All the Troubles in the World

 Ugh. Sooooo late.

A section of the historic carousel in the little Willamette Valley town of Albany

Sorry. Sorry; I know, I promised something right after my latest "WTF is wrong with these people?!?" rant back in June. Had some ideas for that post, too, and then...

Well, life got in the way.

Since then things have changed enough that the central idea of the original post has been blown apart and shattered by the month-and-change of utterly nutty nonsense that passes for U.S. "politics" and "foreign policy" (if such terms can be used to describe the idiocy, stupidity, and the random free-association that dominate both of them), that being what you get when your national government is dominated by an addled moron and his remoras looking for loot, power, plus whatever loathsome ideas are leaking from their heads.

But let me try to get back to where I was originally starting from and see if I can rebuild something out of what I've got now.

Crystal Springs Garden in Southeast Portland

Okay. So. 

The last time I sat down to type I wrapped up that post with... 

"Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning. And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)"

At the time I had a specific Portland thing in mind; this.

"It is in the public interest to avoid supporting animal cruelty, unsustainable environmental practices, and zoonotic disease risks by removing force-fed products from the marketplace. It is also in the public interest to codify values related to the humane treatment of animals, public health, and environmental stewardship. Therefore, the Council finds it necessary to enact this regulation in the City of Portland in order to achieve these goals."

This is the concluding paragraph of Portland City Ordinance 192190, enacted into code on June 4, 2026.

What it does is ban the sale of foie gras.

 

Tom McCall Natural Area, Mosier, Oregon

Okay then.

I honestly have no dog (or goose, or duck) in this fight. I don't have the taste for, or the grocery budget for, the bloated internal organs of domestic fowl. But I also don't think that all the other aspects of commercial poultry production, from the chicken farm through the poultry processing plant, is anything but an enterprise that needs to be punitively overseen and regulated.

Commercial aviculture, like a lot of other commercial food production, is about making foods relatively cheap and affordable. A lot of the things that everyone involved has to do to make that happen, from the farmers/ranchers through the transporters to the meat-packing plants to the groceries, ranges from quick and dirty to downright revolting. There's a reason that parents don't encourage their kids to dream of working in a North Carolina chicken plant. Gross.

But...cheap and available food? Ask any peasant or smallholder or urban laborer in a pre-industrial or early industrial society how they'd respond to knowing that their lives weren't liable to be upended at any given moment by a killing frost or an avian flu or just a series of poor decisions by their lords and masters. Wars. Famines. Shortages that raised the bare-minimum cost of even the most basic foods like bread beyond the means of the common folk - which in most societies in most of human history meant something like 96% of everyone in that society - and meant that you starved, or rebelled (and were killed anyway, after you starved for a bit...).

So I kinda get both viewpoints.

Making intentionally-diseased bird livers by tube-feeding ducks like suffragettes in Holloway Prison?

Ew.

But if you like and want to buy and eat that stuff?

Whatev'. I don't see the point in making law about it, and here's why it did make me swear and take the piss.

Portland City Council has a whole lot of shit it needs to deal with.

We're stony broke, for one thing. Just like always. If you believe what out local pols tell us about it.

Bills don't stop coming in - roads, schools, fuckin' cops (remind me, Siri, what completes the following statement: "Portland Police Bureau is fucking _________"), firefighters, public buildings - while everybody pisses and moans and, most importantly, votes against raising any sort of tax revenue. 

The constant message coming out of City Hall (and the County offices, and fucking Salem, for that matter...) is "OMFG we just have to cut (insert public good here; parks, pools, roads, daycare, mental and physical health service) because we don't have enough money!" 

It's the same we hear from here all the way to D.C.; fuck your medical care, Gramma, don't you see that Elon Musk (fill in the plutocrat name here) needs another trillion bucks?!?! 

So it kinda chapped my ass that, in the middle of this usual annual budget-crisis-oh-woe-is-us-athon that City Council had five minutes to waste (and money to spend, mind you; someone is gonna have to deal with renegade duck liver pate' smugglers and underground foie gras dealers. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as the Central Precinct command group assigns coppers to the undercover Foie Gras Squad) fucking around with poultry guts.

Adorable child meets adorable woman with fanciful ornament, Cathedral Park Jazz Festival

 
Okay, but.

That was before this bullshit blew up all over the front page:

"The (Portland Trailblazer’s) majority owner, Tom Dundon, is trying to iron out a deal with the city for a major, state-of-the-art renovation of the Moda Center that could cost (the public) more than $600 million."

Now this joker Dundon?

He's a reeeeeal piece of work.

A perfect symbol of the Trump Era, a human-shaped cockroach who made his pile off shitty payday-loan-style predatory loan-sharking and now looks for stolen glory off owning sportsball teams. In this case, Portland and Oregon's only "big" major league sport, NBA basketball.

The scumbag has serious fuck-you money - serious as in this $600M is kind of a rounding error of his tax accountants -  and so far his whole "negotiating" approach to this whole I-need-you-proles-to-gimme-money-for-my-basketball-hobby-farm with the public has been pretty much just "fuck you".

Here I have to confess: I'm totally not a basketball fan.

Despite having spent a chunk of my young-adulthood around Philadelphia in the Seventies and early Eighties glory years of the Julius Erving 76ers...not a damn thing. Not so much as a trickle of hooping excitement trickled into me.  

I had to go to my friend Will, Portland native, massive Blazer fan (as in "still remembers vividly every moment of the 1977 NBA Finals and Championship") and stand-up civic and social justice soldier. I figured if anyone would be in the "let's-do-what-we-need-to-keep-the-team" house it'd be Will.

