No, Thursday's Out....

It’s not a great article, but the HEADLINE for the article about an upcoming play at Portland Center Stage - “ Directing Dracula Takes Guts ” - has been making me smile for days. I realize it’s not perfect – directing Dracula ought to take something like bloody-mindedness, or even (if one wasn't afraid even to pronounce it) sangfroid, right? Or maybe STAGING Dracula. But regardless, I still liked it. Willamette Week has always had good headline-crafters. In other cheerful doings, I took a very long one-day drive in a big loop from Fulton Canyon (on the Columbia) up through Wasco, Cottonwood Canyon, Condon, Fossil and Spray (aren't those great names), and all the way to the Blue Basin trail in the John Day National Monument.  (As my friend Julie observed of the Grand Canyon, "it defeats the camera." Blue Basin is like that.) Then I circled back via Mitchell, where Tiger Town Brewing had good beer and excellent pub food. Part of the good news was that it was absolutel...

Scene: Alternate universe/timeline (dreamscape, natch) wherein Oregon has undergone a terrible Floridification.  Teachers are no longer permitted to teach Sex Ed. However, in an odd loophole, students can teach Sex Ed, so long as they say all the forbidden words backwards. Thus: YAG-YAS-T'-NOD! I am a high school senior, assigned to teach the 9 to 11 year olds.  It's my first class. I  don't want to get extremely graphic, but I believe it behooves me, as a caring teacher, to give them a heads up about Y-TRE-BUP, which is barreling their way. I am struggling to craft my lesson, because of the backwards rule, when it occurs to me that if I say I am teaching them under the laws of our county, HAM-ON-T-LUM, it might clue them in to what the terms are that I'm saying backward! I wake myself up laughing. HAM-ON-T-LUM!! Sounds like a foodie sandwich! I'm blaming the New York Times Games section for this problem. I've gotten in too deep lately. Gonna take a vacation.

I am going on a painting retreat to Italy soon - no excuse, as the teacher lives on Vashon Island, and I could have taken a class from her in Bremerton, but I wanted to go AWAY, as apparently many of us do in these lesser-pandemic days. The organizers set up a group thread on WhatsApp, and invited all of the participants to join. I think there are about twelve of us. Anyway, last week I found a fortune in my studio (I had a stack of them, and now there are three, just another one of life's mysteries), and it seemed to me to be making a nice "perspective" joke about travel and art. I took this evocative shot of it, complete with paint smudges, and sent it to the group.  I got a few ha-has, and a thumbs up, and a response from one person with "Who are you and why did you send me this, and stop now!"  One of the organizers wrote back to her and explained.  I'm looking forward to meeting her, and all the others.

Rick and I spend much of the summer at the mouth of the Deschutes River. He fishes, and I mostly hang out around camp, a green and shady oasis in that hot, dry country. Zoom in:  oasis. Zoom out: hot, dry country. (Above the campground, where there was a fire earlier this summer. The dark green trees at center are the campground. Across the Columbia are the brown hills of Washington State.) It’s a state park, and it has spotless (with caveat following), well-ventilated bathrooms, plus individual shower rooms with locks and hooks and benches. There are two areas for tent campers, and one with electrical and water hook-ups, for people with trailers. We have a trailer! You can just see it on the left, under some trees.  I once mocked trailer campers – they weren’t OUTSIDE! They had sinks and beds and bathrooms and air conditioning! They weren’t CAMPING. Then we got our first trailer, and I converted immediately. It’s bliss. Life is good. For us. But I worried whether life...

 Usually, my bad dreams go straight downhill. I’m late, I take a shortcut, I’m lost, someone comes along, it’s an axe murderer. I wake up sweaty.  It’s third-rate horror. If you watched my bad dreams, you’d shout, “Not the SHORTCUT, you idiot!” Then you’d write a “don’t bother” review calling them trite.  In last night’s bad dream, I was with my mom (now dead, but in the dream old and demented and frightened and nonverbal, which happened in real life near the end). We were in a huge Safeway attached to a strip mall. I lost her. My fault.  I knew, in the dream, that I had to find her before Something Happened, and that is was already Too Late. Dream-hours of frantic searching, and then finally she emerges from a little salon in the strip mall, new haircut, new outfit, looking perky. “Oh, there you are!” She says, as if I’ve shown up just in time to ferry her to her next event.  I wait for whoever found her, clothed her, and paid for the haircut to arrive. Nothing...

Yesterday was World Emoji Day! I should throw some emoji in here (emoji? emojis? – I don’t care, and I intend to switch between the plurals at my own whim).💚🧀. That's a green heart and a wedge of cheese, in case it doesn't come through for you. No reason for those symbols. And no reason they shouldn't come through for you. Emojis are unicode, and I am told unicode is forever.  I'm a bit jumpy around emoji. I barely got my head 🤕 around emoticons. My chance of misusing an emoji with a dirty meaning is sky-high. I only found out about World Emjoi Day because I was listening to a podcast. https://www.alieward.com/ologies/curiology And the podcast factoid that riveted my attention was this: people who use a lot of emojis in their texts have more sex than those who don’t. Don’t look at me, it’s what THEY said. They said it on the podcast! What they didn’t say was whether these folks are couples who lovingly festoon their texts to EACH OTHER with buckets 💑of emojis, o...

Our 50 th high school reunion had two parts – Friday afternoon in the back garden of the Roanoke Tavern, and Saturday night at the big community center. The first person I saw on Friday recognized me. He introduced himself, and I froze. He said, “You don’t remember me, do you?” and I said, “No, no, I do, really, I am just getting used to being here,” or something equally odd. Actually, I was at a loss for words. At an earlier reunion, one classmate did a Rumplestiltskin thing on me: didn’t wear a name tag, told me I had the evening to guess his name, kept circling around to see how I was doing. It turned out that he had been buddies with my neighbor. That neighbor was now shaking my hand. I’d planned to go to THIS reunion and greet Rumplestiltskin warmly, by name, sortof sharing the joke with him. That’s the best part of reunions, when it happens – seeing people being grownups in the best way. But then the pre-reunion emails listed him under “Classmates Who Have Died.” Too late to ...