Festering Carbuncle

Do you ever wonder what they meant when they said, "Repent?"

Me neither, I always just assumed it was symptomatic of a zombie deficiency.  It's hotter'n the blazes in here, I've got a twelve pack of cold ones in the fridge and no intention to repent.  Too bad for the neighbors if they don't wanna hear it; I'm out of here in a month, and I don't like the cuts of their jibs, anyhow...  Here's to the walking dead, all of them, but most specifically, Zombie Squirrel, pictured below, taking it easy for all of us sinners...

Dead folks in the clouds? Fer cryin' outloud!

Some days I honestly can't believe I get paid to do my job.  The last few days have seen me hanging out on a barge on the Willamette, sunny weather flirting with eighty degree temperatures.  It's like living an Otis Redding song without the crushing existentialism.  I come home with a tan and just enough dirt ground into my plams to give my life meaning, ease into my Samsonite metal folding chair and crack open the proverbial brewski.  Man, I love brewskis.

I had a hard time with the Band of Horses at first.  Stupid name not withstanding, I wasn't terribly fond of their brand of music right off the bat.  It's really vocal driven, you know, and I've never been big on that sort of thing, but damn, they can put together some lyrics when they try, I tell you what. 

So anyway, it happens from time to time that when I am cracking brewskis a song will dig right into the spot and make me a little weepy, the good kind of weepy.  Cigarettes, Wedding Bands is the song doin' that diggin' tonight.  This song has it all: awesome title; lament of the drudgery of the workaday life; murder; rejection of faith.  Fuck, it's like they're cracking brewskis with me.

Also, any doubts I ever had about these boys were completely eradicated a few months ago when I first saw this clip of a live performance of The General Specific.  It is a barn-burner:

To find a little warmth from the cold, cold world...

So I says to the trucker, I says, "I'd better shovel that little guy up before you drive over and smoosh him through the grizzlies."  The trucker gazed at the bird for a moment, then gave me a quizzical look and inquired, "Where did that come from?"  Either he was bullshitting me or his brain had been teased.  Whichever it was, for a moment there, I was deeply moved by the situation.

I found an iceberg floating in my soul.
It was always there until the sun went up my hole,
to find a little warmth from the cold, cold world,
to find a little warmth from the cold world.
On the ice, I skidded and swirled,
until my toes curled up around the idea that I'm a boy and you're a girl.
I found a house falling down inside your head.
I picked up a brick and made sugar flow from my head.

It's hard to know what I mean when you're so damnably sweet.
I miss you like madness and happy feet.
The feet that danced, skipped and skated,
every time we interrelated.

I don't actually endorse that lyric transcription, particularly the line about flowing sugar.  It sounds like there is something about a pillow in there to me, but I have even less faith in my own interpretation.  In any case, I'm down to a mere 272 songs in my itunes right now.  I keep resisting the urge to add more songs because, as it stands right now, I can hit shuffle and pretty much not need to skip any songs.  Songs written and performed by Babybird himself, Mr. Stephen Jones, make up the largest chunk of what populates the playlist, with songs by Devo running a close second.  This surely comes as a shock to no one.

A Pointless Kvetch

One of the local weeklies set up a Flickr photo pool where their hip readers can post hip photos of hip people, places, and things that are related to hip Portland.  It is hip.  There are a number of nice to look at photos that show up there, and occasionally, perhaps as often as once a week, the local weekly features one of the recent additions on their blog or in their paper.  The featured photos are generally pretty interesting for one reason or another, and almost always were taken hundreds of miles from Portland.  That's not even the kvetch, though.  What is bothering me the most about the photo pool is all of the photos of people hanging out in the backyard and whatnot.  Yeah, the backyard may be in Portland, but that really seems to kind of be pushing the idea of a Portland photo pool, but what the fuck do I know?  Nothin', that's what!

And He Fell, Swallowed by The Grave

I think that the two screws in the last picture (just left of center frame), the ones wedged underneath the shutter release button, caused a short that fried one of the boards.  I didn't spend too long looking, but I didn't see where the screws came from.  In any case, it took fairly high quality digital pictures for something that I could carry in my pocket, and I am pretty sad to see it go.  Not sad enough, however, to even consider paying the large amounts of money it might cost to have it repaired.

