"...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

If at first you don't succeed,

...lie, lie again. After the Mueller testimony and the utter toxic truth, I hope you bafflingly (not a word, but I dig it - deal with it) undecided voters can now see that the choice in 2020 is clear. Virtually anyone is better than Trump (except Pence. More dangerous because he would do shit under the radar - his record is appalling, and he is a believer in 'gay conversion therapy,' of making women who have abortions bury the fetus, I shit you not - never was passed in Indiana, but he was gung ho about it) and is straight up a husband outta fucking 'Stepford Wives,' what were we talking about again?!?!?)))))) Oh yeah. 

It has been a bit, for this blog, anyway, but all my days both at work and in life are fairly crazy right now (personal stuff all good, mostly music stuff, work just work with one guy on vacay so busier.) So for the 5 or so people who read this (ahem!), here are some recent photos and words. I am working on a longer post, an essay about almost dying a few times. Coming soon to a quiet lil blog off in a lonely corner of the Galaxy near YOU...

Here we are.

~~~>><<>>:

All photos by Wayne R. Flower

Downtown Portland Oregon as seen from the Hawthorne Bridge, just East of the metal part, East side of the river.

Iron window grate above a door where I rehearse with a band and rehearse drums for other bands (I need to play bass in a band again! I digress...)

(((*U*)))

At the classic car consignment place by where I live. When I was from age 9 to 11 or so, this was my all time favorite car, color too. I drew it a lot. I got good at drawing cars in grade school, a way for a loser boy who looked like a little girl with the last name Flower to become popular in some way. It is interesting to note that children at the time were like seeds of future non artist consumers of art; demanding and wanting things for free! "Draw me a car!"

Ladder between worlds

Waynebook post: 

Just hanging with the ladies at the beach! #beachbabes #sexybeast

"Dad, post this with some dumb quote, as if I can really talk. You are kinda dumb to think that, pop. And also...YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD! Oh, and uh...good morning, eh, Dad. Can you be a sport and fill my food bowl and water bowl? Shit doesn't grow on trees....You do realize I'm 'talking' to you, right? Get on it, ape!"

This old dude obviously just went through a rough divorce/break up. Heal well, cowboy.

As I have mentioned, I love word play and messing with common sayings...

...and so this entry will be around that. I am going to have fun with it and try and pair one of my photos with each.

All photos by Wayne R. Flower unless otherwise indicated                           
Time feels all wounds.

The grass is always greener...when it's fake.

 





Distance makes the heart go wander.

~~~~~<3~~~~~





          What doesn't kill you...Will try again.

Taken after going to the eye doctor, it always trips me out what those eye drops do, so I thought I would have some fun and photograph myself with a terrified expression on my brow - and yes, I am aware that I am somewhat of a strange man, and also aware that knowing that does me no favors, but, here we are).

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Abstract/Fun Ones:

A bird in the hand is worth a tree full of hands.

You can lead a horse to water, but you'll never saddle a fish. ~~~>><(((((0)))<
        






A stitch in time is an endless stitch...

If at first you don't succeed...Lie, lie again 

Photo from Trump (AKA 'Individual 1' and 'God's Fail-to-the-top-experiment') Wiki page

Love to Folks and Critters,
Wayne Ray Flower II

Some reminders...

...The FBI are not our saviors nor our heroes. But it is more complicated than that. Many of them do good work, they take down child pornography rings (a huge one recently), prevent terrorist attacks. It's a huge entity, it has basically cities of workers doing different things and therefore the evil lies mostly at the top rather than the rank and file. Keep in mind that the key players in the Mueller drama all have known each other and worked with each other for many years over time. That is not 'deep state' conspiracy bullshit, just a fact to keep in mind. And let us not forget the FBI's role in going undercover and trying to subvert honorable People's Movements, like the Civil Rights movement, and have had a hand in some awful shit (it was started by freaking J Edgar Hoover, for chrissakes! His foulness cannot be washed out). 

 (no author/artists credited at source)

...And yeah, there is plenty of fodder for conspiracy theories, and sometimes they are right in the end, natch. But if that were true, and if they wanted to take Trump down, they would have done so BEFORE he was elected. That kills any argument right there. Yep. Here we are. More on this in later entries. In short, hardly anyone will read the Mueller Report. If you haven't you should. I have told myself I will not debate it with anyone if they haven't read it (even discussing it seems unproductive) and the beauty of that is, I won't be spending much time debating it as a result! (for that reason, and, that I deleted my Facebook account). The bad side of this is that, as a result of no one reading it, more will have the wool pulled over their eyes. We have seen this big infant man fail to the top before. Don't be shocked if it happens again. It's God's plan, remember? (oh Lord I hope not). 

