Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

I'm been waiting to find the moment to escape back into Seattle.  Don't ask me about recent events.  This, this, is your (and my) diversion.   *** In what feels like a lifetime ago, I saw my original hometown for a moment last summer.  In all reality, it was how I ended my long sojourn off the east coast, through the midwest, and nestled in the peaceful slopes of the Cascade basin in Oregon.  As I took one last Greyhound up to Portland, walked less than half a block to the train depot, and boarded I begrudgingly accepted the ideal retreat my summer had been was already fading.   Limey had already been returned , my clothes were packed and shimmied into one carry on, one back pack, and one suitcase.  Six week's worth of muscle, memory, and trinkets were packed away in my literal and metaphorical spaces.   As a long weekend, at the end of August, rounded out my travels there's something to be said about the tranquility of returning to a...

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...