... "Andrei, what is art?" Tarkovsky, looking even more pensive than usual, declares that...

..."Before defining art — or any concept — we must answer a far broader question: what is the meaning of Man's life on Earth?" ~ Andrei Tarkovsky (source: http://www.openculture.com/2016/06/andrei-tarkovsky-answers-the-essential-questions-what-is-art-the-meaning-of-life.html)

Tonight I was writing in a journal, something I used to do almost obsessively at different periods in my life, but haven't much for years, except for poem and short writing piece ideas. And I ended up starting one thing and then morphing into something that is perfectly titled in a parody of the great James Joyce book 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' - I thought I would share it with the small group of you who actually read this. I wrote the first go at the draft of this entry to Talking Heads' wonderful album 'Fear of Music' - as a bass player, I can say it often doesn't get any better than listening to Tina Weymouth...

It all started when I scrawled some shit like this in the journal, Sunday December 1st, 2019, SE Portland, Oregon.

It seems cliche, but life is an endless learning experience, but it's like trying to jot down thoughts along the way using your only pen [and] it, running out of ink...Invented time marches on...

Then it went a different direction, and after I finished it I titled it:

'Self-portrait of the Artist as a Relatively Young Man,'

I am always writing...But, as an art form, writing doesn't obsess me as much as music or especially visual arts...It ain't the same drug, but that doesn't mean I don't dig it, double negatives aside. Writing is very important to me, though, and there is no way in heaven, hell or in-between could I maintain sanity without it [again, I exaggerate here a wee bit!] It is the obsession on slow simmer, always bubbling underneath. I always do it more [writing] than I realized at the time, that is when I examine the whole of it globally after some years have passed. 

Since I was a child, I have always been an observer, and this is the chief driver of a creative mind, behind only obsessiveness...and it comes back to the observer...the driver of collecting things, movements, mannerisms, ways of speech, it matters not if the artist can't see, she is [an] observer through her ears, can't hear, collects all with his eyes, and so on. Obsessive observers, all. Same with songwriters, even instrumental ones, the moods are from living with and observing humans, while always being painfully aware, especially when said humans reveal their ugly sides, that we are also human; Obsessive observers of humans that are human...

...It gets inside us [the desire to create], like some virus, makes a home in our psyches, our very bones, and our obsessive natures process it all at excessive speeds inside, demanding to be let out from within the confines of our beings, to be thrown into the physical world, a smear, a dance, a primal yell, controlled vibrations of instruments, vocal cords, a confession of the shimmering universe around us. 

Tarkovsky, the great film maker, wrote of what I write of here as the desire to create being like a seed inside the artist that grows within them, becomes part of them, can't be ignored, that has to be exposed.

I agree with this [it] is more elegant than my virus metaphor...I have felt this, all of the above, since I was conscious. I don't remember a time when I didn't feel a drive to make something that didn't exist and [that] was important mostly on an emotional level.  

I fell into this 'Self-portrait of the Artist as a Relatively Young Man' while just scrawling random thoughts into a journal. But the stairs won't sweep themselves.

Wayne Ray Flower II
12/1/19 
  
Love to Folks and Critters...



All photos by Wayne R. Flower

I met Luna the other day, she was so sweet

 
 Denni the ballerina

 10710707

 PDX from the Hawthorne Bridge (click to see bigger version)

"Paint this side of the building."
"What color?"

"I don't care. City says paint the building, so paint the building, Picasso."

                                                    Breathe in the city

I wish I had a better camera here, this was by the train tracks, someone had put up on little stands these cool lit up orbs, one was an eyeball, they were so cool, such a magical little moment to find them on the way to the bus. They were gone the next day.

"...The first experiment already illustrates a truth of the theory, well confirmed by practice,..

...what-ever can happen will happen if we make trials enough." ~ Mathematician Augustus De Morgan, thought by many to be the earliest expression of the modern idea that later became known as Murphy's Law.

I find myself picking a lot of stories to tell on here that involve some adversity I have been through, small or large. I suppose that is because stories of adversity make for a better yarn, period. That said, I will try and mix more funny stories in. Of course, much of the humor, as is always the way, often comes from the very struggles and adversities that test us.

When shit going wrong piles up, at some point, your psyche and soul tire and you throw your hands up, to your god or otherwise, and ask, "WTF?" or you say, defeated, "Ok. What next? What else ya got?" hands open, arms up to the sky.

The truth is, I have had some epic days of shit going wrong, as the yarn I am about to recount shows, about my apartment flooding as a result of roofers leaving the roof replaced by a tarp after tearing the old roof off...before the materials arrived, the delivery of which was delayed by the holiday weekend (see poem at the end of this entry inspired by this fact) and one of the craziest series of events born from that triggering event of the flood. We are fortunate when the some of the things that go wrong become just a good yarn, aye? Here we are...

Photo retrieved from The Oregonian  

1. When it rains...

...it sort of pours, in Portland, Oregon, that is, but not in the sense of torrential rains, at least not very often. More often it is fine misty rain or a consistent drizzle. The thing about that is, the key word is 'consistent' here, water gets you soaked before you even notice it, and the small drops get in everywhere, or slowly soak everything. I lived on the East coast 5 years, that was a whole different kind of rain, it rained hard in big drops and there was big booming, scary thunder (once a thunder clap made me leap across the width of the bed like a giant cat). But occasionally in Portland it does come down hard. One of these times was on Labor Day weekend in 2016.

2016 ended up being a terrible year for the whole country, or at least for those of us who saw this all coming or just knew in their bones that Trump being elected president was a really scary and fucked up thing. That morning after was a doozy, yes? This experience I am telling of, I can see in hindsight that it might have been some kind of warning. But I won't go into that enormous rabbit hole now. You can watch the news for that. I am not saying that I will never discuss it in detail beyond snippets I have already done on here. But I am really chewing over my approach on that subject carefully. More to come as I keep saying, challenging Future Wayne to take it up...Onward.