[Not sure why, but the whole rest of this entry has an entirely different line-spacing setting, despite it looking fine when editing. Blogger sometimes does shit like this - No matter what I try: Pasting into text editor, formatting in Word, none of it works. I am pleased overall with Blogger, but shit like this drives me nuts!]

More reminders...

...Democrats are in on the take, too and yes of course we need to get God's fail-to-the-top-experiment out of power any way possible, last resort, the ballot. I just mean don't get woolly eyed and forget. Congress is mostly a self-serving and dealing group, established by slave owning, elitist wealth hoarders who tricked poor people into kicking out the British rich so they themselves could plunder their riches and land and often not pay the soldiers who won it for them (the story that may not have been told in your public school books if you are, like me, of a certain age - read Howard Zinn's education altering masterwork of history, 'A People's History of the United States') DIGRESSION ALERT: My point is that nothing has really changed. I am not a huge Bill Maher fan but he nailed it once when he said (from memory) "Republicans will just outright piss on you. Democrats will give you an umbrella first." Yes.

Admittedly, this cartoon is slightly off topic, but I may do an entry on my loathing of 'Undecided' voters who fuck everything up for all of us. If you are undecided now, after everything that has happened...WHAT THE HELL DOES IT TAKE? Ahem...Back to the thread...

My whole political existence as a voting adult has been a nose holding affair. Always a vote against rather than for. The way the Democratic establishment operated during the 2016 US presidential election was shameful in its own special way. The crime of what the Trump campaign and Russians did was so heinous that we forget what was uncovered in the leaked DNC emails; Crush the little people by any means necessary because they aren't buying our bullshit. But here we are...Held to a forced political dichotomy that is so ingrown as to be impossible to disassemble. So we must choose...

I'll take the umbrella.

But I will have my eye on them, as always. And it is wonderful what happened in the 2018 congressional elections, where women, women of color, Muslim women, and people of the LGBTQ community won seats, some of them in unlikely red states. I like, nay, love how these freshmen make the Dems taking money from big pharma and insurance companies clutch their pearls. More, please. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it is looking more and more like it isn't a train after all. We shall see. 

And now, check some pixels...

All photos by Wayne R. Flower unless otherwise credited


Love to Folks and Critters,
Wayne Ray Flower II  

Untitled 6

Sometimes, the world

forces itself upon your eyes,

makes you know it.

A violent rainbow

spewed from the earth and

clouds, stained

with the rosy blood of stars,

boiled to steam by the sun.

I am so small here,

on this round, living thing

that waits to swallow me

and my history.

~Wayne R. Fower                              

...Wow, cheer up, bub!

I thought this one fit the entry well...
Sketch by Wayne R. Flower, 2019

Hand drawn (hand self portraits are kinda my new thing)

Sketch by Wayne R. Flower, 2019

This is a train hitch for a MAX transit train in Portland, Oregon. It looks like something Jack Kirby would draw.

Here's a bit of mind blowing synchronicity: I looked up 'jack kirby machines' on Google image search (after getting only vacuum cleaners with 'kirby machines' - which I love, had a cleaning business, the best there is if an older model, fucking tanks - DIGRESSION ALERT...) and the story line made me realize I was reading this story currently in a Jack Kirby Stan Lee book on The Inhumans (not to be confused with Agents of Shield Inhumans, which are barely based on this) and I hadn't seen this, I looked in the book and I was 2 pages away from it. I love what this person did by imagining how this machine might actually move, well done.

Green screen

Magic

I found myself, for the first time in awhile...

 ...almost out of money, I am fortunate that this time was only for a short period, I am, as they say, gainfully employed, but for the first time in longer than that, I was digging into change. Again fortunate that I had about $50 in quarters, nickles and dimes. I say this in part as I took some fun photos of the change when it was on my coffee table, the Lane table that is the last thing I have of my departed mom (1927-1988 RIP) besides a chipped Rubbermaid rubber spatula from the'60s (when they made shit to last)...

...but this all got me thinking of my childhood and young adulthood...