Nope.

It didn't take ten seconds for my friend to express his down-to-the-ground conviction that our new basketball billionaire can fuck right off with his "pay me you scum" shit.

Which, yeah. I totally get. It took me less time that that. Seriously, Oregon and Multnomah County and Portland pols. You're gonna tell me we're broke, we can't afford to find the jack to do so much as the "something" about the horde of homeless gomers you keep freaking out about 24/7, but somehow we can find enough spare change in the sofa cushions to pay this plutocratic fuckstick to keep keeping his basketball toy here?

My ass. 

And, still...here we are. The public, the City Council, the County Commissioners, even the State legislature and the governor, they're all still dicking around with this damn thing, trying to find a way to ease some simoleons out of the public vault instead of telling the Dundon Organization to either pay for the damn arena themselves or shut up and fuck right off.

Random barn along Highway 99W, somewhere in Polk County

 
You want more? Ohfuckyes there's more.

From the statewide ballot in November there was this:

"The People of Oregon therefore propose the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act to amend Chapter 167 of the Oregon Revised Statutes—which currently provides unnecessary exemptions to laws governing animal abuse, animal neglect, and animal sexual assault—in order to reduce the suffering of animals and improve their quality of life."

That's right; the idea was to allow the Good People of Oregon to vote to outlaw hunting, fishing, livestock raising, chicken ranching, pretty much all meat and poultry production, from your "pets or meat" rabbits in the backyard to the King Ranch.

Driftwood patterns, Otter Crest, Oregon

I have no words for how fucking pointlessly stupid that is beyond "Wow, that's amazingly fucking pointlessly stupid." It's like making hamburgers illegal. Or vodka. Or shoes. Even if it was politically do-able, it's economically and socially impossible. 

And, just here in Portland, was this:

"The ballot proposal aims to use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 officers. That would divert roughly $50 million from climate programs to hire more officers and provide training."

Riiight. Siri, what was that line about the fucking useless Police Bureau again..?

And this, too:

"Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where residents of a municipality deliberate and directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget."

(I got to talk to an actual person who was collecting signatures for this one.

(Oh, right. You might not have these "direct democracy"/ballot measure things where you live. The basic deal is that there has to be a "petitioner", an organization, or individual, who draws up one of these proposed pieces of rule- or legislation-changes or additions.

The language has to be approved by whatever the political authority of the polity you want the thing to apply to - the "PEACE" thing was statewide, so the Oregon Secretary of State's office, the other two were City of Portland, so some suit at City Hall - and then you have to get enough valid citizen signatures to get the wording on the ballot. I ran into one of the people they hired - and these folks are almost always paid temps - and we had a long talk about it.

And I kinda-sorta didn't hate it. But. I had and have real questions and problems with the way the proponents and my signature guy hand-wave away the whole issue of "how to these "PB proposals" actually work in practice?" How do you get the public involved? How does the whole "refine ideas into feasible projects or programs" process work?

My concern is that, watching the U.S. public loll about in the firehose of idiot shit issuing from the government, the government's ass-kissers and fluffers, and the "news media" stenography of the two, without so much as a skeptically raised eyebrow, the chances of this process becoming a nutzoid Skinnerbox of foie-gras-sale and dairy-cow-insemination criminalization seem insanely likely.)

"Corgi Beach Takeover", Seaside, Oregon

 
Well.

What's the sitch on all this political galaxy-brain nonsense?

Two of these proposals  - the PEACE no-chicken-schwarma thing for the state ballot, and the cop-fluffing "Safer Portland" one for the City - died stillborn for lack of valid signatures, and I'm not sure how.

Supposedly both petitions had more than the required minimum when they were turned in to the various elections people, but what I'm reading is that the State and City's name-checks (presumably to ensure that the signatures belonged to living people who are actual citizens of Oregon and/or Portland) tossed so many that the both were 86ed.

(Oh, and the cop-fluffers were bashed repeatedly for their paid harvesters just blatantly lying their asses off about how the funding gimmick actually worked. Which would certainly fit with Portland Police Bureau's methods.)

The PB/community funding one made it, I think. We'll see if it shows up in November.

The foie gras ban is in effect, so no fatty goose liver will henceforth soil our Portland charcuterie anymore. 

St. Johns City Hall (1907), North Portland, Oregon

 
The basketball arena tax-money-giveaway scheme?

Oh, Christ, no; nothing definite and all parties are still dicking around about it. The usual "business community leaders" are still trying to stuff dollars in Dundon's pockets, but every dickish move the team owner makes (and he's made a lot) clarifies the suspicion that, yes, he's just an ginormous dick who can't be trusted. Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes has the deets if you care enough. 

This has all been entirely too verbose, but I hope you get the gist. We really are living through the shittiest timeline. 

We've placed far too much power and influence in the keeping of far too many people who are unscrupulous, or foolish, or ignorant, or greedy, or shortsighted, or simplistic, or some combination of all the above, and we've forgotten that one of the hardest parts of citizenship is that you can't just ignore what those fucking people are up to. Citizenship requires the citizens to stay alert, stay informed, stay involved, and, if it comes down to it, stay - or become - fiercely protective of their rights and duties.

Sometimes...that means a violent - emotionally, politically, and, yes, physically, if it comes to that - collision with the "authorities" that you've elected.

The alternative?

They are your kings, and you are their subjects.

Or their slaves.

Portland Japanese Garden, winter, 2026

(This one was so depressing I didn't have the heart to illustrate it with political imagery. So these are photos from my expeditions out and about my hometown. I hope you like them. At least more than the tales of wretched scum and villainy they illuminate.) 