This tale took place in early September, and I am sure I was stoked at the beginning of the weekend, as I had the holiday off. There were roofers around who had started work on the 4-plex apartment building in the deep SE part of Portland, the Sellwood neighborhood, where I lived.

My neighbors at the time were: above me a young, white and somewhat naive single mother, behind me, a white mellow alcoholic man (a genuinely sweet guy) and upstairs in the back some newer neighbors I didn't interact with much, a young white couple with two young children. 

Recently, a woman of privilege bought the building, had external painting done and minor landscaping done and then promptly jacked the rent $200 (I had some noteworthy conversations with her, one of which started with me saying to her, "I don't use the term landlord; you are not a lord, I'm not a serf. It's your building, it's my home, we have a contract." Needless to say, she wasn't a fan of me, and, I wasn't happy at this place. I ended up living in the neighborhood in one of those moments in life where you have to get a place right away and you have to settle).

The Sellwood neighborhood was not a fit for me. 15 years prior to me living there, when it was a working class neighborhood similar to the Seattle neighborhood Ballard in the late '90s(when I lived there), I would have dug Sellwood then, but by the time I moved there, it had been taken over by new money people. I always felt that I was suspect, when walking around, because I didn't have children or a dog. I was surely casing houses to rob! The only good part of this story is that as a result of this flood, I ended up in an apartment I had lived in just before ending up in Sellwood, a place I like and am still in. So there you go, you are safe knowing there is a happy ending. 


Photo retrieved from Veitengruber Law's website

2. The day of the flood

I awoke to the sound of water splatting on the floor somewhere, loudly. My roommate was at the time sleeping on a mattress behind my couch (he was in need of a place right away, my place was a 1 bedroom) and as I came out into the living room, he was awakened by the water, some of which was leaking through the ceiling and on to the floor in front of his bed. He was half awake and asked me, softly, "Why is this happening?" He was a bit in shock about the whole thing and became somewhat paralyzed.

Water was also coming through the ceiling above the front door and from the light sockets in the ceiling, so I killed the power in the fuse box right away. Part of my personality is that when shit goes down, I switch into survival mode and become an efficient machine, easily assessing what needs to be done. I am thankful for that quality, as in other less pressing situations, I don't have that!

I called and left a voicemail with the building owner. I called the fire department. I went upstairs to check on the young single mother. She was totally panicking, at the door holding her crying toddler. She pointed at the ceiling and it was swelled and sagging. I told her I called the fire department and that she needed to get out of there now in case the ceiling collapsed. The other neighbors weren't home at the time, if I remember correctly. 

The firemen arrived, went on the roof, came down and told me about the inadequate tarping that had been done as the source of the flooding. The owner of the roofing company, a man named José, got in touch with me, apologized for what had happened and explained that his crew screwed up and tore off the roof before the materials had arrived.

After the rain stopped, the building owner had someone come and assess the damage and how long it would take to fix. She told me at first that we could stay in the building while work was being done but we had to move things away from the walls and cover them with tarps. But after a thorough assessment, it was decided that we would have to move out temporarily, or of course permanently, if we decided that, and it was a no brainer to go that route, as it was going to take months to fix properly, and they would have to tear out the entire ceiling to do so, and, as I had wanted to move out anyway (the positive here was obviously not appreciated at the time). 

As a side note to add to the 'when it rains it pours,' 'if something can go wrong it will' vibe of this tale, I was at work the day I got the call from the building owner that we had to actually move out, and it was another day of down-pouring rain, and I arrived to news that a beloved colleague had died that morning, and that I didn't get the job I had been working in as a 4 month temporary position (I co-wrote a training manual and ended up training the person who was hired, that kind of shit), and I literally walked between buses and to my apartment, the very one which I had to vacate, in driving rain under bleak, gray skies.

Jose offered to put me up (my then temporary roommate wasn't on the lease) in a hotel and said he would find one for me that accepted cats, as I had (still have) a tabby cat (who was freaking out about all this a bit, of course). I thanked him, he said he would call me with options. In the meantime, we needed to pack up our lives and move them into storage. 

Luckily for me, I had been paying renters insurance, which in part saved my ass. I highly recommend getting renters insurance, it's cheap (about $16 a month) and it pays off big time in these unforeseen situations. The roofing contractor Jose was also handling finding and paying for hotels for tenants. He was obviously concerned about the reputation of his company, but blamed this entirely on his crew. My thinking was that it is his company, he clearly wasn't monitoring things closely enough. That said, he was nothing but gracious and helpful to me throughout the whole experience. Jose gave me some hotel options and hired a moving company to come get our things to take to temporary storage. 

One of the hotel options was a Motel 6 not far from the apartment, we put that aside as a back up option while he tried some other hotels. As I have a cat, it was a little challenging, as most hotels, even when they do allow pets, only do so for a short period of stay and very few offer long term pet stay. It was not certain how long I would have to stay, a fact that made this whole ordeal bit harder to face. But there we were.




3. The movers and shakers and breakers

We had been working every free moment to pack up all of our things, the vast majority of which were mine as my roommate had most of his things in storage in another state (he had only recently  moved back to Portland). The day of the move came and the movers showed up, the guy doing the talking was a large white guy in his early 30s whom I later found out owned the company. 

The movers were loading my things and my neighbors' things into one truck to take to different storage spaces. My large kitchen window faced the driveway, the movers had backed the truck into the driveway and I could see the workers loading our stuff into the truck. Then they got into the cab and appeared to be leaving, but I could see that the back of the truck had not been shut. The truck began rolling out of the driveway as I rushed out the door to tell them the back was open. They couldn't hear me and turned on to the busy road as I was running behind the truck (and not very well, because of my numb leg) waving my arms and hoping the driver would see me in the side mirror. As I ran behind them, my tall antique office chair and a metal filing cabinet of my neighbor's fell out of the truck (the cabinet got banged up). The driver finally saw me and slowed to a stop, pulling over at the curb.

