House Hunters

Still on the house-hunt, mutherlubbers. C and I considered a pretty nice little spot in Oregon City (without Margaret's approval). But it's just too far out for us. This was cool though:

Hey! It's okay. We're pressin' on...and on and on and on. And Portland: I'm sorry for getting mad. We could always try our chances in this festering booger garden that no one really likes and has never liked, which would require us to sleep standing up in a broom closet, and you could mock us for the rest of your long metropolitan life. But I won't let that happen. Soon we'll be living in the middle of your belly like a couple of satiated ticks.

I'm not mad, Portland. I'm just disappointed.

(Source: Willamette Week)

So: C and M and I have been looking for a new place to live. Started off thinking a little something like this—have sadly gravitated to something more along the lines of this, and will (if the slumlords of hipsterville don't stop pooping on our heads) eventually end up in this. 

What happened to you Portland? I'll answer: you've sold your soul to new management. At this point, I'd take a place with someone else's toenails in my sheets, but even that would come with a hefty whiff of gentrification lingering just around the corner. 

(Source: Jen Sorensen)

Anyone know of a place that isn't a $2000, 300sf studio in a high-rise condo on South Waterfront, and which doesn't have a personal vendetta against dogs or a required deposit the size of a small yacht? Drop us some knowledge. We'd love you forever and pay you back with a savory, slowcooked meal.

The Segall Has Landed...

Today I feel like paying tribute to Mr. Ty Segall. Eminent rocker. Purveyor of awesome. All around hip old soul. How does he do it? Did he learn from this guy? Some people get all the cool jeans (I mean genes)—just watch him play these drums. 

He's like the coolest little kid I've ever seen. And his taste in music? All over the place—in the best ways. God bless him. If you haven't checked him out yet, do so. You won't regret it.

A Poem

Canons

The literary canon

keeps words in

a neat glass case.

My canon has

a greased black

mouth, launches

balls at all the

lonely boated men

in feathered hats.

Bone Road

Follow the rusty tracks down to my secret spot with Oliver’s shoes tucked under my arm. There’s no one’s footprints in the grass or the gravel, no one else that’s been here in my secret spot. Hear grass tickling in the wind and the wind pulling my shirt and tickling my hair, but nothing else. Turn down the bend and there’s Red Creek bubbling far away. Find Old Rusty where he’s supposed to be, leaning in the beach grass behind the red storage house. Water’s tapping on his coppery roof. Walk to him and look in through the empty windows and kick my foot against his slumped tires. Old Rusty. Pieces of driftwood still bed around the car—all the ones found along the beach that looked like bones. They curl like fingerbones and armbones with knots like elbows and knuckles. Drop Oliver’s shoes on the driver seat and kneel in the grass to look at my bones. No one’s been here. The bones are still crisscrossed.

            Open the door. It creaks like a voice.

            Hello?

            Take out the box under the seat and open it. The moldy pacifier. The rattle. The bib. The little tin boy dragging the blanket—it used to hang in the Christmas tree. No one’s been here. Drop the shoes in the box. Close the lid and slide the box under the seat and sit down in the seat with my hands around the steering wheel. Shut the door and hear the little voice creak before the door clicks shut. Look out the window, down at the bones circling the car like a white road, like they pass under. Water’s dripping on the roof, dripping like a faucet, dripping like the faucet. See the bathtub now, like it’s out the windshield. See the water coming up over the white shiny edges and spilling to the floor, and the faucet still dripping. The bones are moving faster under the car. Look into the passenger seat, say: Where do you want to go, Oliver? But he can’t answer and the water keeps dripping.

A Pixelated Fawn

I'm taking a writing class this term called Process Response—and it's awesome! We write and write and never look back. We have little groups to share our writing with. That's it. The point is to write in whatever form we are interested in and think about the process of writing and write about writing and never revise. The point is to move forward, disconnect ourselves from our own expectations and standards.