Chocolate soldiers

You've probably figured out that I hold the current Administration in low esteem.

That said, the "problem" with the United States of America, as currently constituted, is that means that my opinion, and my ability to take any sort of effective action based on that opinion, means exactly jack and shit and, as the saying goes, Jack has left town.

So I'm effectively powerless as an individual.

I suppose I could, if I chose, become a sort of dangerous nuisance. 

Figure out a way to ambush the local ICE thugs. A successful vehicular ambush, especially the first vehicular ambush of a guerrilla campaign, isn't that hard to pull off, provided you can assemble the materials on the downlow and the targets are arrogant and careless.

It's not getting caught putting together the IED, or, if that goes well and the ambush happens, repeating that initial success now that the targets are alerted and proactive that's the hard part. Without an organization larger than myself alone, without a network of intelligence assets, solid effective security, a collection of safe places to hide or lay low, guerrilla allies...there's a reason that most wannabe urban guerrillas have very brief careers.

That game's not really worth the candle. I want to beat these motherfuckers, not get killed or rot in prison just taking down only a handful of their Einsatzgruppen grunts.

No. To defeat these sonsofbitches takes power. And in a republic, notional as our "republic" may now be, power means numbers.

So I went to the meeting of the local "anti-MAGA" organization last weekend.

I'm not going into detail. For one thing, OPSEC. For another, well...let me describe the meeting.

The venue, a run-down sort of backstreet sort of ballroom hung with the faded decorations of a dozen low-budget quinceaneras, was full of Portland lefties. Mostly middle-aged or elderly. Somewhere between late-hippie-chic through solid working class cits to goths and fetish kids. Overwhelmingly white (Portland, y'think?). Lots of teachers or teachery-looking people, and a scattering of pretty obvious union reps.

One of the "organizers", a fairly bougie-looking young-middle-aged white woman, introduced the group by name and a generic mission-statement, and then handed things over to a youngish artsy-looking white woman and that's where, in my unhumble opinion, things started going completely off the fucking rails.

Because she led the group through the music and lyrics, and then the bulk of the group spent the next eight or ten minutes singing a song.

And we're not talking stirring battle hymn. No International here. No Marseillaise. Not even one of the rousing old union battle songs like Bread and Roses.

There was something about love. And being worth fighting for. Not giving up. It was all very affirmative, and uplifting, with not so much as a whisper about hordes of prisoners of starvation, slaves, traitors, or conjured kings.

And that set the tone for the whole thing.

There was a very earnest, collective-wisdom sort of DIYism to the whole magilla, the idea that if people just gathered in little groups they would somehow come up with ideas of how to smash a fascist state.

To me it reeked of how I perceived Occupy back in 2011.  

As I wrote in that post, the Sixties Left has a lot to answer for by the way it convinced many of us on the modern left that simply singing and marching and shouting and sitting-in would beat the massed power of capital, mass media, and all the might of the police-military-industrial-governmental complex.

Compare that to the progressive organizations that succeeded in their resistance. like the SCLC and NAACP and the Civil Rights era groups, the AFL, CIO, UMWA, and the other labor union organizations of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The Indian National Congress. Solidarnosc. The African National Congress.

All these had 1) an actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theater to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied, and 2) an actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting - but leaders and a hierarchy below them that were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents down to the detsils of who, when, where, and with what. 

The New Left's intellectual successor Occupy Wall Street and these lovely people at the quinceanera place all seem to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very worst hangover of the Sixties protests. 

People like John L. Lewis and Gandhi and Nehru and MLK were in many ways unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The Left since their time seems to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person, and that to end organized repression you have to be unorganized.

Two years later I quoted Robert Reich on the failure of Occupy:

"But Occupy eschewed political organization, discipline, and strategy. It wanted to remain outside politics, and outside any hierarchical structure that might begin to replicate the hierarchies of American society it was opposing.

So when mayors, other public officials, and university administrators cleared the Occupy encampments by force — encampments that had become the symbol of the movement — nothing seemed to remain behind. Some Occupiers made plans for further actions, but a movement without structure, discipline, and strategy proved incapable of sustaining itself."

Yep. 

The ANC didn't beat apartheid in South Africa because Nelson Mandela was a secular saint or because the cause was just and the arc of history bends towards justice.

No, it won because it was organized. It was ruthless when it needed to be. It won because it worked the press and international organizations and got funding and took appalling losses in lives and careers and health and hopes. And, yes, because Mandela was a secular saint.

But. 

Having UmKhonto weSizwe skulking about in Angola and Rhodesia didn't fucking hurt, either. 

At the end of this thing the original organizer asked the group to say how the meeting had made them feel (in the opening presentation there had been some discussion about "compassion fatigue" and how stressful it was dealing with ICE and Trumpenscum) and got responses like "empowered" and "hopeful" and "energized".

That's when I realized that this had been more of group-therapy session than planning resistance to fascists, more about "self-actualization" and feelings than setting up cells to surveil the fash and resist the cops and soldiers.

Well. Fuck. 

Look, I'm chuffed that the blow-up frogs and dancers and protestors have been fighting fucking ICE here and have to some extent forced the bastards to go low profile. I'm glad that the decent people of Portland want to beat the MAGAt scum, want to damn Trump and all his works.

But...gang, look. ICE is still here. Still doing their evil shit. We haven't "stopped" them.