The owner of the moving company came out from the passenger side and was apologizing profusely (this is when I found out he owned the company, as he mentioned this in his apology), saying "This has NEVER happened before..." I found myself having to calm him down. My chair was old and tough, though (never once have I used those two words back to back, kinda cool, really...) so it wasn't even damaged. They loaded the truck, shut the back, and rolled on. 



4. Cats are home-based motherfuckers

I had rented a small car to move items I felt were more fragile, and to move my roommate's items to a friend's house about 10 miles south of where we were. Jose had found me a hotel near where I work in deep SW Portland that took pets. This was located about a 20 minute drive away. It was a sweltering hot day, one of those last gasps of Summer in early September. I had to take my cat away from the house and I was stressing about this generally because a) he was not an old cat but not young either and b) due to his poor judgement skills when chasing things, I had made the hard decision to make him an indoor cat as he would have long before run out into the street into traffic chasing a squirrel and died had I not (that doesn't mean I don't always feel guilty about it) so he was very rooted in the home base, even more-so than most cats, and this was the longest time lived in the same apartment (5 years). As a result, he was very stressed about the scenario. He wasn't even good with driving less than 5 minutes up the street to the vet! So I was on a mission to get him to the hotel and settled as fast as humanly possible.  

We, being me and my cat Denni, arrived at the hotel Jose had set up, out by where I work. I had been on the phone with the car rental place while driving in stressful traffic the whole way there, low blood sugar, trying to extend my drop-off time, but it turned out where I rented from was closing soon, and I sat in the parking lot of the hotel while the client rep was dealing with her system acting up and it finally crashed, she got silent and said, "My system went down. You will have to call back in ten minutes." CLICK.(the first of many "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" outbursts happened then).

I waited in line in the hotel lobby and when finally I was able to talk to the incredibly snooty woman working the desk, she informed me that they didn't take pets at that hotel. What?

I called Jose, hot, low blood sugared, frustrated, I wasn't happy at all about the situation, he insisted that the person he spoke to told him they took pets, and when I told this to the clerk, she said, in a flat tone, "It musta been a new girl who didn't know what she was talking about." In my mind I want to see her as having said that through chewing gum, but I don't think that is true, that is when our minds go all Hollywood on us and shit.

Jose said he would find me something else and he did, but it was the aforementioned Motel 6 in a neighborhood that was pretty crazy unsafe at night. I saw some shit, I tell you what, that I will get to. I wasn't happy to be staying in a crappy hotel because some assholes tore a roof off before the...yeah.

But that is what happened. I was still stressing, driving to the hotel, about having to pay for a whole other day for the car rental, and I was characteristically broke as fuck. They called me back, and said I could return the car to the airport (why the hell hadn't they just told me that earlier? Only they and a god or the gods know), which was good and bad news, as transit back to the hotel would be an hour and a half. But there I was. So I drove as fast as allowed (ok maybe a little faster, maybe...) because...

...I had to get my poor cat to the hotel! He was NOT happy, as you can imagine. It had been an ordeal of hours. Maybe ordeal is a strong word. Things get relative. This is just an essay about shitty days, mind you.

I arrived at the Motel 6, which was behind a strip club and a construction site, with a payday loan place and a liquor store nearby. A neighborhood that was vastly different during the day than at night, there was a high school, a burrito truck, but at night the streets crawled with folks with drug and mental issues. And my new home housed some of these folks. More on that below...

I went into the room and set up the litter box food and water bowls and then brought Denni in. He immediately hid under the bed, as I knew he would. I had some flashes back to a cat I drove across the country with when I moved back to the Northwest from the East coast in 2008, a similar scene played out over several nights and caused the drive to be even longer, we had one long adventure and then he left me after two weeks in Portland, RIP Noose! I digress, but worth it for that little guy, he was special. And so is Denni, who ended up being a trooper through this experience we shared. Only cat people give a shit, but they understand; Cats are home-based motherfuckers. Period.


 

Image retrieved from the Colombia River Mental Health Services website

5. The Roofers, PTSD and Wayne as a Fucking Traffic Accident Magnet Strike Again

As I was leaving to return the rental car, I heard a couple in the room next door in a heated, loud argument. I would experience that on a scary scale later.

Traffic was picking up and I had to get this car to the airport. I was driving down a busy four lane road and I heard a ticking noise coming from a tire...or tires? Shit. I pulled over at a gas station. When I looked at the tires and saw the roofing nails I was double pissed because my own car (which I owned until I got in a head on collision in 2014, another bad day! There is another entry in this blog on that) had gotten a flat from roofing nails and I had complained to them about it. And also, this was the roofers double fucking me when you think about it! I got on the horn with the car rental place and they sent a tow truck to get the car. I sat on the hood of the car, trying to decompress, and waited for the truck to arrive. If I remember correctly, I was thinking of the sidewalk near me where my recent ex and I had carved our initials and hearts into wet cement like love-struck teenagers.



I looked up from my revelry to see two cars coming into the wide driveway that were on course to collide, in such a way as to hit me and the rental car, that is to say, I was directly in their trajectory! Keep in mind not only was I in a head on collision in a car, but I had been hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk (causing a disability and PTSD for life, again, the same entry mentioned above covers it, same road 4 blocks away, 5 years earlier, wacky stuff) so my PTSD was jumping as I dashed away from the potential impact zone. But the two drivers managed to just stop in time before hitting each other, and me. I didn't pee myself, but I was pretty close!



