Typecasting

There's an old guy that I pass on my bike ride home from work and the gym. He's out in his lovely, picturesque, slice of Bulgaria looking front porch every evening. He is super cute, that perfect old guy you want to play chess in the park with, his round, slightly oblong bald head has some comforting wispy white hair on the sides, he's tall enough to suggest that he was once strong, yet thin enough to make his collar look endearingly big, and not skinny enough to depress you. I wave at him in the evenings, as I enjoy the soft balmy air on my supercool vintage Schwinn cruiser. I almost feel like I'm part of what goes on after the freeze frame of the "A Hundred Ways to Use Apples to Teach Values" kind of Family Circle photo essay you see in the fall.

Except the old bastard never waves back. He rejects me, which screws up the idyllic fantasy his presence evokes. At first I thought maybe he is blind, or paralyzed by a stoke, or polio, like one of those throwback victims with the metal leg braces I used to see when I was a kid. Of course I figured there must be a noble tragedy, a backstory with a lesson, that prevented his participation in my lovely Northern Idaho town in the fall musings.

Well then I saw him walking across his lawn, gardening and whatnot, and have since concluded that my Norman Rockwell neighbor is just an unfriendly old bastard who could care less if I enjoy my evening or not.

Well fuck him.
And now we are both a victim of my prejudices. I have blotted him out of my beautiful land of make-believe and this is surely his loss.

Is the birth canal a wormhole?

Last night I dreamed I was pregnant and in the early stages of labor. By early stages I mean that I was experiencing what I guess you would call the "bloody show" but it was pretty heavy. I was not super huge, as I was with my own actual pregnancies. I was with Timm, but we lived on the Farm in Monacan. It was great to be there with Toni, Neal, Joe and Rebecca. The rest were newbies and I had no patience for them. They were slobs, like one fool left chicken nuggets in the sink. I was so super crabby. I am trying to figure out what my brain is working on with this dream.
I had an experience the other day when one husband did something that the previous husband did. I was a small and not traumatic thing, just something he said before leaving for work. I noticed it, and also noted the sensation of a wormhole through time. Not a déjà vu, but a wormhole. Somehow it's the same thing with the dream, and I am curious to know where the other wormholes are, and wonder how many I've missed.

Hey Dad

What fun it was tonight to see someone at a wedding in a kilt and explain to my husband what it meant, and to say how I would love to have my father's kilt while knowing that what I want I have already and

to look at the chip out of the skin on my hand with the knot and the bruise around it and to think of his hands and how chipped up they were and how he, like me, was not able to say where his wounds came from. What an honor

to think of his sons, one who I know loved him just the same way I did though we never talked about it till he was gone and the other who I know is doing what he thinks it right, fine men both of them and his daughter

safe and happy at last.

Who Are These People

You think you know someone. You know you know someone. You make choices, you structure you days, plan your life, choose your outfits to one degree or another around the people you know. Yet sometimes, you miss the ways in which they reveal themselves over time because your life is rooted in the security of the people you know.
You are sure people's character and peopleness is revealed by their actions, but which ones? Do you focus on fires and court appearances or do you act on the silly songs and hand motions taught to a group of Sunday school kids? Is someone's career defined by their accolades and complex series of explanations, or the weekend they went AWOL?
Is it the the sychrony of relationships over time that allows for your constantly developing identity to be bounced off of and somehow absorbed into the evolving peopleness of those around you? The people you spent two hours with twenty years ago suddenly reveal something that makes you wonder what the nature of that connection really was. The person you are with every day seems like a random collection of reactions, both fun and puzzling. No matter where we tuck it into our minds, we are defined and defining ourselves by our relationships.
Which is like playing Jenga, pull out one peg and things might settle back into balance, but the whole thing might collapse. Game over.

Revealing

I take walks about every day, and every day I see something cool. When I travel, especially when I travel alone, I forgo the overprices tourist tickets and go walking. I have stumbled upon private museums, historic landmarks, and housing projects this way. I always find myself delighted with a personal impression of where I am.
I am still discovering the place I live. Lewiston Idaho is a small isolated city in a valley, which I understand to actually be a canyon, at the bottom of the panhandle of Idaho, at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers. So there's not much here.
We don't even have a Target, I tell people, as if the presence of a discount retailer makes a place a something. We don't have a Hooters-you can't find fried pickles anywhere.
Of course all the sameness of the shameless strips of commerce across America don't make a place a place. Yes, every Crapplebees has the same menu, and you can count on that when you travel and that idyllic sameness is comforting in contrast to the disorientation and dissonance of trying to get somewhere. After all, the destination is ahead, and where the hell are you anyway?
I wonder.

I like to make cool things.

 I like to make cool things. I think I make the most amazing stuff on the planet. First of all, obvious! Check out these cool ghetto chairs! I have so far made three, and each one is different. I use wooden pallets to make them. So second, they represent A LOT of work. Pallets are a biotch to take apart.  The cool side of this is that you feel like a total badass while you are doing it. You get to use power tools, crowbars, hammers, and a really fantastic tool that is actually called a fubar. Using power tools and fubars makes you internally very awesome. This means that you feel awesome while you are doing it, and that mojo has the potential to make you externally awesome. It doesn't always work-I know quite a few power tool using DICKS-but power tools can add to your awesomeness if you use the mojo for good. Third, though they are heavy and hard to disassemble, pallets are a joy to work with. You end up with a pile of crazy funky cockeyed wood and you have to figure out how to get that wood to become something that needs to stand straight, be solid, and serve a particular function or two. You start with an idea of what you are going to make and how you are going to do it and the wood informs how the plan gets executed. That is why none of the chairs turn out the same way, even though you cut the same amount of wood into the prescribed lengths when you begin. (insert deep metaphor for the workings of the universe being by nature serendipitous here as it applies to your particular life situation-if you don't understand what I mean I suggest you spend some time looking into it)

By the way, I made the table in front of the chairs too, and did all the painting based on what free paint I had collected and what was playing on the radio when I started. Can you tell it was Bon Jovi?

Fourth is the coolest. The stuff I build is the living breathing incarnation of Donna Summer's "I Will Survive." For better or worse I spent a pretty big chunk of my life thus far with a particular person who was very willing to tell me what I could not do and how I was doing it wrong. Their communication of their opinion was very clear, took various forms, and was fairly constant. So I look at my chairs, furniture, and cool things that I've made and I see that I can do things. I can do cool things. I have good ideas and I can do stuff I never thought I would be able to do. I can have ideas, work through them, even if it makes a big mess, takes months, and I loose a couple of toenails doing it (I have since learned to always wear closed toed shoes when I do construction-only took two toenails to cement that idea into my brain). I can do things that make no sense in the beginning but turn out cool in the end. Why did I start dissembling shipping pallets to make furniture?
Because I can.