These damn people don't give a shit whether you feel empowered. They respect nothing but force and fear. If you can't face up to that beating them will require gaining the power to make them fear you, well...if they won't respect law and regulation - and they don't - and if they won't respect your votes - and they won't - what will you do then?

Songs are fine. But, as the song said, you can praise the Lord so long as you pass the ammunition. Real resistance to evil means faith and works. Empowerment is fine, so long as it also includes a healthy dose of steel.

What this meeting thing was?

Was not that. 

As another observer of famous clusterfucks might have said, "C'est ravissant, mais ce n'est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie." - It's cute, but it's not war: it's foolishness.

 Sounded better in the original French, too.

Frontiers 1914: Intermission

Still working on the "Frontiers 1914" piece(s), so that's ongoing. The issue right now is that the next section needs to be about the French war plans. We've looked at Germany and the evolution of what became the "Schlieffen Plan". The bookend for that needs to be France and the evolution of "Plan XVII".

That's...being kind of a pain in the ass.

There's a shit-ton of scholarship (popular and otherwise) about the seventeenth of the French war plans.

The lead-up to it, though?

Not so much.

We'll get there when I finally post it, but the tl:dr is that from about 1870 to about 1911 the French planning was centered around 1) the fortress belt of the "Sere de Rivieres" system in NE France as a 2) defense-first-and-counterattack overall scheme.

But in the second decade of the 20th Century the French military hierarchy - led by the then Chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre - changed this focus to a more aggressive offensive-first plan.

Supposedly this began with the revision of Plan XVI in September 1911, and came in force in full with the adoption of Plan XVII in the winter and spring of 1914.

There seems to be some major politico-military stuff associated with the changes that came before that, though, beginning with Plan XII in 1888 and especially involving Plan XV in 1904-06. I want details of this period, but all I can find on the Internet is pretty generic. I may have to run down some sort of dead-tree sources, and that takes time and more hand-work. I'm pushing it along.

(Update: Turns out there's a pretty important secondary source - the 1985 "War Plans of the Great Powers 1880-1914" - in the Portland State Library that is...wait for it...fucking closed because the fucking Gaza protests got out of hand and then the fucking Portland coppers swarmed in and completed the fucking destruction. So...not fucking good.)

The other "pushing-along" thing is divorce.

My soon-to-be-ex and I met with our financial planner. That went well, and she's working on the asset division the mediator recommended. We need to regroup with the mediator to move towards a settlement and, eventually, a final decree.

That's...saddening.

It's the final defeat for me, the admission of failure. The end of twenty-two years of marriage, and in that the loss of my lover, wife, and best friend. I grieve for that, and her. I wish I'd had the chance to repair the faults that resulted in the failure. I always will.

Meanwhile I'm hootched up in a mother-in-law apartment in the far edge of Northeast Portland. It's a very weird little mid-Century Ozzie-and-Harriet middle-class neighborhood in one of the most fucked-up parts of the sprawling blight that is East Portland. At some point I'll have to do a tour of this area. It's very much NOT "Portlandia". 

The surrounding area is poor and I'd say "rundown" but in all likelihood it wasn't ever very far up from where it is today. It probably went from farm fields to suburban slum to semi-urban slum. 

We probably don't have more skeevy homeless people than I did in North Portland. But here they feel more visible and frankly scarier; there seems to be more visibly-crazy and dangerous-looking gomers out here.

I'll have to post some photos from the truly bizarre NE 122nd Avenue Motorboat Graveyard, too. THAT's a real NE Portland oddity.

The hardest part of this move?

It's lonely.

I'm alone in a small apartment, with ex-best-friend, kids, even the fuckin' cat back in the Little House. I miss them all, even the cat waking me at oh-dark-thirty. I miss all the little interactions, the little kindnesses and gentleness of daily meetings and crossings. Waiting alongside the coffee brewing for a frowsy and sleep-soft woman to emerge from the bathroom. Passing snark from a busy daughter on her way, monosyllabic grunts from a son taking a gaming break.

It is what it is, I suppose.

I've signed up to volunteer at the local humane society to get my pet fix (lease says; no pets...). I've signed up for some sort of Post-60 political action organization ("Third Act"), though they don't seem to be doing much acting lately.

I’d do more political stuff if I wasn’t in Deep Blue Portland. We don’t really have a need to get out the Democratic vote; the Oregon GOP is so fucking looney – they were MAGAts before there were MAGAts – that they don’t have an electoral chance outside the yik-a-hoo parts of rural Oregon. And our four Electoral votes are likewise solid.

So I don’t feel like I can do much in the national races. I’ve got time but not money, and they can’t use my time.

I’m still pretty chapped that the race is as close as it is. Tubby is what we know he is, a gross, bloated, lying, psychopathic crook. He’s no better than he was eight years ago, and that he gets as much love from the wingnuts says more about them than him. But his new siderunner?

Jesus wept, could you have invented a more creepy, loathsome, spineless weirdo than Couchfucker Vance? What the hell does he offer that Tubby doesn’t? His weird breeding fetish that the press tries to sell as “caring for families”? The fuck..? He doesn’t give a shit about “families” any more than the rest of his Party of Personal Enrichment.

But I don’t expect the press to call him or any of them on that.

It's really worth pursuing how, as the current Harris campaign messaging points out, how deeply weird, creepy, and radical these "conservative" fucksticks are.

From their obsessive panty-sniffing of all kinds (from female reproduction to transgender bathroom business) to their bizarre fixation on "masculinity" to the intensity of their drive to shackle sex with breeding the wingnut politics of genitalia is, well...weird. Deeply, madly, truly strange.

