Mary Asks for a Miracle

"behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing"
—Luke 2:48

How do you approach a miracle? She forgets her son
has sky spilling out of his mouth, so she doesn’t look
in the temple, where he’s practicing a prayer
that sounds like the only rose-colored feather
on the wing of a desert finch. She searches the road,
with the revellers, the travellers, returning home,
but the miracle is a beak that snaps the pinyon pine
shell apart like a lever, releasing its heart from its case.
The miracle is a set of questions made by the river
that clips its blue leash to the sea. The miracle is
only partly a boy, only partly a bird or a beach.
She forgets the part that is made of fire and wind,
the part that opens what’s closed or finds what’s lost.
She is sad and worried in her unremembering.
What do you say to the miracle you’re missing
when the miracle tells you it is already home?

~ Linda Dove

This evening we celebrated Christmas Eve with all the traditions of our family; lazy idleness, videogames (for the Boy), desultory exercise (for Mojo and myself), and a meal of honey ham (because honeybaked ham...), scratch mac n' cheese with sharp Tillamook cheddar because the Boy - whose diet generally consists of whatever is on the "prohibited" list published by the American Diabetic Association - specially requested it, and a garden salad because it symbolizes the rebirth of Sol Invictus or Christ, whichever comes first, or who takes two out of three thumbwrestling.

I won't pretend that this winter solstice doesn't feel dark and dim, and not merely because we're into the Dark Ages here in the Pacific Northwest, the rainy months when we see the sun only randomly from week to week. To me it feels like the December of 1860 must have; a tense, louring time vibrating like a tightening string, turbulent with anger and danger. The election of 2016 has made evident what has been true since 1980; that We the People are a house divided against itself, that we are in a cold civil war, and the the only thing left to question is whether we will continue in this tortuous state or break out into open struggle to become all one or all the other. I can neither effectively fight that struggle or win it; all I can do is try and turn it from me and mine.

So I hope you and yours are together, and safely ensconced in love and light. The night is long and dark, and we are our own candles, flickering bravely against the cold outside the glass.

May all of us find our way home safe tonight.

Old Man Yells at GPS

My daughter took her bicycle out in the pouring rain today to deliver presents to her friends, equipped with her backpack and her phone with it's GPS app.

An hour later I got a phone call.

"I'm lost".

After a frantic and irritable quarter hour on the phone I trudged out to the car and drove across North Portland to where she stood, wet and apologetic, and loaded her and the bicycle and her gifts into Bad Bob the Subaru and drove to where her friend lived. Turned out she was about right east-west (off by about a block) but way north, almost eight blocks or so. The Girl says that what happened was that the touch-screen started to sputter when it got soaked, and the GPS app kept jumping her around, telling her she was one block, then four blocks, then six blocks from her friend.

I remarked that civilian GPS gimmicks had a randomizer incorporated in them so that Cletus and Ahab the bomb-makers couldn't outwit the military units tasked to catch 'em.

We arrived at the friend, who emerged in an exultation of dogs, handed off the prezzies, and retreated, wet and grateful, to the car and then to the Little House. Daughter has been curled up on the couch since then with her blanket and her treacherous phone, looking at cat videos.

I patiently explained to The Girl that once, everyone in Portland had a copy of something called a Thomas Guide in their car that guided them to their destinations.

I suspect she didn't believe me.

Si jeunesse savait. Si viellesse pouvait.

Let me introduce myself...

...I'm a man of little enough wealth and taste, well...that's open to interpretation.

Visiting my friend Maia's blog (which is sadly, quieter even than my own, but worth the while to visit for her gorgeous photographs...) I realized that one thing I haven't done is take the time to update my c.v. So if I'm going to start writing here again, I should begin with who and where I am at this time, the People's Republic of Portland in the province of Cascadia, near the end of the year 2019.

I turned 62 this past October, so I've officially entered the "terminal phase" or "descending branch" of the ballistic arc my parents fired me onto back in the autumn of 1957. That's...suboptimal, but at least I lasted longer than my birth-brother Sputnik I, who lived fast and died young.

I'm still who I tell you I am on the cover page here: inquisitive, judgmental, analytical, hard-working. And still husband and father, scientist, retired Army sergeant, and social and political liberal.

I'm no longer a teacher, though. That's unfortunate, because I enjoyed it to some extent. But the time-suck was too huge and the pay too grim. "Adjunct" is community-college-speak for "wage-slave", and I no longer have the patience to do the work it requires for the paycheck it returns.

Physically? I continue to get older and slower. I finally had my left hip replaced this past winter, so that helps, but my "...back's bad and my legs are queer". I'm eaten up with osteoarthritis, and everything, especially on cold mornings, creaks and groans (and makes unpleasant grinding or cracking noises, which is worse). I've got a couple of knee replacements in my future given I live that long.