I've set myself up with only one restriction: I can only use this class to work on my novel. So far It's got me going places I didn't plan on going. Here's a little sampler of today's work (and what has been an inspiring photo by Myoung Ho Lee):

Up the long path of water into the woods there’s a fawn curled against the base of a rock, the thin hide of its back formed to its bedding in the underbrush. A hiker comes up the draw from the highway, his breath loud in the forest. He pauses when he spots the animal and waits for it to stir. He takes his phone from his pocket and snaps a photo, shades the daylight from the screen and looks at the image—the tan curvature lost in the fern. He walks again, slowly, phone held out like a crucifix. Something snaps under his boot and the sharp whipcrack startles him. He stops and looks down at the broken stick in the dirt, then quickly up the draw so as not to miss a vision of the fawn as it bounds through the forest. But the fawn hasn’t moved. It’s back keeps curled to him, face hidden somewhere among its folded limbs. The hitchhiker stiffens. He coughs, claps his hands awkwardly around his phone, whistles and listens to the forest swallow the sounds. Other, stiller noises replace his—the wind continuing its work through the trees, the water chattering anathemas beside him. And the fawn doesn’t move. He keeps his eyes on its spine as he inches away, down the draw. He is afraid to turn his back to the rock until it’s out of sight. He turns then and paces down the rest of the draw. When he comes to the trail, he finally slows to a walk.
         Back on the highway, he climbs into his truck and slams the door shut. He starts the engine and while he waits for it to heat up, he glances at the thick entrance of the forest where things bloom imperceptibly over the trailhead, clenching the path in fronds and dark shadows of fronds. A flock of swallows darts out from the treetops, black and scattered like buckshot against the sky. He watches them flee through the canopy. His phone sits brightly in his hand and he looks down at it, at the image there, the pixelated lump in the underbrush. Revving the engine, he erases the picture and tosses the phone away from him, onto the passenger seat. Then he lurches, tires crunching, down the road. 

Grizzly Man.

I thought I'd take a moment to admire Daniel Rossen's Navajawesome cardigan. I mean, look at him! He just stands there like he's on the outside of a middle school social circle. "I'm Daniel Rossen. Everything I touch is magic, but I'm gonna pretend otherwise and just stand in front of this majestic mountain with my majestic cardigan and majestic skills and pretend I'm just an ordinary human being from Earth. Cause I'm humble like that." God bless you, Daniel Rossen.

What's in the box?

Go ahead, push it! I dare you.

Well, I've been gone for quite some time. Not really...like a day, two, I think, but it feels much longer. It's not my fault though—I started school this week! This fall promises to be one of mystery and intrigue, as I have enrolled in both Detective Fiction and Film Noir of the 1940's. 

Today I spent the morning with this fine chap (the one on the right...well...I guess both of them, technically). We watched The Maltese Falcon, and like, man—that movie never gets old, man. I did enjoy hearing some newbies try to hash out (in excited whispering) just what was going to happen in the end. But, man, they totally got MacGuffed!

Among other things, I've ingested and digested The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Silver Blaze, The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, A Scandal in Bohemia and The Greek Interpreter. Sherlock Holmes, you rock! (No. Not you, Sher-lame!) Now I'm cracking the spine of Agatha Christie's first Miss Marple mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage. These are the exciting reads. I'm dreading The Intentional Fallacy and The Death of the Author—which might sound like murder mysteries, but are actually literary criticism. 

I forgot to mention Shakespeare—does that ex-nay me from English Major eligibility? Yep. Topics in Shakespeare—a pretty general course, four of his plays set in Italy. Pretty cool focus. I'm in the middle of Romeo & Juliet and should probably stop writing this post so that I can get back to homework. 

Soon soon! Happy Thursday!

Happy Tuesday and welcome back.

Sunday—a night of chit chat with the fam, drunken debauchery, half-played board games that turned quickly into bored games, future Saturday Market & picnic promises. 

Wifey, Margaret and I ushered in the holiday at my family's house in Vancouver—fast food Vancouver, ghetto Vancouver, million-miles-wide by million-miles-tall Vancouver, Vancouver of the Washington variety (no, not DC, not the capitol, rather the state: Warshington—the r is silent). 

We had a blast. How was your special weekend?