I expect these fuckers to be politically and economically pro-Gilded-Age. They've always wanted to party like it's 1929.

But the culture war stuff?

It's borderline insane. And that it's not constantly derided as such is a massive failure on the part of the press (and any and everyone else who doesn't point it out). It should make everyone associated with it as popular as genital herpes.

I'm glad it's finally being at least marginally recognized and pointed to.

I guess I’m trying to be hopeful…but prepared to be disappointed. If the US public is willing to let these scum get away with their little Plutocracy Project 2025? Well…maybe I end up my post-divorce days in prison for rebellion.

I sure as hell hope not; I’m too creaky to make a good rebel.

Hope this finds you and yours busy and well enough. I had to laugh; on the way out of the grocery today the rent-a-cop asked me how it was going and without thinking I replied: “So far so good. But it’s early yet – lots of time for things to go wrong.”

That’s kind of my standard reply to that question and has been for years, which says a LOT about my outlook on life.

Maybe it’s an old sergeant thing.

I'll be back with more war plans in a bit.

Merry Leafmas!

Once a year the good people at the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation (i.e. the Streets people) come around and hoover up the leaves that fall in the streets and on the "city strip", the string of land between the outside of the sidewalk and the curb.

This is called "Leaf Day" because that's what it is; a single day (which varies depending on where you live) where this process takes place.

Ours here in the "97203" was yesterday, 12/18.

Note that the idea here is that the City is removing the "City's" leaves; the ones that fall on City property but are a more general mess and potential catchbasin plug.

So of course every Portlander worth their "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker cheats like a motherfucker; front yard, side yard, back yard...if a rake can reach it, the leaf falling in those private properties goes into the gutter for the City to haul off. Everyone politely pretends this doesn't happen.

So, like any good holiday, the key is in the anticipation and preparation; raking, sweeping, and blowing the leaves out into the street. Waking up early (or staying up late) to move cars and trucks out of the street out front to invite the City crew in.

And then the magic begins!

First the front-end loader shows up. The basket thing piles up the leaves and bundles them down to the street corner. There another loader with a standard bucket loads them into one of the City dump trucks cab-ranked nearby.

This, as you can imagine, is not really surgical. A lot of gunk and leaf debris remains behind:

That's why the water truck comes along and sprays down the street, washing this junk into the gutter.

Finally the sweep/vacc truck hoovers up this stuff, leaving the street sparkling clean for, well, at least the rest of the day.

And the wonder of :Leafmas is done for another year.

What's kind of sad is that I realized that "Leafmas" is as much or more of a genuine holiday for me than the big conventional holiday it's always adjacent to. Christmas is kind of "meh" for me. I have not a shred of religiousity, and the current American commercially bloated "Christmas" is an embarrassing  travesty.

But Leafmas?

It's both practical and satisfying, a sort of community ritual that pushes all my civic buttons. Like the ideals of religion, it brings us together in a common cause to make our world a bit better.

So a merry and peaceful Leafmas to all who celebrate!

H&I Mission

One of the now-long-forgotten Army things is the "harassment and interdiction" mission. This Texas A&M site sums up this artillery technique as it was used in Vietnam; "(unobserved fire which) engaged suspected targets with no more than a few rounds fired at random intervals throughout the night, and sometimes during the day."

My understanding is that a typical H&I target would have been a crossroads, or some similar linear intersection (bridge, paddy dikes, treelines), where the local S-2 thought that Charlie would be using to move around.

As the A&M site points out, while this sort of shooting could have been at least plausibly effective in a war where you had "enemy" roads, or crossroads, or bridges, doing this in a notional ally's house? NOT a very good idea. Your chance of blowing away some random villager was so high as to be nearly unavoidable compared to the likelihood of catching the NVA 309C Division in the middle of an admin move. 

Anyway, I don't have anything momentous to discuss. I'm threading my way through the Yarmouk references with the idea of getting something out before the end of September. What I really want to do is travel back in time and grab Abdallāh al-Azdī al-Baṣrī by the stacking swivel and choke him until he got a fucking editor! Dude! Seriously! I get that early Arabic writers were mostly in it for the poetry (that's the c.w. on a lot of early Islamic "historians" all the way up to Ottoman times, as I kept encountering writing up Constantinople 1453 and Vienna), but this is ridiculous.

In the meantime I didn't want to leave this joint untenanted, so...

First a quick personal note.

Had kind of a scare the other week. Sight went out temporarily in one eye. No more than three or four minutes, but the doc checked my blood pressure and things there were not good, so off to E.R. I went for the full meal; CT scan, EKG, blood work, all of it.

The end result was:
1) No idea about the vision, even after numerous pokes and peeks at the eye clinic. The term "ocular migrane" was tossed about but in truth nobody really knows.
2) I'm now on BP meds. So far, better, but not perfect. Need to drop weight, too. That'll be fun.

Other than that, the second creature to find itself in trouble was the big fig tree out by the back sideyard...

This thing was a cute little sapling when Mojo bought the house more than twenty years ago. Nobody here really likes figs, so it was just kind of an unminded but seasonally-messy nuisance for much of the ensuing couple of decades...until it got freaking huge. It shaded out the whole back yard, dropped fruit (which was now too high to pick) all through the autumn that drew crowds of aggressive yellowjackets, and we generally a nuisance.

So we lopped the bulk of the thing down:

But there we were stuck.

A handsaw worked well enough for the upper parts of the trunks. But the lower? Yike. That meant power.

Chainsaw power, to be precise.

So off to the local rental store and back with a nifty little electric saw that proceeded to take the bulk of the damn thing down to the ground...

