece of muscle and bome less than three feet away from my hand is just flat out frigging impossible.

I've come to dread these away-from-home trips just because I fear that I'm going to get up one morning and no amount of effort will let me put my sock on or tie my bootlace and I will have to go, barefoot, to some horrified stranger asking for help like a beggar in the marketplace.

My replacement date is now in March, because my current employer - for whom I worked for years back in the day has concluded that my "period of employment" dates only from my RE-hiring in February of this year. Which means I am ineligible for medical disability leave or paid benefits until after that date in 2016.

So I shamble around like some spastic zombie and curse my leg and my ill-fortune.

But enough self-pity, dammit.



I wanted to throw this up before I go, though; it's the full album from which I got the Karen Alexander song Brown Shoes I posted here a while back. If you're looking for something fun and uptempo, forward to 23:00 and the song Baghdad Ragman. You want hooky?

"Hussein the barber's got a razor like a saber, and
Hassan the butcher has a brother who's a baker, and
The whole bazaar it hums like a song, and
The Baghdad ragman comes with the dawn..."

Oh, yeah. I think you'll like it.

Cold Iron

I spent the better part of the daylight hours of the past Thursday and Friday doing soil exploration using hand tools; hand auger drills of various sizes as well as a pipe and slide hammer contraption known as a "drive probe".

Both of these gadgets required human muscle to work, and since as it happened the soils that the human muscle - my muscle - were required to work on were either composed of fucking great lumps of rock, or end-of-summer-dry silt soil that had the fixed opinion that it was just like rock said muscles were sternly reminded that it was nearly fifty-five years ago that they formed from their primordial protoplasm.

In plain terms, I am no longer young, and for the past two days required my body to do something that was too demanding for its remaining strength and endurance.

I am tired, and sore. The big muscles in my shoulders, arms, and thighs ache and cramp, and the now-familiar deep burn of pain in my right hip has flickered up like a fire fed fresh coals. I have taken several painkillers to tamp down this fire, but the result has been to deny me sleep, an oddly common side-effect of this particular medication. So when the second big lag-cramp twisted me up from our bed I limped out here to sit and stretch and think and write a little, since I am outside the room of sleep, my nose pressed against the warm night-glass but my eyes still wide open, my mind still spinning, unable to open that casement and enter into the silent room to lie down and sleep.

Surely I cannot be the only one who, aging, begins to feel the body's fraying, the steady, sullen failing of the parts that once worked so well, the weakness of once-strong muscles and the grinding of once-smooth joints that remind me that I am a long way down the road towards my body's inevitable failure?

And I am surely luckier than many. My body was stronger, for a longer time, at a higher level than many of the sorts of people I see daily; young people whose obesity makes them look and move like old men or old women. People who seem to sit rather than walk, walk rather than run. People who decades younger than I whose bodies, or minds, bear the obvious marks of serious illness, or violent injury.

And I am lucky in having been gifted with the endurance of pain. Pain and I are old...well, not friends but, perhaps, two old enemies who have crafted a sort of familiarity with one another. He is not a stranger to me, this daily thief who robs me of the back that was strong and straight, the stride that was long - as long as the stride of a man with legs less than three feet from sole to crotch could be - and fierce.

Every morning we rise within moments of each other, my companion and I; often he pokes me in the shoulder or in the hip before I have straightened up from my night's rest to remind me that he has never left me, that I will never be alone so long as my joints continue to deteriorate and my bones continue their hobby of collecting stray bits of calcite like gingerbread on the eaves of an old house.

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So I sit in the quiet room, the only light the phosphors of the white screen before me, trying to let my body settle into a quiet hum that will give me time to think, and write.

From the rental house at the corner to the west comes the noise of the University students enjoying a Friday night's socializing. I am suddenly seized by the strong desire to dress and walk down the dark street to show them my herky step like a marionette with a tangled string, and tell them to dance, and run, to leap and skylark, to arch and bend and enjoy the young strength and suppleness of their bodies now, whilst they may, while they enjoy the fullness of youth, and power, and grace so that they may have those memories to pull about them when the ache and stiffness of age and hard use lays its cold iron on their limbs and bends their backs like the brittle stalks of the autumn grass.

