I’d been told that an acquaintance’s son had arrived home safe from Iraq, his first overseas Army stint. When I asked the acquaintance today about his son’s experience, he filled in the story with details, details that remind me of what we all know but rarely ponder: inches and seconds often add up to the difference between life and death.
The young man had been driving a Humvee. Moving slowly, the vehicle hit an IED. The blast hurled the front wheels more then 250 feet. This slowed the vehicle, and when another IED exploded a few seconds later, the force was centered beneath the front of the Humvee rather than the occupants. The difference? A broken arm, concussion, and minor burns instead of dismemberment.
As the father told the story, a smile never left his face.
Thinking about the universe is like staring at the sun. One has to quickly turn away from the incomprehensible vastness; the combined sensations of insignificance and loneliness are too much to bear. Oddly, this video graphically illustrating the vastness makes it less painful to contemplate. But the 3-D effect of drifting past uncountable galaxies is beyond humbling, especially considering that all are moving farther from Earth at stunning speed. And the video raises the inevitable questions that contemplating the universe brings: how is it possible, and why are we here? Watching the video should be required of those among us who are perpetually puffed up with self-importance.
After closely following the mainstream media’s superficial coverage of the presidential campaign, I’m not surprised that much in Rolling Stone’s damning new portrayal of John McCain’s life and career isn’t widely known.
The piece feels like a hatchet job but only because the sheer volume of negative information is so shocking. I’ve read some of it elsewhere but mostly in bits. To see it aggregated in a single piece is jaw dropping. Read More
For about the tenth time in a week, I’ve been hit up for money by the Democratic National Committee. Solitictors call me on the phone, send me emails, corner me outside the grocery — you name it.
This evening, a nice but persistent young woman came to my door to ask again. When I told her I’ve given several times to Barack Obama, she said: “He just raised $51 million in July.” As in he has enough, so how about spreading it around to all the other Democrats running for office.
Her approach irked me, and she knew it. Yes, she’s working for a worthy cause and has a tough job, but that’s hardly the approach to take.
My irritation faded a short time later when I found this “story” about Obama’s half-brother, Cooter, threatening to derail his campaign. Sadly, some people will believe it. Obama needs all the money he can muster.
Easily distracted, I am. Especially when I find a web site based on an idea brilliant in its simplicity and stunning in its execution.
Welcome to Constant Setting, featuring a single photograph taken in a place where the sun is setting at the moment you view it. (As I write, the fiery sky of Bora-Bora is one click away from filling my screen.) You also can get a map of the locale. Read more here about the concept, summed up in the tagline: Simply because the sun is always setting.
When I rise in the morning, I’ll watch the sun go down — somewhere, and start my day with wanderlust.
Not often do I read about a sixteen-year-old boy and immediately wonder what he will do doing thirty years hence. I hope I’m around long enough to see how life unfolds for Zac Sunderland, who’s attempting to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world.
Zac’s departure two months ago from Marina del Ray in California escaped me. Now I’m following his progress via his blog and its link to Google Earth, which vividly pinpoints his location and route.
When I was sixteen, I had trouble driving a car straight. Too many decades later, I’m living vicariously through Zac as he battles the contradictory demons of storms and no wind in the middle of the Pacific — alone but so very much alive.
Some news stories I can’t get out of my head. They keep reverberating with questions.
Take the post-mortem wishes of two men, one an astronaut wanting to return to space, the other an actor astronaut wanting to go there for the first time. Read More
When I spotted this trash can with a message today on Northeast 28th and Couch, I immediately thought of its broad theme: Portland’s intense recycling and reuse ethos.
Now I realize it might be a so-obvious-it’s-subtle hint: look inside, stupid, and get rich. Or maybe part of a treasure map, and the long shadow points the way. Read More
Tufts of white fluff drift over my goldfish pond, on the way somewhere. Escapees from a cottonwood tree perhaps, fanning out on this cloudless and cool Portland morning. Another pastoral moment deep in the city.
From my neighbors’ century-old linden tree comes an incessant chirp. Beneath the shroud of limbs, I can’t see the bird but its notes are familiar: distress.
A silent bird comes into view, a juvenile Cooper’s hawk on a thick limb. Its head bobs down then up, pauses, then resumes. Each movement frees little white feathers that join a wind-blown procession toward the pond.
Spying me, the hawk lifts off, baby bird brunch in its beak, and disappears through the green canopy.
The other bird, hidden, still chirps, each note now a lament for what’s been lost.
When I first saw Jason Tozer’s photographs, including this one used with his permission, I thought they were from a newly discovered solar system.
Tozer’s work is a stunning reminder that we think we see so much so clearly but actually see little. Hidden worlds abound at our fingertips, their existence beyond our grasp.
I’ll never think of my little boy‘s bubbles from a bottle the same again as they waft past on a warm breeze, Jupiters and ringless Saturns adrift.
You can learn more about how Tozer shot his images here.
Rocket 88 is blazing through the Peacock Room with some high-octane psychobilly with flamboyant frontman Michael Bales in some tight shiny pants. . .
This news arrived in my email today via Google Alerts, courtesy of an entertainment web site run by my former employer in Orlando. Before I moved to Portland, I occasionally received phone calls intended for him, a member of my same-name brethren. No surprise: the calls left the impression that his life was edgier than mine.
Besides the Rocket 88 singer, I’ve received email alerts about others who share the name, including the Indiana guy appealing his theft conviction, the assistant producer of a film in which people spontaneously change genders, the veteran Florida fishing guide, and the PhD student immersed in biomedical informatics at Columbia University.
The emails make me wonder who they are, beyond the online snippets and snapshots. Do common traits accrue from something as arbitrary and artificial as a name? Would we like each other if we met? Read More
I posted last week about the Rapture after finding a man’s suit abandoned on church steps in downtown Portland. Today, I stumbled upon this portentous scene on the edge of a lush Willamette Valley wheat field south of Portland:
I had stopped to photograph a long train hauling fresh-cut logs (the tracks are in the background). When I finished, I looked up and saw the three baby shoes on a manhole cover. Clearly they weren’t a failed installation of shoefiti — no wires overhead.
Now I’m rethinking the irreverence of my earlier Rapture comments. Two stark sightings in five days add up to more than coincidence. Not exactly prophecy. But what?
My mother never made it west of the Mississippi. Until now. As I write, countless specks of her are in San Francisco Bay and the Pacific, bound for who knows where on the lunar whim of tides.
She’s used to the water. When she died in 2003, my two brothers and I scattered some of her ashes in Apalachicola Bay a few steps from her house on St. George Island in the Florida Panhandle and in the lake where we grew up in Central Florida. The rest she wanted deposited in San Francisco. But she waited patiently in Portland, a protracted layover in a plastic container hidden away in my office cabinet. Atop the cabinet rests her senior class photograph (class of 1948, Bosse High School, Evansville, Indiana).
My mother – her friends called her Joanie – loved sentimental songs. When I was a kid, she played Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco†over and over. This was her only connection to the city, and the images and emotions evoked in the 1962 song touched her in ways I don’t claim to understand. Read More
