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This is a test because I’m messing around with Digg, which I can’t for the life of me get to work. What I really want is to show you a picture from a birthing clinic in Haiti. I told Chuck I want to go there and help. I said probably if I really wanted to help I’d just get a second job and send the money, but that doesn’t sound fun. Do I really want to help or not?
>Are fears really fears or are they metaphors? Does everything have to stand for something it’s not?
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I have every current Oregon Book Award contestant book I can find sitting in a pile on my table. I spent yesterday reading All God’s Children, Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families, by Rene Denfield. A well- written, important and compelling book. Denfield focuses on a particular Portland group of street kids that was violent, sadistic, and disturbingly anonmic.
anomic—alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals
I hung out with street kids when I left home at 17 and lived in Madison, but in those days it was all peace and love. I don’t think anyone would have tortured or killed anyone else, or burned them up or killed their dog. We saw ourselves as part of a revolution. We were the real thing, the ones who had left our families, who had left school and everything we knew, who didn’t need any of it. We were inspired by Jerry Rubin. He never talked about killing anyone, from what I can recall, but Anita Hoffman did say we would dance on their graves. It was a metaphor, I think.
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This is one of the trees that will be cut if The BLM’s new forest management proposal, WOPR, (Washington Oregon Plan Revision) goes through. This tree is in the Alsea Valley, Oregon.
>It’s raining and all the little creeks and rivers are filling. Last night the salmon began to swim up stream.
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Last week we went to The Oak Grove Restaurant at the Hood River, Oregon Golf Club to hear an Austin band called GypZee Soul. Don’t let the golf club idea fool you– the place actually a funky little restaurant/bar with a dance floor and music, big windows with trees outside, and nice folks dancing and drinking and have a good time. GypZee Soul is two piece, soul/bluesy/eastern European group that blew us away. Even Chuck who hardly ever likes anything. Check out the large triangular string instrument in the picture. If I can figure out how to put one of their songs on here, I will. Otherwise you can go to the link and listen and then, hey, why not buy the CD? Support independent music. Support great music wherever it happens.
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I don’t know how there can be so many movies about writers. What could be more boring than a writer? Chuck is in South Africa at the Society for Conservation Biology Conference, and I am having a personal writing retreat at my house, just me and the laptop. My dog doesn’t like it. He is trying to mind control me into playing catch, but sorry, it’s not working.
>I’m reading a science fiction novel for my book group. Usually we read international novels. We went through a long Middle Eastern phase. We read several Turkish novels. We read several Indian books. We also read Faulkner. This month it’s science fiction though. Science fiction is the only thing my son reads. I was telling him tonight that what I don’t like is reading descriptions of a world that someone has made up. I skim those parts, to get to the conversations, then I spend the whole novel wondering, where the heck are we? are we on an island? a space ship? or what? My son says that I have no imagination, that’s my problem.
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>June 14, 07
At school today, Max asked, “Why did God make us mammals?”