My dad finally gave a verbal mapping of The Olson family history (sorta) and it inspired me to plan a special road trip...

Norway!

This will take some craftiness on our part. We'll need to fully float-ize the car. But it's well worth the effort. I heard that the O-L-S-O-N spelling of my surname (as opposed to O-L-S-E-N) indicates Norwegian ancestry (as opposed to Swedish). The logical jumping off point is the capitol of Norway: Oslo. Look at it! Frickin' Christmasy as heck!

Nova Scotia!

The second stop has to be Nova Scotia, where I still have some older family members floating around (super older, like triple digits older). We've always wanted to move to Canada. How about Halifax, huh?

North Dakota!

Then it's time to see where the old man was born—North Dakota! Apparently there are some great cousins still plopped down in Bismarck somewheres. From here, my grandfather and grandmother moved my dad and uncle out to Washington—and the rest is history. But...

Kentucky!

Apparently, Gramps (youngest of an 11-kid clan) had a brother who opted for Kentucky, so we'll have to make a pass through this beauty! United we stand, divided we fall!

Someday someday someday...

%

I was never good at math—but lately everything I see seems to be numbers numbers numbers. It's a possibly detrimental conspiracy for someone who loves letters and words and long strings of sentences. What's the deal? What's with all these numbers?

How is it that some things...

...take 100% concentration, when we really only use 10% of our brains? 

May I ask:

What's with the economy and all this 99% business?

And while we're on money:

Where's the money, Lebowski?

69 cents — Isn't that 69% of a dollar?

Oh! And wait a second. What percentage of the senate is female? Huh? Also: while we're speaking of demographics, why is Portland made up of 49% homeless and 49% hipster?

On the topic of cleanliness:

Does washing your hands kill any percentage of germs?

And

Just what percentage of history is truth and just how much of it is this?

I'm talking about unchecked aggression here, dude. These numbers are killing me. Really. Shapes and colors—that's my forte.

Noire Portland: The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

I was walking home from Spanish 203 today whilst cramming el pluscuamperfecto de subjuntivo into some dark recess of my mind (where it will hopefully never bother me again) when I suddenly felt the urge to solve a crime!

With all this sunshine it's hard to recall Portland's rainier days—dark months when you can wring the rain out of a skyscraper and watch the city-dwellers recede into the shadows like wary hermit crabs. 

But today, even with that great ball of fun lighting our way, the city still looked like a mystery. So don a fedora and buy yourself a pack of Chesterfields. It's time to weed out the crooked.

Dead man crossing.

Yes, we're the beautiful City of Roses—fine fine fine—but roses also have thorns. I tramped through the South Park Blocks trying to beat the heat, but it was gettin' to my head. People lounged around without a care, like they couldn't sense the other side of things, the city below the city, the brick behind the fancy new siding, the real face behind the mask.

North I headed and as I neared the end of the South Park Blocks, I paused for a moment to take in a grand view of The Roosevelt Hotel. It reminded me of some locale in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. Perhaps someone was watching me from one of the hotel's dark windows, or perhaps I was watching them.

Yes, Portland has it all—the makings of a fine noir city. But without a steady rain beatin' me in the back or the scrunching of wet tires echoing through the streets, my mouth was beginning to get dry. Luckily I passed by the Hotel deLuxe, where the walls are lined in gold, glamour and glitter. A man needed a diamond jacket to pass off here, but no worries—he could always duck into a dim-lit boothseat in the Driftwood Room and order a bubbly Portland '85.

Finally, I tottered home past the old Pennoyer Mausoleum and Ella St. Social Club, where the night's antics had yet to embark. I kept my eyes on the windows, but as always I couldn't make out who was playing records in the upper office. 

With feet like cinderblocks, I finally reached my destination under big ol' Blue Volvo, watcher of Burnside, keeper of secrets. 

By this point I was delirious, nearly dead from the heat. My little itch to solve a crime was stretched thin and warbling with each passing semi. My noir mood quickly gave way to thoughts of a popsicle—cool lemon lime. Ah, forget it! Perhaps cases are best solved in the rain.