...where I then applied the 21st Century version of the Roman Plow; a full bottle of Round-Up poured directly over the remains.

That will probably have to be repeated several more times this year - the sonofabitch is full of vitality and has already shrugged off a soaking with this poison.

But who's higher on the evolutionary scale, goddamnit. Two of us enter, one's gonna leave, and it ain't you, tree.

Let's see...what else should I send a round out at..?

Oh, yeah; this thing turned up in the World's Worst Newspaper the other day:

Tl:dr, the minor league ballclub that plays out on Portland's western 'burbs is being held up by the big leagues' ploy to extort more money out of the little communities where they play. The bigs are forcing their minor league slaves to force their local governments to pay for ballfields or lose their teams.

Some guy named Knudsen has a nice little takedown of this extortion racket. Keep in mind that, as he mentions, 1) the current minor league ballpark is only ten years old, that it 2) has the capacity for over 4,000 fans, and 3) typical crowds at these Hillsboro team games runs about half that, at best.

So Oram is all in on getting tax dollars for this gimmick.

Which is insane, given that supposedly we can't afford to get our hoboes into apartments or keep our junkies from scaring the normies, but which is also business as usual for the whole sports-owners-and-politicians-frolic-through-the-public-trough tradition.

I'm hoping that the gang over at Field of Schemes will have more on this disgrace before the City Fathers out in Hillsboro can start backing up the dump truck full of cash to the loading dock at Tonking Field.

And speaking of politicians and cash...

Oregon's governor has muscled into the homeless "crisis", shaking out a "task force" that's supposed to provide recommendations on how to rid the parks and streets frequented by the Good People of Portland of smelly poor people.

The whole business is secret, run as a private meeting because it's working under the local business alliance. Many of the usual non-profit and non-commercial suspects (i.e. organizations that work with or advocate for homeless people) are shut out.

My guess is that the business people will recommend the usual - more sweeps, more laws, more jails, more shelters - instead of the simple and practical solution: "tax rich people and businesses, fund jobs programs and cheap housing". That's how these characters usually roll; it's never worked before. That's never stopped them. I trust that the latest round of political circle-jerking will produce nothing practical.

I've seldom been disappointed.

And speaking of politicians living down to their expectations...

Dahlia Lithwick has a good piece at Slate (paywalled, I think, but if you don't go there often I think you can get it free...) that points out how fucked we are because Mittens is as "good" as it gets in the GQP and he's exactly the sniveling piece of pond scum you'd think if you remember his presidential run.

Bottom line? He wants a tongue bath for saying mean things about Tubby...while doing nothing substantial to interfere with all the shit Tubby and his cult are doing. Tax cuts for richies? Sure! Privatize? He's all in! Fuck the poor and the sick? Anytime! 

Oh, and speaking of shitheels...

Here's the thing about this.

First, Boebert is an asshole. Not because of who she is but because of what she does in Congress. This idiocy doesn't change that.

Second, though, is that this says something truly sad about her intelligence.

Because I love Broadway. I've been to two big touring musicals in the past several years; Wicked, back in 2021, and Hadestown this past year. Both wonderful, both memorable, both parts of my life I'll treasure.

Both expensive as a sonofabitch.

I took the Girl, and for both shows we had orchestra side-aisle seats, and for both the seats ran something like $150-$200 each. IIRC orchestra center seats ran $200-300 and up, first balcony and boxes even more - $400-500? Anyway...a LOT of money.

Point is, this isn't 1984, when I could drop into the TKTS booth in Times Square and nick a Sweeney Todd seat for thirty bucks. Musical theater is a big-money event, and tickets are hard to get.

To go to a big Broadway show to vape and grab ass? To be obnoxious to the point where you geet kicked out?

That's just fucking bone stupid. You might as well just set fire to a pile of twenties.

I mean...copping feels in a dark theater is a great tradition...for the matinee of Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not blaming the woman for being an idiot.

I blame her voters for electing the dumb fuck.

And here we all are.

Jesus wept.

Success and Failure

The Girl was a star at the soundboard of last night's production of Failure: A Love Story, running something like 30 wireless mikes and a complex recorded musical score like a pro.

So...the show for which she so flawlessly put the sound together?

 

First, it's a very odd little bit of work. Here's what the playwright says about it:

"A magical, musical fable where, in the end, the power of love is far greater than any individual's successes or failures."

That's a pretty roundabout way of describing the plot. Bottom line: it's a Twenties period piece (and there's a LOT of "Twenties" music and other stage business to remind you) in which the main actor shows up after about a quarter hour of exposition and proceeds to meet and fall in love with three sisters, all of whom die in some sort of bizarre way before the lovers do more than steal a kiss or three.

There's a lot more. Music. Dancing. Talking clocks and animals (and the actress who played the snake kicked ass, I have to say). The Chicago River. Johnny Weismuller.

It's one of those sort of "magical realism" things, and there was a lot of fun dialog and clever bits of stagecraft and let's say that it tried hard. 

 

But the construction of the play was fundamentally flawed. 

 

Unless the lead actor is utterly brilliant, the requirement for the character to meet, love, and lose to a series of bizarre deaths three sisters in 145 minutes is just too impossible to make work as genuine drama.

 

If you were playing it for complete farce? 

 

Fine. 

 

But the playwright wanted to make it a Deep Statement about Love, Life and Death and a high school cast just couldn't make that work. 

 

Shit, John Malkovich in his prime probably couldn't have. Maybe. But it'd be a hell of a hard pull. The playwright made it damn deadly difficult.

