Over the five days of my trip I must have spent no more than half an hour alone. Much of our time was spent driving from one pretty place to another where we would hop out of the car, snap a few pictures and drive off again. An obligation to record rather than an impulse to appreciate.

And so, with that, I announce that I'm taking a break from this weird blogging world. Maybe it's a result of spending so many back-to-back hours with my partially deaf 94 year old grandmother and my loud, argumentative mother, but silence and privacy now sound like the ultimate ideal.

Thanks for visiting.

Over the river and through the woods. . .
It is predicted to be 85 degrees on Sunday at my grandmother's house. Hell ya. I will be there, soaking up every wave of sunlight I can get.

We will also be taking grandma with us down to Carmel and Monterey so my father can get his birthday present: a round of golf on one of those fancy courses overlooking the ocean. While I'm sure my father will be as giddy as a stoic New England businessman can get, I find the whole thing fairly obscene. At least he won't be playing Pebble Beach. A round of golf there is $500 and you can only play if you stay at least 2 nights at their lodge where the cheapest room is $675.

My father hasn't been longing to play one of these courses. His sense of self-worth isn't tied up in a swanky loop around the links, but there are people out there who depend on this stuff. So much of our culture admires this kind of excessive wealth. There seems to be no way to diminish the allure.

I look forward to seeing my grandmother and parents, but I'd be just as happy seeing them here in my slanty shanty with my common law and my cats. These are my riches and they are plenty.

Here's my new ring by jeweler Carol Greiwe. The stone is a weird agate I picked out. To me, it looks like a little rural scene, a scarecrow in a field or a tree in a marsh.

Carol makes some mighty fine baubles. Check out her wares at her new website. She does custom work and will treat you like a queen.

Happiness
by Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Ah, urban living. I know the yard I have would be considered vast in other cities. It's a nice, manageable size if I were a person with garden manageing skills. I am not. I spent the afternoon planting a few scared looking plants in my front yard and pulling more weeds in the back yard. I am highly aware of not knowing what I'm doing, but it must get done.

Instead of beach houses and tropical palapas, I am now focusing my procrastinating powers on building some small semi-private sanctuary out of this bland patch of earth. Hide. Hide. Hide. This picture doesn't even show the worst of it. The view out my office window, the window I sit next to as I write, is five feet from my neighbor's crowded, cluttered patio. It's quiet over there now, but as the warm weather returns it will fill with squealing teens and middle-aged drunks watching baseball.

I've got to get my fortress growing. I've got some shy characters over here. They scare easily and don't like rowdy parties.

Periodic cat photo:
Here's Mao trying to get into Middlemarch. She had about as much trouble with it as I did. She gave up and decided to play with her toy mouse instead. I gave up and tried Tolstoy.

If only I could make these blooms my umbrella. Fat pink joy.

The New York Times has this page up. 4,000 dead U.S troops.

Meanwhile, there's the civilian death toll. Over 82,00, at least.

Go ahead, vote for McCain.

Yet another monster going up in The Pearl. There's so many now that one more doesn't matter. The stretch of empty field and railroad yard between the Broadway Bridge and the Fremont has long been consumed. Who lives in these places?

The condo down the street from me has three tenants and the rest sit empty. The signs have gone from "For Sale" to "Price Reduced" to "For Rent/Lease." The only activity I've seen over there has been a small local production company that rented one of the units out for a shoot of some sort. So now, the building so many neighbors worried wouldn't fit in with the local aesthetic, fits in even less. It sits there, with an open pit next to it where another condo has failed to appear. A giant mistake.

Last year at this time I was preparing for a week away in Yelapa, Mexico. This year, my friends are going back without me. I feel the lack of tropical sun on my skin. I crave that bone-deep warmth. That said, I could also live quite happily in this permanent state of twilight blue. Berries. Ink. Sapphires.