This is 'Treep,'so named as I bought him at a Native American reservation stop (I do not remember the tribe, sorry, SE US) on one of the Treepeople reunion tours we did in 2018. It is a cat carved out of marble. Treep watched over the silver.

   ...I grew up pretty dirt poor, but was graced with a mother who had for most of her adult life the super hard job of running a house full of kids, and not having gone and gotten a job outside the home because in her generation (WWII generation) most women were expected to stay in that home and raise the children and do the tons of different jobs involved in running a household...


    ...then she found herself having to enter the workforce, after the divorce from my father - all my siblings are half blood, some a different father, some a different mother. I always reference The Brady Bunch to help understand it all, and to understand how the hell I could have nieces older than I, I could even pull a master tangential karate conversation mode move here and go into how I was the accident of a person who had already mostly raised 5 kids, a 40ish 2nd generation Irish Catholic woman who would never use contraceptives, and a dad who either didn't care or thought 'the rhythm method' worked (a shout out to the many Rhythm Method Accident People out there!)...


   ...so after the oldest kids moved out into the world, it was young me (7/8), mother, and my next in age older sister for a time, then she eventually moved out and it was just Mom and I, and she went out and worked a few jobs at one point. She kept me fed and in school. Helped me learn to fill out grant paperwork for college and I went a while, Boise State University ('87-'88) not to finish my degree until after 21 years out, here in Portland, Oregon. I was preoccupied by rock and roll semi-professionally for a time (a good thing), before the tech career ate my life for a decade... Mom, she died penniless.        

                   ...I have had a period of ten years making good money, in Seattle and Boston respectively, I won't bore you with the details of the biz, but it was tech stuff, late '90s to 2008, but other than that and the last couple years, I have been used to being poor, so when I become poor again...

...I fall easily back into old survival habits.

                             Of course the ultimate privilege is what I was born as, a white man, something I never take for granted or waste when I navigate the world and I can be an ally when I am needed to be for others and always, to listen to and learn from people who have a system stacked against them.


   ...to me, there is no 'woke,' just waking; Always learning and waking, until death, a lot of deprogramming to be done, that mirror sucks, white people. But look in it with me. I digress. But not for nothing. 

   You must...

...be the flower in the pavement...

 Everything IS made of stories, of information. That carved figure is from Germany, a gift from my older brother, who returned from the military service he had done in Kaiserslautern, Germany. I have cherished it since. I guess I am in a reminiscent mood tonight. Here we are...

  

 There is no up or down in space.

 Slow motion battle of the squares

 Violators will be removed

 How baby carts are made

Felinus Dorkus, Denni (expect many photos of this one. Deal with it!)....

"It rained today inside my head." ~ Train graffiti, SE Portland, Oregon, or it is somewhere down the line by now =={    }-[    ]-[    ]>


All photos by Wayne R. Flower

~(((([[[[{{{{}}}}]]]]))))~

An easy way to toxin-free cleaning at home...

...is what I want to write about today, because I think it is important. 

I wrote a final paper in college a few years ago, when I finished up a degree in Community Development at Portland State University, on how every American home has a toxic waste dump of cleaning products under the sink, and how to address this under the radar environmental issue. I didn't even go into yard maintenance products, in order to keep my essay focused, but that is a whole other issue. [Note that the paper covered a broader solution goal, that is, how the local government could educate the public on it and other ideas, here just focusing on a personal solution that lead to the broader scope of the essay I eventually wrote].

The issue isn't just that those toxic cleaning products are sitting there, in closed containers. It is that they are used, and that ultimately they all end up in our water, thus the soil, and in the atmosphere. Also, whenever a region floods, due to heavy rain, hurricanes, etc., those toxins are mass dumped into the water table. It is a major issue for rescuers as well as the folks who need to be rescued. Those chemicals combined with sewage spewed into the water makes for a powerful environmental concern.

One thing that happens in a capitalist system is that companies are always trying to come up with new products, and that becomes a priority over any other concern, because of course in a capitalist system, money, and specifically profit, is king of all. So in the case of toxic cleaning products, there are a ridiculous amount of them, all with some added gimmick to them, multiplying profit, and thus, more and more of this shite is put into our atmosphere. 

As I covered in my college paper, I had a cleaning business in Seattle in the mid '90s through the late '90s, at the peak 8 accounts, lived on it, did the work myself (with a very short period having some folks work for me) and I used the traditional set up for cleaning bathrooms in the US; Clorox and Windex. Windex is straight up ammonia, and I don't think I have to convince you how nasty the stuff is, you have breathed in Windex or straight ammonia at some point, I am sure, and there are those unfortunate souls who didn't know that mixing ammonia and bleach cause a compound that releases a toxic gas which in turn causes lung damage (there are many documented cases, I found in the research for my paper.) 