 

The real problem wasn't that the author made a Deep Statement about Love, Life and Death. The real problem was that the author wanted to be both glib and clever and deep. The progression of meet-love-die was just too scrambled, too hasty, and too inhuman. People don't love, or lose, the way the stage people were written.

 

In particular the sisters' deaths were 1) too repetitious and 2) too quickly succeeded by the next dead sister. Sure, there was some facile discussion about how knowing our death was inevitable didn't make the life that preceded it a failure, about loving while knowing the looming Hand of Fate.

 

But the need to move the plot along to the next bit of clever stage business meant that there was no real reflection, no real thinking or pondering about death and it's inevitable end of love and life, of loss, of grief and grieving.

The lead actor had no time to do any of that, even if he'd been a Broadway-grade star instead of a nice kid in high school; he had to move right along to falling in love with the next doomed sister.

Again...an actor with tremendous skills and a genuinely manic edge might have made that work as a sort of deeply cynical and fatalistic comment on the folly of our pretensions to eternal love and the Meaning of Life. A sort of "live for today" kind of spurning of The Vale of Shadow.

 

Or someone with the gift to portray a deep, unlighted sorrow might have shed some sort of dark light on how we're born owing God a death, and have no hope to defend ourselves when He comes calling to collect, and how that makes our lives a lingering grief, a deferred appointment with sorrow.

I've been in love with live theater for forty years. When it's good - and I've seen some stunningly good theater - it has an immediacy and an impact no film or book or music has.

But when it's not - and for all that this show tried honorably and hard, and the young cast did as well as they could (and my kiddo was a soundboard star!) - it's no more than facile and easily forgotten words on an empty stage.

Kind of too bad, because the cast and crew worked hard and well.

 

Sometimes, though, all of our best efforts and intentions wither in the bud, never to flower.

And that might be a better summary of the play that anything the playwright intended.

Ice

We had our annual December ice storm last week. Predictably Portlanders panicked, abandoned their vehicles on the freeways, and huddled around the gas heater when the limbs came down and the power went out.

We did none of those, spending the day Friday and Saturday sitting indoors waiting out the cold.

When we did emerge the damage was pretty photogenic.

The Girl's comment?

"Yeah. I can see how that might not have fit inside the green compost bin."

It's raining now, by the way. It's winter, but it's still Oregon.

Home for the Holidays

The contract work I was doing crashed last week, so I've had a genuinely "retired" sort of holiday all last week.

It's been nice.

I've continued to wake early because, well, I like waking early. I make a pot of coffee and hang out at the dinner table, reading the news or just reading, sipping the good brew and watching the day slowly begin.

This week the leaves finally began to fall.

That's not a good thing.

The neighbor's yard features a ginormous bigleaf maple. She gets most of the fallout, but we get enough to make the backyard a mess of sopping maple leaves. The Boy - who has no job outside his gaming - got roped into the collection of these damn things. Since he's nineteen and has never really had to work to standard his leaf-raking is...sketchy. So Drachma Kitty and I had to come out and pitch in.

We've done this twice now. The rains that came in last night look like they've finally knocked the last of the leaves down. So there's another day of this ahead of us.

That's not exactly a thrill to look forward to.

But the alternative is a yard full of bottomless mud.

Oh, there was one "work" sort of thing last week, but it was really just sad.

A project that I'd worked on before I retired went to fieldwork. The PM had wanted me to drill the thing, and without me to sit the rig he'd gotten a cherry staff person from one of the Puget Sound offices. He did get me to review her logs and they were...not great.

Should I come in and look at the soil samples? I asked. I might be able to work out some sort of actual stratigraphy; I know the site and the soils. Sure, he replied, so Tuesday morning early I went into my old lab and looked for them.

Nothing.

I asked around; turns out the staff person had never been in the Portland shop. Maybe the samples were in the Salem office? So off I went in one of the company trucks, down I-5 to the little rental office in downtown Salem where this PM holes up. Went in, looked around.

Nothing.

An hour after I got back to Portland the PM send me an e-mail. Oh, I just got this, he says. 

It was a forwarded copy of a message from the staff person saying that she had reviewed the samples and logs and wanted lab assignments. I guess she took the samples back to Tacoma, said the PM.

Yeah, the empty spaces in Portland and Salem kinda clued me in about an hour ago, I replied.

You bet your ass I charged that job every second of my wasted morning.

But that's a big reason I retired when I did. This guy is the chief engineer of the Portland office, and it's perfectly in his "management" style that he had no fucking idea where the samples of the drilling for this sensitive and potentially-hazardous investigation even were and wasted four hours of project time for something he should have never authorized.

Oh, well. His circus, his monkeys now.

Got up Thursday and watched the Macy's Parade. I didn't have the marching mariachi band on my bingo card, but they were pretty goddamn awesome.

And at least the CBS broadcast showed the actual parade. Fuck you, NBC, you worthless gits.

This year I did an actual turkey, as opposed to a breast-only. The Girl has finally developed a liking for the actual tasty parts of the critter (the dark meat...) so I got the smallest one of these monsters I could find and cooked it the way my mother taught me; sealing in the juices with a hot oven and then basting like a madman.

It turned out good as turkey can get.

That, in turn, meant the return of a long-dormant Lawes family tradition; the boiling of the carcass.

My mother, child of the Depression and the Big War that she was, refused to waste a scrap of food go to waste, would use the turkey carcass to make broth and from that some sort of soup, usually a turkey-vegetable-barley sort of thing.

