Exercising while listening to music and watching tragic news on CNN is a collision of dissonance.
Picture the scene: two dozen bodies bouncing along on cardio equipment in front of six health club TVs. I’m on the elliptical machine. Music blaring from my ear buds drowns out all other sound, even my panting breaths. My eyes are fixed on the seige at Mumbai, playing out in video images and closed-caption text. But my thoughts careen from one unrelated subject to the next.
The Taj Mahal hotel shudders with explosions and belches black smoke set to an inadvertent soundtrack, Death Cab for Cutie’s “Your Heart Is an Empty Room.” The song doesn’t fit what’s on the screen, though one line jolts me: Burn it down, till the embers smoke on the ground. Read More
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Hate knows no boundaries, judging from a map compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s especially disconcerting to see the presence of hate groups in my city, Portland.
But I’m not naïve about such matters. After all, I grew up mainly in the South. Not that racism wasn’t rampant in the Northwest. I’ve read extensively about the Ku Klux Klan’s robust activities in Oregon during the early part of the last century. Read More
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“Daddy, I see raccoons,” Atticus says over breakfast today, his third birthday.
The raccoons frequently visit our garage roof and use the ladder leading to our Portland backyard. Read More
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I‘ve been known to travel with a laptop computer. I’ve also been known to write and store on its hard drive the most private of thoughts, not to mention personal financial information.
Now I read that the Department of Homeland Security has bestowed upon itself the right to search computer hard drives and other digital storage devices belonging to people entering the country. Without probable cause. Read More
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He’s no wacko. This friend of a friend is rational, educated, and well read. Personable, too. Yet his vision of the world’s immediate future, though short of apocalyptic, is bleak.
We’ve met several times in small social settings. At the first I learned he was an avid proponent of the Peak Oil school of thought and liberally shared his views: the world is beginning to run out and we’ll soon see the effects, not just in soaring fuel prices but food shortages and, eventually, economic collapse. He spoke not grimly but with the determination of someone certain of the road ahead. That was three years ago. Read More
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A little publicity goes a long way. In May, I wrote a story for The Oregonian about two Portland men starting a new business, City Garden Farms. Their idea: grow vegetables in the urban yards of people willing to participate in return for a weekly supply of the harvest.
Their entrepreneurial zeal impressed me. Their philosophy impressed me more: grow food on small plots within a few miles of consumers, minimizing the environmental effects of transportation. Read More
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I‘m a terrorist. No doubt about it. I didn’t want to go over to the Dark Side, but some forces are too powerful to resist.
The Obama Fist Bump nailed me, or OFB as we converts call it.
It happened today on a Portland pedestrian bridge over Interstate 5. I was among throngs of people walking bikes across the Failing Street Bridge. We were part of Sunday Parkways, a trek along six miles of streets closed to cars for six hours.
Wheeling his bike toward me beneath a gray sky was a harmless looking dude. A skinny summer-time Santa with an Obama sign on his bike. Behind me, Suzame, my wife, saw the sign and yelled out the candidate’s name over the din of cars streaming past beneath us. Santa stopped next to me and held out his clenched fist. Read More
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Unlike past wars, the Iraq war is an abstraction. We rarely glimpse the unspeakable suffering. Most of the media have lost interest. Some stalwarts remain, chronicling events beyond our comprehension. As much as I hate this war, I’ve never let what happens there penetrate my comfortable life here. Until now.
Reality intruded last night when Suzame, my wife, showed me this photograph: Read More
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Odd what catches one’s eye. In Saturday’s Oregonian, a story about a man’s death at the coast invited a quick read. Why I’m not sure. The story was terse, as such stories usually are and have to be because of limited space: a for-the-record summary of another tragedy, another person dying too young.
This morning I read a piece written by the man’s close friend, posted on an indispensable web site about Portland’s robust food and drink scene. (Both men are/were restaurateurs.) A dispassionate account with passion roiling beneath the surface. Read More
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I hope this hauntingly beautiful video shot in San Francisco inspires copycats in Portland. Artist Paul “Moose” Curtis uses stencils and a pressure washer to transform the ravages of urban pollution and time into pastoral scenes. “Nature’s voice. . .is written in dirt like it would be written in blood,” he says.
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The nation’s last charismatic political figure representing Hope was gunned down forty years ago today in Los Angeles. It was one week after I graduated from high school, and I was sleeping late. My summer job hadn’t begun. My brother David burst into my bedroom and woke me with the news.
At seventeen, politics interested me, and I was getting swept up in Bobby Mania. His impassioned anti-Vietnam War message had started eating away at the government propaganda I’d been force fed in civics class. But I was more drawn to his willingness to tell hard truths about our country. And I had succumbed to the strength he exuded. People felt it in his words. Some saw it in his eyes, including a Russian poet who described them as “two blue dots of will and anxiety.”
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