n-judah love song

a decade? impossible.

If you're still reading this blog, hello, old pals. I'm as surprised as you are.

10 years ago, I started this blog. I moved to San Francisco with a broken heart, $200 in my bank account, and absolultely zero idea of how to do much that was useful. Well, I knew how to pour a mean drink, code a little HTML, and talk my way into clubs and out of speeding tickets. 

That year, I met some of the nearest and dearest people to my heart. Some of you are sort've famous now, some of us are still pouring shots, some of us are still writing, and some of us aren't here anymore. 

So, what does 10 years of trying to tell you funny stories look like in the rearview?

-It's funny and not a little uncomfortable to flip back through the archives and see the exact moment where mistakes were made. But from this, we learn. 

-Blogging all those years, even when it was sporadic, or on other blogs (why so many blogs?!) made me a better writer. I started NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, and to my surprise, 7,000 words have bubbled up in a few days. This proves that if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.

-You can't make old friends. You can't untangle the loving and the fighting and the misunderstandings. There's a patina on these friendships that's pretty, and I'm so very grateful.

I've missed you. How are all y'all?  Ain't we lucky?

 

 

 

bent hoops and singing salmon

He was notoriously mean to servers.

We were, quite simply, a ragtag group of bare-faced litmag kids, with copies of On The Road stuffed in back pockets, and Jack knew so much more. He never made us feel badly about our ignorance of the simple fact that he had lived it, loved it, admired and tasted it all; whatever we were fifty years too late to be, to beat.

Oh, but we wanted it anyway, and so spent nights underground on Selectrix typewriters, pretending to know what the fuck we were writing about. Producing terribly adequate prose.

Dr. Booch, Mistah Jack, Sir: you were our bad cliche and an amazingness, and you believed in all of us, however meager our talent.

 

 

 

bent hoops and singing salmon - jack booch

This whole Columbia River Crossing debacle sure is getting on my nerves. Correction — the idiots holding up progress in the name of artistic expression are getting on my nerves.

Recently, bridge designer Miguel Rosales pompously proclaimed, “The chosen design for the bridge should reflect Portland’s unique tradition and core values.” What’s that? Core values? Is he perhaps suggesting Lady Justice winking at a crooked mayor?

Or maybe a giant basketball hoop? The headlines above the fold in The Oregonian are nearly always Blazer-related, and as much as I enjoy the occasional sporting event, I have to say obsessive interest in Greg Oden to the exclusion of all else is illustrative of the sort of “core values” Rosales will need to symbolically express.

These boobs might as well request that, as the poet Auden put it, “the river jumps over the mountain/And the salmon sing in the street.”

Setting aside the innate absurdity of such concerns, one wonders how it has escaped so many Portlanders’ attention that this bridge is an INTERSTATE bridge, not a Portland bridge. It’s the Columbia, you morons, not the Willamette.

Furthermore, in the midst of a terrible recession, it would stand to reason that the single most important factor with regard to its design would be the efficacy of its impact on interstate commerce. Following that are concerns regarding the employment of local workers and the feasibility of its overall cost.

The St. John’s Bridge was built during the Great Depression, employing tens of thousands during a time when the average Portlander was struggling mightily to survive financially.

The end result was a beautiful combination of gothic arches and streaming cables that has stood the test of time, promising to do so well into the future.

That’s how you plan a bridge — not by imagining it adorned with giant salmon (if you think I’m exaggerating, see the pedestrian bridge spanning I-205 as part of the Airport MAX extension).

Barry Johnson, in a recent Oregonian column, expounded inanely about the need for a bridge design that will express Portlanders’ “feeling about their river.” My feeling is I’d like to be able to cross the damn thing without getting bolloxed up in traffic around Jantzen Beach.

Mayor Adams — bent, but unbowed — proclaimed in his agenda for his first 100 days that we need an “aesthetically appealing bridge design” that reflects the city’s needs and interests.

When I read of Metro Council President David Bragdon’s insistence that we keep Adams around after his recent sex scandal because he’s “the city’s point person on the Columbia River Crossing bridge project,” I thought to myself, “Alright already. I give up. Let’s just make the thing a big, bent basketball hoop and call it a day.”

via www.vanvoice.com

Never use two words when one will do. I'll never forget his cackle, demanding another martini, or his gruff kindness. Jack understood in a moment the precarious position that a lovely, lovesick barmaid felt, and tipping extravagantly for the performance. Helped me realize about people-watching as a competitive sport. He was my champion in a time when I felt I had none.