6. Hotel, motel, it's no Holiday Inn...  

The tow truck driver arrived and as he was hooking up the car, a bus came and I rushed to catch it back to the motel. At the motel, I had to look to find Denni, who was still hiding. He seemed to have not calmed much, and it was clear why. The fight that I had heard when I left earlier had ramped up. It was a man and a woman screaming at each other at the top of their lungs, so viciously that I feared one of them might shoot the other and I would be accidentally shot through the wall or something. It was that bad. So bad that the next night, the police came and took the man away.

Seeing a police car in this motel parking lot was common, I came to find, as there were a number of people living there in extended stay who were in very bad places in their lives. There were prostitutes turning tricks, junkies renting a place to shoot in. But I came to find that the state of Oregon seemed to have a deal with Motel 6 to house people in transitional housing. I met a Somalian family who were staying in a room because their house had burned down. So it was a mixed bag of folks, along with the usual travelers you see at a motel. I would end up living there for a month, in one small room with my cat. I was glad to have it.

Venturing out at night became something I did only as it was necessary, as my first venture out to the convenience store was eye opening. It seemed on every corner was lurking someone with severe mental and or drug issues. People muttering to themselves, or, yelling, like the 30 something white guy in nothing but filthy, torn jeans who had pushed his grocery cart full of trash up to a fenced off vacant lot. He stood at the gate, raised his arms, and let out a loud, primal scream of despair. I have lived in Seattle and in Boston, and I have seen some crazy shit. This hit me in a new way. I felt horror from and pity for this guy. 

My friend who told me about a mutual friend's house with an apartment for rent in it who told me about it when I moved there before knew of my situation and called me and said he was speaking to that friend again and he was looking for new tenants. I was so relieved, as the hunt for an apartment was depressing because rent had skyrocketed in the 5 years I had been living in Sellwood and it wasn't looking good for living anywhere near the city itself. My roommate was also able to move in. We are still here to this day, at least for a year longer starting February. I have cherished it every day, and I will view having a place to live differently for the rest of my life. I can't even imagine what it is like for people who find themselves homeless for years or for their life, often due to circumstances out of their control.

I heard word that our former apartment had run up against city inspectors and they had found mold in the walls. Whenever I was in Sellwood for errands, I would go by the place out of curiosity. It stood empty for at least 6 months after.

At least I got a poem out of the whole experience (and a blog entry!)...

José the Roofer

The rule is; you don't tear the roof off if the materials haven't arrived.

A month of sunny days is not a promise of no rain.

Water runs down walls through water pipes to light bulbs; hot, bright, electric glass sacks waiting to explode.

Families put to motels. Men of long hair put to motels, one of whom had moved into the apartment 35 years ago.

The rule is, freak out a bit, it's okay,
but don't freeze. Unparalyze.
Pack your things.
Feel sorry later.
You don't tear the roof off if the materials haven't arrived.
Let light in only through windows.
For if light comes in elsewhere, so will water.
Inspect the studs before pinning on the chalk skin.

But it's too late. The microbes are in your stomach flora, invading slowly, like the Celts. Jose the roofer said, “There is no water leaking. All is healed save for the entombed lung spores hungry for impoverished lungs. Count the days left. Plan it out. You live in a motel room with your cat. Don't get ahead of yourself. Rebuild your life, but don't get ahead of yourself. You don't rip the roof off if the materials haven't arrived.”

Make sure the water rolls away and drips down to the soil.
Keep the mold farm dry and quiet.
Entomb it again. Shhhh. (Don't tell new tenants).
Replace the rotten studs,
pray to your God(s) they stay unrotten. 

And now for the usual photos, a random grab bag from the last week.

Love to Folks and Critters, 
Wayne

All photos below by Wayne R. Flower 

Adjusting my tiny drums

I decided not to wear a costume this Halloween and just go as myself

Central Industrial District, by where I rehearse - the light was magical that evening

Panorama distortion of the balcony at the building where I rehearse (click for a better view)

Irony is carving a tree into a tree...

Awesome mural I randomly spotted walking to catch a bus

"...Let's go to a commercial!"

Oh if we could, put a pause on this whole sordid business that we call every day - This Bizaaro World shite, beyond anything we dreamed in plays or books or movies or tales told.

It hit me the other night that with what is going on in the US and Britain at the same time now is a tale we always heard about how the US is just the New Rome, and that it's decline is coming, or happening, depending upon what quarters you choose to live in, what you choose to believe, what to filter, all that jazz. But it isn't just us, it's us and our 'strongest/best/closest' ally, Mother Britain, our colonial empirical ancestors, the Emperors who gave us it all, who schooled us in murder (and then 'our own' country built once liberated from England, by wealthy elites who used poor people to seize the Royalist's wealth, then hoard it and screw the poor over, eventually pitting them against each other. A nation built, literally, on the backs and blood of enslaved human beings, which caused this country to rise to power at an accelerated rate, and to go on to slaughter the natives here to steal their land, make no mistake about it, white folks. We showed you, Mother.)


These two empires that have brutalized or taught brutalization to the world, manifesting as a fucking death fest where these empires use people who are just trying to get by each day, the people who do all their dirty work while the rich clutch their pearls, as their fodder. These empires are are now faced with idiots in charge of the fate of millions, the Russian puppets, not only people, but puppet policies.The Russians have gotten deeper than anyone, hats off. They run businesses in the US, in countries everywhere - entire communities count on the jobs from their factories and other employers - It goes oh so much deeper than election hacking, and even that has had some test runs into voting machines that are under reported about. They are up in us, to put it crudely. They have a firm hold on the collective genitals of the Western World. (oh-I guess that is also crude). I digress with the best! (my new way of saying I digress, as of now). And it crumbles like, well, yes, like Rome, in stereo, the absurd and somehow beautiful decline of western civilization once saved from Obama's tan suit.

Will you wake up, Republicans in Congress, before you get us all blown to fucking Kingdom Come (and we rebelled against a kingdom, see...) Democrats... FOR FUCK'S SAKE DO SOMETHING.

Which reminds me of a joke I wrote the other night as I woke at 4 am to pee...