The beach and the bay and the two brief moments I was out enjoying them on my trip to Lincoln City. The retreat was a success. Thoughts thought. Writing written. Struggles, triumphs, whiskey and a big ass bathtub. I honestly can't say that I'd want to do that kind of intense thinking all day every day. It felt good to get back to my physical work this afternoon. But I'd be willing to take one out of every four weeks and hide away with a project and a view. If only I could find someone willing to pay for it.

I hate to leave town when Taylor St. is about to burst out with my favorite celebration of pink blooms, but I'm off to the beach and another round of revisions. It's just a stack of typed pages, but I feel as though I'm about to meet up with some old high school friends. What will they be like? Will we get along? Do I really want to spend four days all alone with them? No choice now. Dig in and make the best of it.

photo by Herman Krieger

A new study shows that for every dollar Oregon spends on higher education, a dollar and six cents is spent on prisons. Look here to see how much your state cares, then let your state legislators know what you think.

Ever feel like you're driving around in a beater van with painted over windows and no brakes? Okay, so it's a bit of a stretch. Still, it feels like I've been bumping around inside this shitmobile for over a month now, waiting to hit something solid. I'm hoping that landing is solid but sweet when I head to the coast in a few days for another round of novel revisions.

A poem by Robert Creeley

The Farm

Tips of celery,
clouds of

grass–one
day I'll go away

In a dream, this would be my backyard. A forest of timber bamboo. In reality, this is one small grove on the extensive grounds of Bamboo Garden in North Plains, OR. Too open to truly hide in, it would still be a good green filter against a rush of miseries, a good tease for the imagination.

The top picture was taken a few days ago out at Sauvie Island, home of pick your own berries, bird sanctuaries and buck naked fairies. We walked along the Columbia, saw a whole host of pretty little snakes and admired the distant but crisp view of Mount St. Helens.

The bottom picture is from 1980 when St. Helen's erupted. Those aren't clouds. That's ash. I find it fascinating. Imagine the energy it takes to blow the top off a mountain. In my fourteen plus years here, I've never been to see it. That's unbearably lame. It is, however, top of my long list of Pacific Northwest destinations to get to before the end of the year.

Reading an old issue of The Paris Review, I came across an interview with Jack Gilbert. This guy has it figured out, or at least, a good way of trying to figure it out:

The poem is about the heart. Not the heart as in "I'm in love" or "my girl cheated on me"–I mean the conscious heart, the fact that we are the only things in the entire universe that know true consciousness. We're the only things–leaving religion out of it–we're the only things in the world that know spring is coming.

Later, the interviewer asks Gilbert what, other than himself, is the subject of his poems.

Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don't know why people limit it to riches, pride, security–all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the the house. And they have to have a car. You can't see anything from a car. It's moving too fast. People take vacations. That's their reward–the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives–until it's too late. Though I understand that often you don't have a choice.

Makes me want to pick up and move to Italy, move to the beach, move towards some slower place. Makes me wonder about all the times I've chosen security over adventure, comfort over joy. Makes me wonder what it would take for me to make a different choice.

I now own tan pants. Sigh. I long ago came to terms with being shunned from the punk rock club, but I'm now officially banned from inclusion amongst the artsy/fartsy pre-goth alternatypes. Of course, the transition happened ages ago. The thrift store dresses got chucked. The amount of polyester in my wardrobe has been minimal for years. Still, tan pants? Having grown up surrounded by L.L. Bean models, I always feared this moment would come and now it has, but that's what I get for trying to make my pants from last winter make it through this winter. Slim pickins off the winter sale rack. Shoot me if I post a pic of my new duck boots.

Is it obvious now, how I'm in full avoidance of the matters at hand? There's big trouble brewing in my latest novel revision. Brewing can be good, of course. A good boil can do wonders. However, I fear the whole thing will have to be chucked in the end, an unpalatable mess. Humph.

The rain may come in slow and steady for the rest of the week, but today we have daphne. Regardless of what the calendar says and ignoring the pale crocus blooms, the first intoxicating hit of those tart pink buds means it's spring in Portland. Praise be.