"...This is all very confusing, especially when we consider that even though we may consistently consider ourselves to be the outside observer...

...when we look at the rest of the world, the rest of the world is at the same time observing us, and that often we agree on what we see in each other. Does this then mean that my observations become real only when I observe an observer observing something as it happens? This is a horrible viewpoint. Do you seriously entertain the idea that without the observer there is no reality? Which observer? Any observer? Is a fly an observer? Is a star an observer? Was there no reality in the universe before 109 B.C. when life began? Or are you the observer? Then there is no reality to the world after you are dead? I know a number of otherwise respectable physicists who have bought life insurance...." ~ Richard Feynman, "On the Philosophical Problems in Quantizing Macroscopic Objects"(ca. 1962-1963) as quoted by Morinigo, Wagner, & Hatfield, Feynman Lectures on Gravitation (2002)

 

Well, I am still exhausted. On top of the state of our nation, and the confusion among those who vow to replace this 70 year old child king, life is doing its pull-the-rug-out-from-under thing it does in varying degrees, as it does for all of us, though compared to the last few years, so far not that bad. We carry on and, here we are (if you have followed this blog, you knew that phrase, my altered Vonnegut sentiment, was coming; ). As one gets older, they have been through enough to have a library of past experiences, and when we were young pups, adversity, any level of it but especially concerning a a high level of it, felt like the end of the world, but now we can look back, access the library, and tell ourselves, we went through this and freaked out but everything turned out fine.  

Despite this uncertain time, I can say that music in my life is going well now, my dance card is full there, and I am always churning out visual art and writing. I am forever grateful for art and its sanity restoring capabilities, even when it uses insanity and the brink of insanity itself as the fuel to balance it all out.

Taking a different approach with photos in this entry, a photo essay that came from somewhat unsuccessfully trying to capture raindrops' impact rings in a puddle, an essay that I am calling:

Pulses From Another Dimension

 

"God is now here...

...God is nowhere." ~ from Philip K. Dick's novel V.A.L.I.S. (Vast Active Living Intelligence System - the recitation of the meaning of this acronym from memory is a perfect test of one's level of PKD nerdiness, btw)

Blade Runner, and my Conversion to being a Philip K Dick Fan 

If you know me, it is no secret I am a huge fan of the film Blade Runner, and of course by extension a huge Philip K Dick (PKD) fan, he who wrote the book it is based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (I highly recommend that you read it even if you have seen Blade Runner a million times, it is very different story-wise than the film, that said I feel each is brilliant in its own way). It can't be overstated how much PKD influenced all modern sci-fi, written and filmed. After Blade Runner/DADOES, sci-fi would never be the same again. Minority Report, Total Recall, Man in the High Castle, and pretty much all sci-fi to follow his work is based in some way on the  PKD, including, loosely based, the iconic sci-fi cult classic Scanners (which also plays into this narrative later, and coincides with my birthday experience, all detailed below) and films groundbreaking in their own right, like Alien (especially in the fact that it focuses on working class anti heroes - save of course Ripley, but that is out of need in the first film - the working stiff was something PKD had been most of his life, and he always spoke to that and had since the '50s - I digress with the best...).

Before I lived here in Portland, Oregon, I lived in Boston, but before that, I lived Seattle for 14 years playing music, and before that, I grew up in Boise playing music, and Portland was basically my back yard state wise, and thus I was in Portland often. Never liked Portland much (it was a much different town then, when first I came here, in the early to late '80s, and really, it was much cooler, raw, DYI, but areas I played and hung out were crime-ridden then - it was my only lens on P Town for years) until the mid '90s when my friend James, a friend from the early days of State of Confusion (an Idaho hardcore punk band I played in that morphed into Treepeople) and Treepeople, and who is my current roommate, lived in Portland at that time, and I would take time off work and come couch surf at his place. He is a pretty well read cat, mostly in the classics and obscure stuff, but is a fan of PKD, and is largely responsible for my 'conversion.' He had many of PKD's books laying around, and I would spend hours reading on his couch, and would go to the famous Powells Books - and in the mid '90s (oh how I miss this) Powells had tons of different era printings of PKD's books. I was fortunate to have been in Portland when they were still available (good luck finding any now outside of eBay and Amazon for bank) and I still have them all, they are among my most prized possessions.