Trump could get shot on 5th Avenue and nobody would care (a parody on his words to a similar yet opposite effect, oh confused ones)

I could go on and on but I won't (maybe later...)

In other news, I got a new phone and these days that means a new camera....


All photos by Wayne R. Flower

"What should the city icon be?"
"I know! A donut!"
"Brilliant!"

 

 Our tendency to see faces is strong...even when there are 3 eyes...

 

  

 

A drunk tree. Now I have seen everything.

 

"Yeah I'll be there in a sec, just going to smoke a cig..." ...Tchik!Tchik! BOOM!

 

I want it known that I am 100% pro duce. (sorry) (not really)

 

"Back in the day, I was hearty! I was thick and green and full of thorny bits and....Back in the day, I was hearty! I was thick and green and..."

 

No, the doorway is not rounded - That is some default effect or accidental effect - A new phone, as mentioned...Kinda cool, though.

"...It's not that I like the Empire. I hate the Empire...

"...There's just nothing I can do about it." ~ Luke Skywalker was wrong. There is something we can do about it, folks. Please, please vote in November 2020. You know who you are. You know what we need to do, what we need to restore, what we need to improve upon. Onward.

 All photos by Wayne R. Flower

Is your glass of bricks half full, or half empty?

 Free bedroom set!

 A random assortment of things on a yellow folder led to this advertising-esque photo. I like the colors (and I am no fan of yellow).

 Under the Madison side of the Hawthorne Bridge, Central Portland, Oregon

The hall to the room where I play lots of drums. Out of context, it beckons for far more than playing drums; "Come play with us Waynie, for-eva, and eva, and eva..."

 "Damn it, Son! How many times do I have to tell you not to play in the street! Get your can over here this instant!"

 Hmmm....So...I am a huge Portland Trail Blazers and Damian Lillard fan but...this choice leaves me cold and baffled as to why the choice not to have his head included?..fuckin' weird.

 "Muzt azzimilate...zzzt"

 "You think about paint/And you think about glue/What a jolly boring/Thing to do..." ~ David Bowie, from the song 'Andy Warhol.'

"...He not busy being born is busy dying..."

...says the Bob Dylan song 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' 

"Everyday above ground is a gift." ~ Common saying in the US, especially among the elderly

[Buckle up, this puppy's long...Wait, where are you going, come back!!...You can take breaks. Hey! Come back!]

Bus Battles

 
Photo retrieved from: https://toybook.com/moose-toys-unleashes-the-fortnite-battle-bus-play-set/ 

I originally began this essay with recounting two times I almost died involving cars (read on for more on that) and then in the middle of writing it, I had an experience which later made me realize that with minor shifts in circumstances, I could have died in this situation as well, so I added it.

The evening started with a great rehearsal in a band I just started playing drums in called We Miss The Earth. After rehearsal, the band had drinks at a neighborhood bar near where we rehearse. I parted to walk back to the rehearsal space to pick up my backpack and snare in a grocery cart (I needed the snare for an out of town session with a different band) as I needed to walk about 1/4 mile to the bus.

At the bus stop I met a nice person, a woman, maybe 45, white, and with a familiar accent, she said "This town is so weird," (not sure that is quite correct wording, but similar) and she was looking at what I think was a bus map, making me think that she was new to town, and so I said, "Oh, are you new to town?" and she replied, "No, I've lived here for 20 years, it's just still weird to me," (again, paraphrasing.)

I asked where she was from and she said  Massachusetts, which was coincidental as I lived there, in Boston, for 5 years. It should be noted here that I moved to Portland, Oregon, from Boston in 2008, and of course when I lived in Massachusetts, I learned how to spell that shit, you better believe it. But tonight as I type, I realize the 11 year gap has removed my ability to spell Massachusetts - WAIT! HOLD THE PRESSES! That was the first time this whole series of sentences about the great state of Massachusetts (HOLY SHITE, I DID IT AGAIN!) that I actually spelled it correctly since just after I lived there. Boy, this paragraph is exhausting for me, I can't imagine how it is for you. What the fuck were we talking about? Who knows? Here. we. are.

So the nice woman and I chatted, I forget her name (Jennifer?) about the buses of Portland.