I was cleaning offices and recording studios exclusively, I didn't at all like the idea of going into house cleaning and into people's lives directly, and offices are way easier to clean, and I cleaned recording studios as I am/was a musician and knew what not to touch in a recording studio, and, they were studios where I had recorded, so one new recording studio account led to another. I digress, a little, but all to say these places I cleaned had small bathrooms, and I thought about how I was in these small spaces, inhaling ammonia (yes, in retrospect I could have got some masking, but I was younger, yada, yada...) and how fucking awful that was. And later I thought of how so many people were doing the same, radiating out from any given block where I was cleaning an account, all that ammonia, multiplied into the atmosphere. Then all the bleach, the Clorox (an interesting fact about bleach is compared to many other toxic substances, it is at the very least, broken down to a basic form chemically, hard to explain...) Nasty! : 0

I did some (pre-internet) research and came up with two basic products I need that were completely natural and did all the same jobs all the other swill of awful, harmful chemical compounds I had always had under my sink since moving out on my own (and after of course growing up with it) and having carted it all around to my cleaning accounts for a number of years, until this revelation. It is so simple, it seems deceiving, but, it is these two things: Bon Ami cleaner, which is just made of corn starch, and white vinegar diluted in water in a spray bottle (to replace the Windex.)

'Vinegar to replace Windex?' you scoff at me, 'what on Earth are you talking about?' Yeah, try it. You can vary the ratio of water (cold tap water, and let it run to clear the sitting water from the pipe) to vinegar until you get a good compound (you want to smell that vinegar to know it is strong enough to be antiseptic.) I feel it cleans glass and mirrors specifically way better than Windex (sorry Windex, the truth is out!...Please don't kill me...it was bad enough you were killing me slowly!)

 

'Ok,' you sigh, 'But cornstarch to replace Clorox bleach? COME ON!'
After I ask you to stop yelling, I tell you that starch that is as concentrated as Bon Ami is powerful, more so if you get the surface to be cleaned wet, sprinkle it on, and let the starch do its work over 10 or 15 minutes, you can spray some vinegar water compound on - This is good for cutting boards and counters (especially white ones, it will remove pretty much any stain, wine, whatever.) Just scrub and rinse. Bon Ami also works wonders on chrome, it won't scratch it, get chrome wet, sprinkle it on, scrub off with rag or paper towel, rinse.

[Addendum: After writing this I realized I left out a crucial home cleaning product: Dish soap! I use the brand in the photo below, but any legitamately natural dish soap will work, there are many effective ones out there (beware ones from large soap companies labeled 'green' or 'natural', they are merely trying to catch that market and use clever wording to get around the fact that it ain't natural, ain't green, no way, no how! And even if it is natural, in my view, I would still be supporting a company that was part of the problem - when companies go to all natural, environmentally safe solutions, they will have my ear and maybe my money...Anyhow, always check ingredients!)]  

Also, as an ex girlfriend of mine will tell you (she taught me this) most drain clogs can be cleared with baking soda (another powerful natural cleaner) and white vinegar (again, play with ratios.) I do concede though, that for really, really tough drain clogs, nothing works as good as the old nasty toxic shit. And you are left with a choice. In my case, I am too broke to call a plumber, so sometimes my plumber is first name 'Liquid'  : ( - If anyone knows of a strong natural solution, let me know. I have not yet found it (also holding out for vegetarian bacon as good as bacon, but that one may never come...sigh)

I don't want to beat this one to death or anything, but I am here to tell you these two (well three if you include baking soda) things are all you need to clean everything in your house, and they are completely environmentally friendly. You see, there are millions of us. I could get nihilistic and say that we as humans are really just a parasite of Earth, but my take is, if that is true, we should strive for our best hope; Becoming a mutually beneficial symbiotic parasite.

I will leave it there. Here are some photos to 


wander through. Have a swell rest of wherever 


you find yourself in your day, I hope it was/is a 


day that feels/felt good.




Love to folks and critters,


Wayne Ray Flower II
 



All photos by Wayne R. Flower

Train and train-yard as art

Human machinations

Unintentional art

The morning after

Toxic beauty