My sister and I, children of the plump Sixties that we were, made merciless mockery of this housewifery. We called the broth and the resulting soup "turkey bone gruel", gruel being the word we thought best symbolized the penny-pinching poverty and misery that the gruel represented

Mind you, it was good soup. Kids, they're just little fuckers sometimes.

Speaking of which...

I went into the Boy's room last night to shut down the gaming and asked about his application to the Portland police cadet program. He replied that he was no longer pursuing that program, but intended to go to college.

......

I'll believe it when I see it. He needs to do the work to find out how much he needs to do, how much it'll cost, and where he needs to go. Will he? I have no fucking idea.

The afternoon of Thanksgiving Day was bright and calm, and I went out into the yard to enjoy the temporarily-leafless vistas.

I sat in the old rope swing, idle since my progeny got too old to swing in it, and just took in the sunny afternoon, quiet and at peace. But also at a place I'd never been before in that familiar backyard.

What lies ahead for me? For us?

I don't know. Perhaps the most fraught part of this whole "retirement" thing is that I don't know how it goes.

I've been a wage slave for thirty years, ever since I left the Army.

I don't know any other life.

But now I'm going to find out.

Christmas Day, 2021

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

~ T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

There was a time when I would struggle out of sleep on Christmas morning, desperate for caffeine amid jittering children impatient for loot.

Today? Nah. Just me and Little Cat, coffee and tuna pate' and soccer re-runs in the silent morning house. Why the hell was Qatar playing in the CONCACAF Cup semifinal? Fucker was in Eurasia last I checked. Fucking FIFA cash-grab, I suspect.

Finally the crew staggered in and the presents were distributed and everyone got down to the hard business of Christmas Day - napping (parents), gaming (The Boy), and something artistic (The Girl). The cats begged for food, prowled randomly, or napped, although Drachma did have a moment with his new catnip toy:

.

He had to sleep it off under the tree...

Late in the afternoon my Bride concluded that we needed a brisk walk, so we headed out into the gray, rainy, high-thirties evening, down to the little woodlot waste ground along the fringes of St. Johns to walk off excess Christmas Spirit.

And proceeded to immediately come across a dump of cut-up commercial weed.

"Oh Christmas weed, oh Christmas weed, how lovely are your branches..!"

Frankly it was miserable; cold, wet, with a nasty east wind that was just enough to chill any part of you that wasn't covered.

The Girl and I turned back just past the treeline in the distance of the photo above. The Bride kept on going just long enough to show us what weenies we were being, and I'm totally okay with that. That was a rotten ramble.

But we got home to the warmth and the glow of the lights, and the promise of the quiet evening to come.

Trail of Tears

Just to the west of the Little House there's a City park, the Peninsula Crossing Trail, that runs along the east bank of what we call "The Cut", the immense railroad cut that runs through North Portland from the Willamette River side - where the vast Albina freight yards are located - to the Columbia.

The Bride and I discovered it soon after it was opened in 1996. Back then I could still ride a bike and we did, enjoying the quiet wooded trail between the busy and largely-bike-lane-free-at-the-time North Portland arterial streets.

That's actually a pretty good picture of how the trail would have looked for, oh, about a decade or so.

Then Portland's "homeless problem" metastasized. 

Today the trail looks more like this:

 

Most housed North Portlanders won't stray onto the trail anymore; it's not worth the debris and the random whacko and the ride is no longer peaceful and pretty.

Like most Portlanders, I'm frustrated and angry. Almost every public space is now inhabited, and nearly all the habitations are a sour sprawl of...well, everything; filthy clothes, bags of trash, broken bicycles and cars...they're trashpits. There's a reason nobody ever went for a walk in the city dump.

But, like most Portlanders, I'm also baffled by what to do about these camps.

I mean...I know the real answer. It means building a mass of cheap, low-cost rental and housing units. It means staffing organizations that will provide support and structure for the people moved out of the camps and into the housing - both in the form of "support" like addiction programs and medical and/or psychiatric care - and "structure", like nannying them to take their meds and go to the job training programs.

But...here's a good example of why even with all this - and I should note that "all this" is a fever dream; nobody in Portland will vote the taxation it would take to do all that - I despair of figuring out a way to deal with this homeless mess.

The link above takes you to the tale of one "Gary O'Connor", who lived and died - violently - along a similar trail in Southeast Portland. 

The article tries hard to make O'Connor into a sympathetic character, but can't avoid noting that:

"O’Connor couldn’t read or write and resorted to stealing...(h)e struggled with addiction...Court records show O’Connor had burglary convictions in Multnomah County and at the time of his death had a warrant out for his arrest in Clackamas County, where he was accused of giving police a false name and criminal trespassing."

So let's assume you get this guy into a subsidized house. You get him a into a drug addiction program. You get him back in school - at 45 years old, mind - to learn to freaking read and write and do simple math.

What then? Who's going to hire this guy? A former crook and tweaker who lived half his life illiterate? Frankly, I'm guessing you'd have to assign a sort of parole officer/social worker/nanny to the dude full time to keep him from deciding that stealing bikes was less difficult and demanding than his job stocking shelves at Kroger.

Multiply that by thousands or even tens of thousands; people with health issues who need medical help, people with drug issues, people with emotional issues or mental health issues. People who, honestly, prefer to steal rather than punch a clock.

I mean...to be brutal, if this guy was a pet you'd take him to the vet and have him put down. He'd just be too much trouble.

But he's not a pet, he's a person. A troubling, troublesome person, but a person. So you kind of have a moral dilemma on your hands. He's a huge sink of time, money, and trouble, and one who is very like to reward all that investment with...very little. 

But if you don't make that investment, there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space.