It was late and there were limited options bus wise, but I lucked out on a 17, though I had to catch a 2 to get to it. The woman I spoke with also was getting on the 2. I said, "Have a nice night," as we boarded, and she said, "You too," and as always after random nice chats with random strangers at bus stops, it ended with a bus boarding that separated us to wherever we each sat. 


~~~~~[   [ ]  [ ]  ]
      o          o                            
 
I had the cart, with my backpack, drum shoes and clothes in it, so I sat at the front of the bus where the disabled/elderly seating areas are (which technically, I have right-away to, as I am disabled, but always give seats up for people who need it, I can walk and have better mobility than most folks who have preference there.) But the seats were down when I boarded the bus, and a young man was kind enough to get up from those seats, fold them up for me, and sit in another seat. He was a Latino man, mid 30s. I said, "Thank you," and joked, "You should get a Good Citizen award or something," and everyone in the front of the bus laughed, including him. He then sat next to a black man sitting in the seats at the front of the bus, the ones that face inward from the bus walls, across the aisle and to my left. The black man was in his 30s as well, and this man spoke to the Latino man in basic Spanish, randomly. The Latino man said, "Hey, man, why you keep talkin' to me in Spanish, bro? I don't speak Spanish," in a Mexican accent (causing me, the black man speaking bad Spanish to him and the other Latino man to laugh.) They worked through that, but in the middle of it, a voice from behind me boomed in bad, broken Spanish (I speak just enough Spanish to know how bad it was.)

I turned to see a young black man in his 20s with baby dreads. He was upset and yelling at the black man in his 30s, just ahead of me and to his left. I had been facing another man, Latino, in his 30s, who was eyeing the proceedings carefully, and eventually stepped in as the hero, and verbally took on the young man who was stirring up trouble. The young man behind me began chanting "Cesar Chavez!" over and over again, occasionally mispronouncing it as "Cesar Chivez!"

The great Cesar Chavez, AKA 'Cesar Chivez'

The Latino men both converged, and by the way, I haven't identified my own race in the story as you are reading my blog and just to your right you can see I am a white dude, but I do ask you, while we are on the subject, and I am talking to YOU white people, notice how pretty much EVERY white writer only refers to race when the character isn't white, and yeah we live in a world of some out of control pc norms, but here is the thing, those out of control norms are usually preached by white people who are afraid to live around people of color (these are the white people talking to white people about racism, for example, while afraid to live around black people - this is the Pacific Northwest brand of racism.) That doesn't negate the need to change things that make others feel small and not valued in society every single place they look. Listen to people of color in order to learn, not self-proclaimed 'woke' white liberals, see? 

Where were we?....

The Hero stood up, confronted the young man who wanted to fight, and the young man was targeting the black man in his 30s who was speaking toddler Spanish earlier, "You need to shut up," said the Latino man. The young man was ramping up his rage, yelling in English with what sounded like a Jamaican accent, "He's fuckin wit ME. Cesar Chivez! Cesar Chavez!" The Latino man to my right came forward, and the Latino man to my left did also, both targeting the man immediately behind me. I was directly in the middle of this fight, and realized it was time to 'get outta Dodge,' so I stood up, saying, "Hey, I don't wanna be in the middle of this," and moved toward the area just before the front exit, near the driver. She was wisely calling Trimet security. I watched the situation between the young men unfold. The two Latino men were flanking the young black man. The other young black man, the target of the other man, sat, a bewildered look on his face.

After I determined that this situation wasn't going to resolve, by watching the angry young man as I stood just behind the first guy to stand up to him, and since I was only one stop away from where I intended to get off, I decided to bail, hefted my cart with my snare and backpack in it and began a walk to the second bus I needed.

So as I walked toward the stop to my bus home, I saw the black man in his 30s, walking behind me. I said to him, regrettably now in a 'Whattya gonna do?' shrugging tone, "That's living in the city, I guess." Then I said, "Did they kick just you off the bus?" and the man answered, "Yeah. Man, and I am homeless!" All I could say was, "Sorry this happened to you," because what else could I say? We went our separate ways. Why do I say I could have died in this situation? Because these kinds of situations can escalate and change very quickly, and often in a direction where a gun or a knife comes out. As well, in the last few years there was a brutal stabbing murder of two white men confronting a white racist who was harassing two Muslim women on the Max light-rail train stop. It is worth noting that the stop that this happened at was the Hollywood stop, a neighborhood which comes into this entry later.


Car Wars

Image retrieved from:

https://www.fudzilla.com/news/automotive/46422-samsung-and-sk-hynix-in-car-wars

When I first moved to Portland, Oregon, I lived in a SW part of the NE neighborhood, near what is called the ‘Hollywood’ district, officially named after the wonderful ‘20s era theater in the area (still a place to see films) but also the name traces back to the neighborhood’s Scottish roots, when it was called ‘Holly Rood.’

There is a busy thoroughfare boulevard that cuts through the neighborhoods called Sandy Blvd. I lived right off of Sandy on a street called Hoyt (24th being the number st.) I was off to see a friend get married in Seattle, the year was 2009, I had lived in Portland a year, having moved there from Boston, where I had moved from Seattle for a job 6 years prior. I was about to board a city bus to the train to the airport, waiting at the crosswalk with my suitcase to cross Sandy to the bus stop across the street, carrying a backpack, and a freezable lunch box.

It was a rare sunny November day, the 6th. The walk light came on and I looked both ways for traffic just to be safe. Looked right, looked left, began crossing in the crosswalk, rolling my suitcase behind me, adjusting the backpack and the lunch box slung over my shoulder by its strap. I looked right again to see if the bus was coming as I neared the middle of the crosswalk and a car turning left from 24th on to Sandy hit me as I was turning the other way to look for the bus (in retrospect, fortunate that I was looking away, as when the car hit me I was relaxed, as opposed to when you see it coming, and you tense and injuries increase as a result. Not that I got off from injury, I ended up with some time-release shit leading to disabilities for life, namely a mostly nerve dead left leg, the one the car hit that happened to be the side where I had intense sciatica years before that led to back surgery 10 years prior to being hit, but hey, I can walk, I’ll take it, and, if I could feel it, as I do in flashes, it would be the intense pain I had before it became numb. I digress, but do I need to write that I digress in a blog called ‘Short Story Long – an endless conversation'? Probably not.)