The film was released in 1982 after many battles and versions being up for use, and to little fanfare at the time. It was, and it sounds cliche, but fits this story/film more than most, ahead of its time. But PKD always was, had been since the '50s. 

The release of the film Blade Runner was the year I turned 16 (and the day of my birthday itself does play a role in the synchronicity later) and also the year my father died of his third heart attack.  

PKD's work has a through-line composed of the questions 'What is real?' and 'What is human?' but also it has a central theme of psychology, of seeing into the mind and motivations of what is always an anti-hero, and often a distressed one living in a world where the police have psychics who probe the minds of criminals and potential criminals, where drugs provide either a way out of the daily toil or conversely, are used to enhance psychic abilities or to control dissidents. In these worlds he writes of, generally neither the reader nor the characters ever know what is actually real, at least not at first.

 The author Philip K. Dick, AKA, 'Weird With a Beard' to friends

The synchronicity 

Philip K Dick died on my 16th birthday, as mentioned. I was a virgin, which you will see is relevant. A friend invited me to a party at a woman's house, whom I will call J. J was 21, as were a few of our mutual friends. She was tall and thin, pretty, with a blank expression most of the time that cracked occasionally with a sweet little crooked smile, as I remember it. She drove a yellow Ford Pinto. This car plus her bleach blonde hair, and her blood red nail polish and lipstick are mostly what I see when I think of J, 30 plus years later, like a caricature made of iconic details, one quintessential to Boise, Idaho and children of the '60s, which all the party-goers were.

   
We hung out and got wasted, like all good US teenagers do (though J was just beyond teenage hood age-wise and lifestyle-wise...she had an apartment after all!). I was a bit more fucked up than most. There was a group of people watching a wild sci-fi film on video, called Scanners. It was insane and I was so fucked up it was even more insane. I would watch it many more times in life, and come to love David Cronenberg's films. But wasted at age 16, I was just into the psychic warfare and the amazing exploding head scene. Later I would come to find out that this storyline was all but lifted from a few PKD stories. And as the evening progressed, I felt like I was living within one. 

J had her eye on me from the minute I walked into the house. I was a handsome young man, tall and naive, ripe for the pickin'. At one point I ended up with her and another friend of hers, a guy about her age, I will call him D, in her basement bedroom, away from the party goers, smoking weed. Oh yeah and I had been talked into doing a hit of LSD; "C'mon, Wayne, it's your 16th birthday!" So, there's that. 

And things started looking very weird. I looked up at D once and he looked like a projected, microdot image in the darkness of the room (I had no idea what a pixel was then, so it was 'microdot' like the then state-of-the-art printer), what in retrospect was exactly like things in PKD's stories and the films based on them. I was wondering if D was even real ('What is real?') or human anymore ('What is human?'). We were all sitting on a waterbed, so I was warbling back and forth, J on one side, D on the other. D was messing with me (what good 20 something wouldn't?) but eventually J shooed him out of the room and focused on me. We began to make out. And then she looked like a microdot projection, too. This combined with the sloshing noises of the waterbed (those things were SO LOUD) was taking me further away from reality. Soon, I was fading away, and we fell asleep. In the morning we had sex. Apparently I played it pretty cool (probably hung over) because she said after that she had no idea I was a virgin. The poor woman had me knocking at her door after that for a week or so until she finally got rid of me.

1982 was also, as mentioned, the year of my father's passing as well as PKD's. Father was buried outside of Spokane, Washington, where some of my relatives still live, and where I spent a summer or two visiting him over different years when he moved back (but he generally ended up in the desert sates until he settled in Reno, Nevada, where he passed). 

My older sister B had the unenviable role of keeping the kids together and distracted, the kids being me and my nieces, who, to go along with the WTF? nature of PKD, were older than I. Yes, this is true, because I was the accident of a 2nd generation Irish Catholic woman who didn't believe in contraception. My parents were in their 40s and each of them had prior families - so my siblings are much older than I, and thus, their kids were often around my age). What B chose to distract my nieces and I with was to take us to see Blade Runner. My life was changed forever.