I'm still a toiler in the vineyard of soils engineering and geology, still where I have been for the past couple of years. It's fine. It's a job, no better than many I've had, but better than some. I work with some good people, some slackers, some yobs. Sometimes my work is fascinating, sometimes drab, sometimes difficult. For every fun landslide there's a day spent with my heels up watching a bunch of chucklefucks pave a parking lot. It's a glamor profession.

Outside of work, I still follow soccer in Portland, both the Timbers on the men's side and the Thorns on the women's. I lost my gig writing for Stumptown Footy, though - and there's a special sort of humiliation getting canned from your non-paying side gig! - and moved over the another blog (called Riveting!, in case you enjoy being bored out of your skull about soccer...) where I do the same thing for the same pay.

What can I say? I like soccer, I like to write about it, I'm often mistaken but never wrong...that's kind of the point of blogging, right?

Outside of that, it's reading; history, science fiction and other fun junk-novels. I get enough heartache from the news, so my taste in literary entertainment is pretty light. I should really put up a post about several authors I've run across lately that are a lot of fun. So between that and beginning to work out again - the hips made that kind of chancy - my idle hours are taken up pretty well.

Family? Well...

Mojo is now in her second year as School Secretary of our kiddos' elementary school. She's the beloved "Miss Mojo" of a wild rumpus of kiddies. This Halloween it was pretty adorable to open the door on a bunch of fun-sized elves and superheroes and Pokemon who immediately started screaming "MISS (Mojo's name)! MISS MOJO!" until she came over and greeted them and gave them their treats. She's still smart and sarcastic and still uninterested in politics and soccer. How we find anything to talk about I have no idea, but I love her like fresh meat loves salt.

The Boy is in his third year of high school, and has entered the Monosyllabic Phase. He's still struggling with his tendency to slack off; he really doesn't like to work - something I recall from my immediately-post-pubescent-period - and until now has done as well as he's done by pure mental throw-weight. He's taking a bunch of AP classes this year, though, and has found that he can't slide on through on pure headspace alone. His response has been somewhat gratifyingly diligent, though, so we'll see. There's a lot of promise there. But at 16? It's still mostly promise.

The Girl...well, I should start by saying that one of her funny things is that she absolutely hates it that I talk about her here. She's got a fanatic obsession that some sort of creepy stalker is going to chase her down through this blog, as if I try and boost my clicks by chasing down creepy stalkers. So I won't say much other than that she's a middle school kid with all that entails. She's gone from sweet little miss to salty little devil over the past year or so. My favorite story from that evolution came the other day, when I was digging through the spice drawer and came across this:

Daughter: "Seriously?"
Father: "What the..? I didn't think we still even had this."
Daughter: "So what is "authentic Asian taste", anyway?"
Father: "Hell if I know. Have you tasted yourself lately?"
Daughter:
Daughter: (licks back of hand) "Salty. With a hint of bitterness."
Father:
Daughter"
Father:
Daughter: "What? You asked!"

She's a gifted artist and something of a dramat - though she's all about the tech side and has no ambition to shine on the stage rather than behind it. Weirdly, her love for musical theater has revived my old affection for the genre, and we've enjoyed several shows including Wicked (which I enjoyed far more than I thought I would given my indifference to the source) and In The Heights.

The Damn Cat is being a damn cat. I don't want to pen him up indoors, but I wish to hell he'd stop killing little birds. Knock it off, you furry bastard.

Oh...and, oddly, the other thing I've taken up lately is...archery.

We have a very odd little, very Portland, sort of place here called "Trackers", and one of the things they do is run bow-making and archery classes for kids. And they also run an indoor range, and a friend and I have taken to turning up there every week and killing targets. It's a hell of a lot of fun for five bucks.

Being me, of course, I can't settle for just plunking away at a paper printed with concentric circles. The fun part is the challenge of hitting some small noisy thing, like a plastic bottle or a cardboard cup. The other day all I could find was a plastic seltzer bottle, so I shoved that in the hay bales and proceeded to twang away at it. Thing is, I didn't want to try and hit it standing up, like you'd shoot can's with a rifle. I wanted to hit it end-on and, more particularly, opening-end on, so I'd have to put an arrow through the 1-inch wide pour hole.

Took me probably a dozen flights to finally hit it.

But when I did?

GodDAMN that was satisfying.

So that's me writ small; I still can't do things the simple, easy, or sensible way.

But I'll keep firing away until I hit the fucking thing.

And there I am.

See you again in a bit.

The Fallows of the Year

It's been a long day already, and it's only mid-afternoon.

I woke at five to the shrilling alarm in the dark. Shuffled to the kitchen to light off the coffeemaker, then to the toilet, then back into the kitchen to find provender for the ravenous maw of the small domestic predator that bosses us around the Little House. He's affectionate but a demanding master, the furry little bastard, and will let me know in no uncertain terms if his breakfast isn't served up quickly enough.