 

Like a commenter, the bar regular knows a different sort of innermost secrets. Especially a writer who understands what it's like to ache inside, the world-weary knowhow of love that's never meant to be. And so, instead of crying, we write, cheers, and celebrate.

 

We'll miss you terribly, good sir.

'tis better to give.

My father's been working on a book for a long time. A fictional novel with large dashes of memoir about a man, his dog, the Vietnam war, and tales of San Francisco while he plays piano at the Top of The Mark.

I'd been reading and listening to parts of the book for the past year. When Dad was finally ready to let us take a peek at the finished work,  he gave me a binder-bound copy, and asked me to read it and let him know what suggestions I had. I started making my editor's notes in the margin. Halfway into making notes, an idea: somehow, Dad needed a hardbound copy of his book.

Cajoling him into sending me the electronic copy in Word was the hardest part. When TypePad did a holiday cross-promo with Blurb, who make books out of your blog (and just about anything else) I knew I had the final piece of the puzzle. Then came the next hardest part: editing the damn thing. All 400+ pages.

I have a newfound respect for editors. Knowing when to cut a word, when to rephrase a paragraph: when does the author's work end and the editor's begin? I stuck to the essentials: correcting a sentence structure here, a continuity error there. Added artwork and reformatted and noodled around with the page layout. The first time I loaded the whole thing into BookSmart, the software choked and crashed: too much text. It was pure joy, though, to work with the book. It reminded me of using Pagemaker and blog templates all rolled in one.

It was coming down to the wire for Christmas delivery, and it looked like the book wouldn't get sent on time to SF. Fortunately, Padraic, the Blurb staff person on duty pulled some magic out of his hat and somehow rerouted the book to be delivered to my parents' house on December 24th. As a fellow customer service person, I've got to give Padraic a huge shout-out for being awesome and going out of his way to help. Rock out, dude.

The DC area, of course, was recently walloped with unexpected amounts of snow, and after four or five increasingly frantic calls to FedEx, Dad's book wasn't on the truck.  It was sitting in the warehouse only a few miles away. All that work for it to just to sit until after Christmas? If it were any other present, it wouldn't be a big deal, but this was THE GIFT.  I couldn't just give Dad some socks after all that. 

I drove to the warehouse, put on my sweetest smile, and made it clear I was. not. leaving. Politely and clearly: please help me. I know it's Christmas, you must be going crazy, everyone's got a problem and they're rude and annoying and UGH working on the holiday, there's no reason you should help me, but: please. Please help.

It must be good customer service karma that I've put out into the universe, because two hours later I was tearing into THE box in a frozen parking lot. Hoping and praying that the book turned out as well as I hoped it would.

As the final present under the tree, after a year of ups, downs, and sideways, after changes and sadness and joy and not a lot of money for gifts, the evidence:

My dear darling Daddy: speechless for the first time ever.

The proud author.

He's still out in the living room reading through his lovely, lovely book.

May your days be merry and bright, may you get your own gifts you didn't even know you wanted, and may each of you have the joy of giving someone you love something completely freakin' awesome.

happiness + vulnerability

Happy to Be Miserable is a thoughtful essay about, among other things, how happy emotions are harder for people to express than negative emotions. Love, awe, gratitude and joy are more difficult to convey, the theory goes, because it leaves us vulnerable. We're exposed because happiness is hooked to the future, which is of its own nature uncertain. Negativity can be immediately expressed, and so it scratches a different itch. Basically, while being happy is better for you in the long term, we're all kinda lazy and like the short term release valve, the quick hit.

The word "community" is mentioned several times in the essay, and so I wanted to put in my own two cents, since how to build and maintain a positive community is a huge part of my life - both personally and professionally. 

Being snarky-funny on the internet is sort of what the intertubes are made of. It's de rigeur. I wouldn't have the internet any other way.

So, I try to take the long view. The concept of community means that we're all here looking out for each other. Ain't nobody here but us chickens, so let's keep trying to reach out from a place of empathy. Keep top-of-mind that most of us are happy to be miserable, and accept each other in our moments of less-than-perfection.I don't succeed at being happy all the time, because that ish is HARD WORK. The only way happy gets easier is practice. Practice not reacting in a frustrated way. Practice laughter. Practice going just a little further into the future.

Practice, practice, practice. Happy is contagious.

 

image credit - Marc Johns, link to Happy to Be Miserable via Lilia.