I think I would like to get something like this, eventually, with the larger DSLR sensor in a more compact body, but if I can't fit it in my pocket, I don't really see the point.  I also don't see myself going in for a DSLR, because I like my old 35mm, I like film, especially slide film, I like the having to make the decisions that one has to make when everything is manual, and I especially enjoy manual focus, for some reason.

I picked up a little Pentax point and shoot affair to use in the interim, until I find/can afford a suitable replacement for the Cannon, but so far I can't get enthused about it at all.  It seems to not handle low light situations very well at all, and it doesn't offer a lot of control over the settings, but I needed something I could use for documentary purposes, and it works for that.  So, yeah.

I came here looking for something I couldn't find anywhere else...

I think the story of why I wound up in jail is a lot less fun to tell than the story of being in jail, but I will try to tell it honestly, I guess.  Let's see...  At the time, one of my best friends was in some sort of substance abuse group, something to do with DUI diversion, and one of the other dudes in his diversion class was a bartender at a place downtown called 'Boogie Woogies' (wow, this story got embarrassing sooner than I thought it would).  Because I lived within easy walking distance of (sigh) Boogie Woogies, the aforementioned friend and I went down there with another 'friend from way back' and got stiff drinks from the rehabbing bartender.  The funny thing was that when we showed up, the guys working the door weren't going to let me in because they thought I was too drunk.  I assured them that I had only had a single beer before walking down there, but they were having none of it until one of them presented a breathalyzer that looked like it came out of one of those bubble machines you put a quarter in to get temporary tattoos.  It signified that I was sober, so they let me in.

Several hours later we left, and on the way out I checked back in with the pocket sobriety meter and, sure enough, it said I was drunk. For reasons that were, and continue to be, beyond my comprehension, my friends and I decided to hang out on the sidewalk for awhile.  As you might imagine, sidewalk-hanging gets pretty boring, pretty quick, so, in an act of pure altruism, merely intending to release my companions from the suffocating burden of their own boredom, I did the Pee Wee Herman dance on the roof of a Honda.  Unfortunately, I blew the dismount, and in the commotion the parking lot attendant suggested that I join him in conversation for a moment.

I didn't think it in my best interest to comply with the attendant's request, and I instead started making my way back home.  I would say that, at this point, I didn't completely understand that my walking off wouldn't be considered 'resolution' for all parties involved, although in hindsight it seems pretty obvious that the attendant called the police.  A bulletin went out on the Police band, dispatched to all points, no doubt, that a mirthful vandal was about, and that he should be considered armed and dangerous, and approached with Xtreem™ caution.

So...  Friends and I are walking on the sidewalk when a cop car pulls up next to us and begins keeping pace.  After a minute or so I grew impatient with the situation and stopped, looked at the cop, and asked what he wanted.  He yelled from his window, "Get on the ground!"  I suggested that there was no need for that, and indicated that I would be happy to continue the conversation in more of a face-to-face manner.  Repeat twice, at which point I start walking off only to step right into another cop.  Understandably, the officer took umbrage to my bumping into him and threw me to the ground.  I stood up and told the officer, who had somehow managed to multiply into three cops while I was down, that there was no need to resort to force, as I had no intention of fleeing.

So, for a while the cops kept throwing me down and I kept standing up to find that their numbers had grown.  Eventually, the sixth cop informed the other officers and myself that he was going to deploy his pepper spray.  I looked him in the face and expressed, in so many words, that I was of the opinion that he had neither the right nor the guts to do so.  He proceeded to deploy his pepper spray. 

At that point, the situation changed in two ways.  First, that cop was now out of pepper spray.  Second, I couldn't see anymore.  So, we did the whole, 'they throw me down, I stand up' thing a couple more times before one of the cops put his knee on my spine while another pushed on a spot behind my ear that kind of hurt a whole lot. It was a good move on their part, as the excruciating pain made it significantly harder to stand up.

By the time all of that had been taken care of, my face had been pretty scuffed up by the sidewalk, and my eyes were stinging pretty badly from the pepper spray, so I had a bit of a disinclination to stare into the bright light while they snapped my booking photo, but eventually, the corrections officers and I pulled together as a team and made it happen.