From there it was out and about Oregon all day. I had driven two hundred miles before noon, and that wasn't the end of my travels.Fortunately today I ended up at a site close enough to my house to take a detour to the local pub - the Lucky Labrador on North Killingsworth, no more than a long pint-bottle-toss from the Fire Direction Center, where I could have a pint and some peanuts and write up my field reports and, now, this post.

And that's many of my days; up early, off to work, home, dinner, bed. Desultory conversation with my Bride and the Girl (the Boy has entered the Dormant Phase of adolescence, where he will not speak unless 1) directly compelled, or 2) about some kind of gaming - he's at the extreme endmember of "videogamer", and if there was a way to make a living at playing Fallout outside of Seoul he'd be on it like a Republican on a tax cut.

Speaking of Republicans...

Actually, no. Fuck, no. Instead, let me start with this.

I've been thinking lately about this place. About how I wrote it off this time last year, about how I had decided that it was a ghost blog, and that I had nothing more to say here. And how I felt about that.

And I've concluded that I feel like shit about it.

I've written a lot here in this place. I've been slowly collecting the "battles" pieces into a Word document with the idle thought of possibly submitting it to a publisher and realized that I am up to almost 200,000 words (and I'm only up to Verdun, back in February of 2012!) I wrote some brilliant invective. I wrote some that I, rather vainly, consider some genuinely fine prose. Some pretty damn fine prose. Sometimes even containing some genuinely worthwhile thoughts.

And a lot of crap, of course.

But I thought about how I'd chosen to let this blog die like so many others and thought...no.

Goddamn it, no.

I'm a good writer. I have some more worthwhile thoughts and ideas and emotions to write in this place.

So I've decided to make a concerted effort to bring it to life again. There'll be more "battles" pieces, but only discussing events that entertain and amuse me rather than the famous ones that make the history books and the "decisive battles" compendia.

There is one thing that will probably not be here.

U.S. politics.

And there's a simple reason for that; there is nothing more to be said about U.S. politics that I haven't said over and over again. It is a worthless subject to discuss because there is no "discussion".

The "conservative" faction in the United States has given in entirely to cargo-cultism. There is no more remaining intellectual rigor or political throw-weight to movement conservatism. It has devolved completely into a sort of...well, here's what I wrote seven fucking years ago:

"...the modern GOP has become...a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right..."What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger."

And that was seven fucking years ago. Since then the prion disease has engulfed the "conservative" brains. There's just nothing left there. It's all God, guns, gays, snowflake babies, tax cuts, and Islamophobia (now with 100% more racism!) all the way down. Trump isn't a symptom, he's part of the disease, and the third to two-fifths of the American public that are infected don't want to be cured.

And that's the problem.

No republic can survive that percentage of its citizens immune to reality and reason, committed to nonsensical idiocy like "trickle-down economics" and white pride.

No.

We are, instead, living in the final years of the American Republic. Like Rome, we will either preserve the trappings of republicanism as the workings are replaced with open oligarchy, or we will devolve into a low-grade sort of civil cold war. Watch the ridiculous charade now enacted in the capital, where the reality of a moronic Chief Executive whose behavior reflects what we knew of him before the creaky mechanisms of colonial oligarchy installed him as our First Citizen cannot be accepted by his "conservative" cult for fear that, once the nonsense of Ptolomaic geocentrism is exposed as the nonsense it is, the remainder of the edifice will not stand. That a criminally cretinous fool must be defended at all costs, because the costs of accepting the criminal reality and cretinous truth would destroy the cult just as the first broken tapu brought the entire Hawaiian religion down in a heap.

These people would rather burn the republic down than hand over power, and that in itself is what destroys republics.

I cannot stop that. I cannot change it. I see no point in being the Shirer of the Fall of the American Experiment. I may touch on things from time to time, but I cannot imagine what earthly good it would do to repeat and repeat and endless string of posts that amount to a rewording of "WASF if the GOP is not destroyed!!!"

So I'll resume the one-sided conversation here. I'll talk about home and work, life and love, my home in the Pacific Northwest and other places I love or have come to love. There will be battles, and there may be poetry. There will likely be random posts where I talk about nothing but what amuses me.

But there will be, once again, posts.

Long-form blogging may well be dead but, goddamn it, it's not going to die here, not now, not in the fallows of 2019.

I sit. And I listen.

When I return to California,
to my life with its many engines—I find myself changed,
the city somehow muted, frenetic and fully charged with living, yes,
but still, when gifted with this silence, motions have more
of a dance to them, like fish in schools of hunger, once
flashing in sunlight, now turning in shadow.

~ Brian Turner, Phantom Noise