I had never heard of Philip K. Dick let alone read any of his books when I was 16. I am certain my aforementioned friend James was reading him already, and he was about age 13 or 14 then (but hell, he was reading Proust then!). I am a Star Wars kid, was 11 when it came out, stood in line to see it. That film also changed my life, but not like Blade Runner. It was so realistic, so compelling, so dark. Maybe sometime I will write an entry and expand on that, but it isn't the focus here. 

I wouldn't read Philip K. Dick until that time I spent visiting Portland, 12 or 13 years later. At 16, as bright a kid as I was, I was never curious about what a film was based on much, or who wrote the book or screenplay, except maybe the Lord of the Rings books (at the time the only film adaptions were animated). I had no idea that the same director who directed BR also directed Alien, released 2 years prior (also a groundbreaking sci-fi film in its own right that affected me but again, not in the same intense way). But looking back at other things that happened, I saw odd little connections as I investigated more.

For one, and this is more of a personal connection seen in retrospect, I had a completely false memory of my father's funeral, which I didn't even know was false until about 20 years ago, when I discussed the funeral with my sister. It blew me away how my mind constructed an entirely different, more pleasant scene, complete with a beautiful ceramic urn for my father's ashes and a moving eulogy by a priest, rather than the truth of a simple wooden box collected at an airport freight hangar and quickly buried before my religious aunt arrived, and a priest hastily hired to appease said aunt (my dad was in no way religious and had refused to let me be baptized, and would not have given a shit how he was buried.) This is another theme in PKD's work (there are many layered ones) which shows up in the source book and the film Blade Runner, that is, the idea of falsely planted memories, such as those planted in the 'Replicants' of BR. This particular synchronicity just came to me writing about all of this. It is not a strong synchronicity, as this memory glossing over happens to all of us, it is a psychological coping mechanism hard-wired into us, but one nonetheless. 

One day not too long ago, I was looking at my copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and looked at the publication date. It was in 1966, the year of my birth.

  In summary: 

• PKD dies on March 2nd, 1982, my birthday
• On my birthday I randomly ended up at a party, got wasted and talked into doing LSD, a drug that many of PKD's fictional drugs are based on, watched a film loosely based on PKD's work, and saw things as projected virtual reality, a heavy theme in the writing, and incidentally was devirginized
• My father dies in 1982 and in the town of his funeral, my older sister randomly takes me and my nieces to see Blade Runner
• My memories of the funeral turn out to be false, the form of which resemble very closely the false, implanted memories of the Replicants in BR
• The book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was published in 1966, the year of my birth  

During different time periods in my life, I have actively tracked synchronicity (more often inaccurately referred to as 'coincidence') and what I have found is that when you do this, you notice that it is very common. I tend to look at it as more the fabric of the Universe than some big, mystical, magical thing. Either way, there is something there. As to what this means for these Blade Runner examples, I have no idea, but it is indeed worth the raise of an eyebrow.

"If right means nothing...

...we're lost."

Rep. Adam Schiff, 2020 from his Senate Presidential Impeachment Hearing closing argument speech

~I am exhausted from a busy and stressful but productive week, and it is exhausting being an American right now, so I leave you with photos and wishes of relaxing and letting go for a bit...

Love to folks and critters
Wayne Ray Flower II ~

 99 per cent of the photos on this blog that are mine have only been cropped and otherwise untouched by software effects, this one was tweaked by some effects on my Samsung Galaxy Android phone, in full disclosure

 Thinking of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and all the inspiring things he did with water, which is present in nearly all his films in some prominent way

"Don't fence me in," ~The Green~

 The vast majority of experimental motion shots are shite, but every once in awhile...

The anatomy model, mini sombrero, and the radish painting are things my old friend and current roommate found   

 

A new logo for Republicans in the Senate?

I have photographed a few versions of this - sometimes the clouds and light are reflected in the poster frame glass in just such a way as to catch this melding of our reality with Vincent's

Remember, when learning your kinetic powers, practice only on yourself

 Graffiti blooms, SE Portland, Oregon

 To tag, or not to tag, that is the question

My life is so full of trains now, not only for transport in the city, but I live near a train yard, the band I am in rehearses next to train tracks. Good thing I dig trains.

... "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