After the mug shot, I was taken over to see the nurse.  She was nice and I was a dick.  She gave me a look that offered a last chance to acquiesce to the circumstances and I acknowledged her offer but refused to accept it.  It was the moment when I realized, unequivocally, that I I had absolutely no interest in surrendering my indignation.

They put me in a little holding cell with a stainless bunk and no mattress.  I woke up a couple hours later, colder than I had ever before been.  I knocked on the window and an officer opened the door and asked if I was ready to come out.  I indicated that I was.  He said that it would be a few minutes and then closed the door.

After an amount of time the resembled forever, the officer returned, opened the door and shackled me to the heroin addict.  We shuffled to a van and were transported to the detention center where we were unshackled and placed into the a large cell together.  About an hour later I was escorted to a window where my fingerprints were taken, my property was returned, and citations for criminal mischief and resisting arrest were issued to me.

I called a lawyer the next day and he told me that I had nothing to worry about, so long as I ponied up a thousand dollars upfront.  I went to the court and told them I was innocent, that it must be a case of mistaken identity or something, and the court offered the services of a public defender who only required three hundred dollars upfront.  His name escapes me, at the moment, but it had a German ring to it.  He was fresh out of law school, and he had the most wonderful Colonel Sanders style goatee.

We met for a half hour and he told me that I was screwed.  A couple weeks later I showed up to court and he pulled me aside.  He told me that I was going to be called soon, and said "she will be representing you," as he pointed across the hall.  "Don't worry, it'll be fine," he said as I stood there worrying that it would not be fine.  'She," whoever she was, said that I would admit to being guilty of half the charges in exchange for being sentenced to sixty hours of community service and restitution for damages to the victim's vehicle, an amount that was still to be determined.  Frustratingly, the damages to the victim's vehicle wound up totaling less than the two hundred dollar minimum required for a charge of misdemeanor criminal mischief, which seems like just the kind of 'technicality' a lawyer might use to help their client 'get off.'  In any case, I was just happy to no longer be facing the uncertainty of that 'dark wind.'

Community service was cool, though.  On Saturday mornings I would walk down to Waterfront Park, where all of us miscreants would congregate until a half-dozen or so vans would show up.  We would all pile in to the vans and travel from park to park, raking leaves for eight hours.  My second day I hopped into a van with a Rastafarian looking fellow who flagged down one of the white guys to come over and get me the hell out of his van. 

The white guy walked over and said, "hey, you don't want to go in that van."  I looked around at all of the empty space between the five black guys sitting in the van with me said, "there's like ten people in that other van, I'll just go in this one."  He says, "No, you don't want to go with Dave."  And I, being completely clueless to what was going on, said, "Why not, he seems alright to me."  "No, he's mean.  Come on with me, I'm nice," he says.  I still didn't understand what was going on, but it seemed apparent that they weren't going to let me go with Dave, so I got out and crammed in with the white guy.

He turned out to be pretty cool.  He had been a firefighter in the Air Force, stationed in Alaska.  I took most of my trips with him, and we mostly just went around to cemeteries with beautiful views and took flowers from off of graves.  It is pretty strange, but I am getting a little wistful, now, thinking about it.

I had only been living in the city for a few months, maybe, by the time I started the community service, and I had pretty much kept to my own little part of the city around where I lived, worked, and went to school.  So, pretty much every park we went to was entirely new to me, and we went through a lot of parts of Portland I have never been anywhere near.  Unfortunately, the places were so unfamiliar that I don't even have the faintest notions where any of them are or what they are called.  I live a few blocks from a park, now, that may very well be one of the parks that I raked the leaves out of all of those years ago; there is no way to know for sure, but every time I see the park it inspires a haunting familiarity.

In any case, the way it worked was that you were free to go after you had fulfilled your obligated amount of time, but no rides were provided other than to where and when the van was already going.  Because my sixty hours finished in the middle of the day, I was going to be left to my own devices as far as getting home was concerned.  I don't remember exactly what happened, but somehow we wound up not very far from where I needed to be by the time I was free to go, which was pretty unexpected, because we had never been anywhere near my neighborhood before.  The group supervision might have worked it out so that we were in my neighborhood, maybe I was just let go somewhere near the max line, I don't know.  In any case, getting home was fairly hassle free, and thus my adventure concluded.