La Lanterne Rouge

One thing that Portland does rather well is bicycling.

Don't mistake me; we're smack down in the middle of Northwest Redneck Gooberland, where trucknuts and mudflap girls roll throughout the outer Southeast and beyond Beaverton to the west, but in our downtown we have worked diligently to make riding the velocipede safer and more beguiling than most other parts of the U.S.

Back in the day I used to commute to my old job over the West Hills on my lead-pipe-construction Kona hybrid, grunting and sweating up one side and freewheeling down the other morning and night. Sharing Barnes Road with the cars sucked, but the ride through the Washington Park forest on the east side of the hills was a hell of a great way to imagine yourself breaking away from the peleton through the hills of the Vosges or up the wooded slopes of the Pyrenees.

My present office lies too far over the hills and far away from North Portland even assuming I wanted to risk the ride up and down Germantown Road. And my uneven legs have made cycling - exercising in general - a less regular event for me. So it was with a little trepidation that I entered the 17th edition of the Bridge Pedal, Portland's annual mass celebration of cycling, and headed downtown before dawn to try and ride over nine of our ten Willamette River bridges.

Well, I didn't make nine; between the St. John's Bridge and the long ride back downtown to cross the Fremont my right knee just crapped out. The fact that I had just ridden past the Fire Direction Center probably had something to do with my unwillingness to ride through the sore knee and achy hip. As did the realization that my fitness is completely gone.

In the day I was a beast of a climber. Not much on descents for fear of falling, but going uphill I was relentless. Sunday, however, the second small incline set my legs to burning with lactose buildup, and by the ride up the road to the big green suspension bridge to North Portland I was gassed. The feeling that your body has betrayed you is an ugly one, and bone loss or no, I have got to figure out how to get back in the saddle. I despise my weakness; I'd rather hurt than simply give up my strength.

So Team Me recorded a DNF on Sunday, I'm afraid, and is now looking for a new directeur sportif to get the boys back into the peleton, if nothing else, as the red light at the tail end of the train.

Foxy Grandpa

This is for you, Carrie.
You see, when I was little - maybe first grade or so - my teacher caught me squinting to see the chalkboard. Since this would have been something like, oh, 1963, little kiddies were expected to actually see the chalkboard in order to learn stuff.

So she dimed me off to my mom, who dragged me in to the opthalmologist, who diagnosed me as mildly nearsighted and recommended glasses.

I wore the goddam things all through grade, middle and high school and into college. The top picture is my sophomore dorm floor buddies in 1977. The "Mack" cap belonged to the owner of the room and I disavow any responsibility for it. The horrible tinted lenses and goofy facial hair, alas, are all mine.

As I aquired a veneer of sophistication - what used to be known as a "university manner" - from maturity and exposure to those wiser than myself I got a little more picky about my glasses stye. The clipping is a publicity still from "Romeo & Juliet" my junior year. Note the better beard and the part-in-the-middle Seventies hair, what I would eventually come to designate a "reefer part" in the Army because of its purported association with smoking weed. Not that I would have known - I wasn't nearly cool enough in 1979 to have smoked weed...

I hated glasses. I truly did. I was forever losing or breaking them, cleaning them, buying and repairing them. They were annoying and expensive and ugly, and finally in the Army they became such a pain in the ass that I stopped wearing them.

And, guess what? Abso-fucking-lutely nothing happened. I shot expert with pistol and rifle, seldom ran into things, passed my drivers' license vision test without them.

For twenty years I lived happily without glasses.

Until...several years ago I noticed while reading that my right eye in particular had difficulty focusing. It seemed to have a blurry spot in the center; I had to shift the text around to get good definition. My vision in the right eye got noticibly worse over the next couple of years. Eventually, just on a whim, I stopped at the little magnifying glasses kiosk at Fred Meyer and tried on a pair.

They worked.

Well, damn.

So now I'm officially "Foxy Grandpa" when I put on the glasses. Mojo finds them endlessly amusing, Sheadon considers them a toy, and Missy enjoys seing how far she can bend them or twist them before they will break (NB - this is not very far).

Youth is a struggle for attention: old age a struggle for dignity. Not sure where on this scale these damn reading glasses fall, but I'm betting "attention" isn't it.