Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

Life back on the east coast has fallen back into its rhythms, as we say.  The weather has cooled, the leaves are changing, I have my annual end of September cold.  Predictability and rhythms are important sometimes.  Right, now as a I sit here amid long essays I'm filing and composing predictability seems to resonate like a founders ale at a locale beer show.  Dark, deep tones of amber, smooth edges of nutmeg and cinnamon making that ale a pumpkin seasonal spout.   Of course, pumpkin anything--in the changing, colorful days of fall--has been a pop culture affection/affection/addition of basic white people .  Even as I sit here now, with a regional pumpkin cider ( Harpoon , to be exact) in a flannel left over from last year's make, I feel a mix of melancholy and romance with the changing seasonal tides. For as much as I love fall, it's colors, and its crisp air it also singles the end of the summer, long days, and sun kissed skin.  Though, this...

I haven't lived in the mountains in years.  In about sixteen to be exact.  That was when I found myself living in Las Cruces, NM with the Organ Mountains in the background. Then I moved back east, and headed northeast to New York.  Yet, in years of moving and shuttling about I forgot and suppressed the memories of where I started.  Seattle.  All those years ago.   I'm in Oregon for the month, on work and research officially and more so is the resounding reset of me.  Pretty much from the moment I exited the Portland Airport a sense of comfort and ease began to settle in on me.  One of those moments when you realize you are home . . . in my case it was a home I always knew I had, but along the years I had suppressed it and moved on.  In the days since, things have fallen in place like natural kismet, without strenuous effort and with buttered ease.  I started out in Seattle, and we lived in a little house on A Street in Tac...