I have wondered if I ever could convey in writing the terror of being hit by a car. I will try. It will be hard, because the PTSD stays with you for life, itself also a possession of another, tense, reactive being whom you watch from inside yourself. It's like how when your back hurts, the muscles tense because they are trying to protect you but end up making it hurt terribly. I am hoping writing of it will be a kind of catharsis. That has usually worked for me in the past. But it won't solve the PTSD I experience when walking near traffic or almost getting hit in crosswalks now. Here we/I are/am. We shall see.

Having not actually seen the car coming when the car hit me, it was an instant shift from my every day reality into sheer terror (I recently described it to someone as waking up suddenly in an entirely different person's life, 'This isn't my life!'). I felt the bulk of metal slam into my left side, my leg, by nature of the juxtaposition of me and the car in spacetime. It happens so fast you almost have to catch up perception wise, that is, while it is happening it is so far outside your known reality, it is like briefly having your body yanked into another dimension, and then you are dropped back here to try and process it with a brain not up to the task, so it throws up defenses. I was sucked into a dimension of violence, chaos. Entropy touched me physically in a hyper sped up way, as if its normal decay and unwinding was not quick enough and extensive measures were taken up.

After going over it later, I pieced together as much as I could in sequence of what happened. My body was hit sideways, in the leg, and it folded in the middle, backwards, onto the hood of the car, as I instinctively, reflexively, swung my left arm out behind me to brace myself with my left palm (which led to a permanently injured left rotator cuff, an injury that once made me black out from pain just from reaching for something while sitting on the couch and it took years for me to add the two things together – I was mystified as to why, with all the pain I had from known things, would an out of the blue pain hit me when I didn't remember injuring it, and having it be the most intense pain I have experienced – no other pain has made me black out.) 

I remember the classic frozen moment you read about or see in films when characters experience great trauma, or in my case maybe more of a very slowed version of time, and that frozen moment, accessible always, is feeling my body bent in half, my back sliding to the hood, my legs at the bumper, and the driver of course stopped in a panic such that I flew about ten feet through the air, my body naturally twisting in mid air, finally landing on the asphalt on my front and actually bouncing a bit, as if made of rubber, to then land on my back, where I lay still, completely bewildered and in shock.

I laid on my back on the asphalt, saw movement coming at me, and could just see the car that had hit me rolling to a stop. The driver, a white woman in her mid 60s, freaked out, yelling. "Are YOU ALL RIGHT!?!?" I slowly turned my head towards her, mostly motionless, like a turtle on its back, and replied, "Call 911," and even in shock, my daily attitude was intact, as I thought, 'Do I really have to tell her that?'

Then the movement I noticed to my left earlier formed into a man, a handsome Latino man in his late 50s. He was asking me how I was, what my name was, what day it was (later I found he was a volunteer fireman and knew the questions EMTs ask) and he told me not to move and that he had called 911 ('Thank you,') and I laid my head down. I was in front of the bus stop I got on and off of many times already in the year I had lived in that neighborhood.

I was freaked out because I thought for sure, due to my physical issues: intense sciatica and back surgery in '99, that I had really fucked things up (it turns out I was correct, but it was, as previously mentioned, a time-release nightmare of pain, then numbness, read on, dear reader...) I was most certainly babbling about this at the time. The EMTs came and loaded me in to the ambulance. One of the EMTs, a young white man, asked me some of the same questions the Latino volunteer fireman had, including my address, I paused as the tape in my brain slipped and spun, and I panicked. The EMT said, "It's OK, relax and think," and I gave my address, but it was my Boston address. I was in shock of course but this terrified me, as I thought I had said my then current address. I was taken to the ER. Within an hour, I had been examined with no major injuries found (in part because of the gym thing, that is, after back surgery I had to become a gym person to keep my core strong and protect my back and thus I was in good shape) and before I knew it, I was in a cab on the way home. 
 
When I entered my apartment my cat was mystified by me on pain meds and in shock. He did that nose bouncing in the air thing cats do with new smells, and especially hospital smells, (probably brings the veterinarian to their minds) as it sniffed my scent coming to him in waves, a concerned look on that little cat face. And for two years, no injuries. The lawyer I hired only got my medical expenses covered ($5,000) and $2,500! This was largely because I hadn't been majorly injured.

Also, as with the previous story, I later realized with a minor shift in factors, my head could have ended up like my freezable lunch box, which had rolled under the wheel of the car (I saved it for a few years after as a reminder of how precious life is.) I am so grateful that I didn't fall under that car. I will take a permanent limp and not being able to really run over that, thank you very much.

I have some photos I shot for a photo essay project on this incident in a digital photography class that I will find and post here later.

Two years later, out of nowhere, from my hip, groin and left leg came sheer pain, 24/7. It hurt to sit, it hurt to stand, it was excruciating to lie down or get up from lying down, and I only had one spot on one side of my body that I could lay on and not be in pain. 

My poor girlfriend helped me with everything, helped me move, fed me, did my laundry. I am forever grateful, FO! My daily routine was to get up super early in order to have time to slowly, painfully, rise from bed after everything had totally settled in in my back and leg, and walk off the pain, or walk it down from unbearable back to excruciating. Then I would stand at the back of the buses to school (it was way too painful to drive, I tried), I had gone back after 21 years away from college, was at the time working on an Associates of Arts degree (which I achieved, with a high grade point average, and on to a BA in Community Development from Portland State University, in spite of all the pain, thank you very much.) I stood at the back of my classes. Standing, as you can see, was very slightly less painful, but of course I had to sit when I became weary from standing so much.

Then one day it was so bad, I couldn't get out of bed. I just couldn't, the pain was too much, and my left leg muscles were spasming (not a word beyond slang, but totally should be) violently. By chance, this happened right as my girlfriend randomly stopped by to see me. She called the ambulance. As the EMTs gently tried to maneuver my my 6'2", 230 lb frame out a sharp, short right angled hallway, it hit me that this was the second time in my life where different girlfriends have had to walk out of the house with me on a stretcher and see me put into an ambulance. There we were.

And again, a familiar scene at the ER, a doctor taking me into any open examining room and having me drop trou to get a shot in the ass of some serious shit. Mind bending shit, so mind bending that pain is merely amusing, because you can't feel it anymore. "Yes, thank you, I am fine now! Thanks Doc! Guess we'll be on our way-What's that? Oh you want me to wait. Ok! Whatever you say Doc, but I feel great." Memories floated/float to me of myself sitting in the waiting room next to my previous ex at the ER, in Boston, watching TV as Leonardo DiCaprio accepted a Golden Globe award for his role in the Scorsese film 'The Aviator' and a doctor had just done the drop trou trip with me and we awaited our turn and I was so happy for DiCaprio. "That must be great, that must be amazing for him...To win a Golden Globe and be recognized by his peers it's so nice." I was so fucking happy for him. My girlfriend laughed at me, with me, "Yeah, Honey," she said, a huge grin on her face,"real nice."

A couple weeks after the ER visit (in Portland, not Boston) the feeling in my left leg and foot suddenly went numb, about 75% of my foot and close to the same for the leg. It was as if my body said, "That's too much pain. Shutting it off!" I am about to determine why at a doctor visit the journey to which has been long, partly due to not having insurance for 10 years, partly through procrastination (which if I am honest is the mother of my affliction) and one theory randomly posed by the anesthesiologist as I was having my belly shaved for gall bladder surgery recently, was that maybe I had a mini stroke. Maybe. We will see. There are other factors since then, too. The side note is that the anesthesiologist looked exactly like a Hollywood Nazi doctor; thin, pale white skin, shaved bald, with of course the medical wear, and he was German. I felt so awful for thinking that of this nice man. Thanks Hollywood! (which in this story has a double meaning, am I right? The Hollywood Neighborhood where I was hit...and the...Hollywood Nazi...nevermind.)

Car Wars - Part II
- Sandy Boulevard Strikes Back

Flash forward 5 years, to 2014. I no longer lived in the Hollywood area, I lived in deep SE, near the border with Milwaukie (not a typo, that is how they spell it: wrong), Oregon, in an area called Sellwood. But I was driving my car in the Hollywood area, getting ready to go play some drums at an hourly drum room that I rented every weekend to keep my chops up. I was driving on Sandy Blvd, I had been driving SW, and as always when I drove in the area, I glanced up at the spot where I had been hit by a car, where I could have died.   

Since that day, when I was driving in a car, I was very sensitive to people walking in crosswalks, as you can imagine. As I was waiting to turn left from Sandy on to 28th, I noticed out of the corner of my left eye that a guy I knew, I forget his name now but he owned (owns?) a tattoo shop right there near the corner of Sandy & 28th - I met him at a local dive bar that I sometimes ate cheap breakfasts at - anyhow I saw him and a couple friends talking at the corner, and they had the right of way in the crosswalk, I was waiting for them to start walking. At the same time, I unintentionally nudged forward a little as I turned my wheels slightly in anticipation of turning after the pedestrians passed. It was raining slightly and the sky went gray as I flipped on my windshield wipers. 

Then the car was slammed into and turned completely in the other direction. Again I was transported into someone else's life, a life of instant, overwhelming metal violence and forces beyond defense but for seat belts and air bags and Volvo roll cages (thank God or Gods or whomever for those) and the air bag was like a punch from The Hulk, and ended up, lucky for me, being the source of the only injury I sustained from this wreck, a scar on my abdomen.

I had been hit by a car coming toward me as I waited to turn, and had rolled just enough for them to hit me, as I was glancing quickly at my friend and his friends waiting to cross the street. So it was technically my fault, this is a matter of record in the settlement and of course I own my part in this head on collision. No one else was hurt, thank goodness. But I maintain that they were going way too fast for that street. This could never be proved, however. I am certain that if they were driving the speed limit, the damage would have been much less, and they may have even been able to stop all together. Whattya gonna do? 

I sat there in the car, seat belt on, airbag deflating, trying to land back into my consciousness, which had in part risen above all of this violence, like before, when I heard a woman's voice ask how I was feeling. It turned out she was a passenger in the car that hit me. She was genuinely trying to calm me down, I don't remember everything she said, but I remember becoming suddenly very conscious of what I said, because I knew from experience that you have to watch what you say about injuries or anything else as it can fuck up your insurance claim. But I was also in shock, so I kind of sputtered, not forming words because I wanted to talk but felt I shouldn't, and was too out of it to talk anyway. 

Another EMT trip and ER visit in my life. No major injuries. Again a cab home. Plopped back into my life again from the land of violence, near death experiences and trauma. What's on TV?

I went to see the car, my '90 Volvo 240 wagon at the tow truck place and my jaw dropped. Volvos, especially up to the 2000s, are tanks, they have a roll cage and plenty of real estate in the impact zone (which somehow sounds dirty.) That car saved my life, no question about it. I am forever grateful to Mingus (the name of my car, named after the great composer and bassist Charles Mingus.) And in that moment, seeing the whole front end of my main ride for the previous 15 years crunched up to the windshield on the driver's side, even more than being in the wreck itself, it hit me how I could have died.   


Below, photos I took of my 1990 Volvo after my head-on collision. This car saved my life.

 







The crazy thing about all this was, this happened
4 blocks from where I had been hit 5 years prior! Sandy Blvd was trying to kill me! I have tended to avoid it as much as possible since both accidents happened, though I practiced drums near it for years. 

I carry these near death experiences with me always. One of the things that stands out from almost dying I didn't expect; you can easily lose that, 'Life is Precious, I Will Never Take it for Granted Again' feeling you get right after, and thus the challenge becomes to not lose it. So far I have done ok with that. It is the best and most powerful thing you can get out of these experiences.

I have been a person who has tended to stress the past sometimes, things I can't change, and, to sweat the future, something I can try and influence but never totally control, yes, I know this is an issue for most of us, and I also know my solution reeks of pop psychology appropriated from Eastern, specifically Zen Buddhist, beliefs, that is, I engage in a simple exercise, where when I find myself stressing backward or forward, to paraphrase the above tendency, say for example, while petting my cat, I am stressing that my cat will die, most likely before me, and so what I do is ask myself, "What is going on right now, Wayne?"
"I am sitting on my bed on a beautiful summer day, a breeze coming through the window, and hanging out with my cat," and so on. It helps me appreciate what I have when I have it. That is what I take away from almost dying; learning to live in, and appreciate the Present as much as possible. It is fleeting, sometimes more than we know.

Love to Folks and Critters,
Wayne Ray Flower II


All photos by Wayne R. Flower

 Feeding time at Gateway Transit Center

 Inter-dimensional mirror

 'Bottled Joy'

 Window to drums

 Scuba shop window display

 The Saint of Shadows

I don't know what the hell to call this photo