. it lives.

This is just a heads up that I am bringing back ..twaddle.. alive on a daily basis?
It could be.
I'm trying to integrate video a blog and different points that I can be reached by social media.
Interesting because I normally try to avoid people.

I am a self-imposed hermit.

This will be all in their face. I'm I up for that..?

There' a lot of backstory on my life; how much I'll unpack here I don't know.
My plan is to have different videos that I hope to run in other locations and bring people back here through to my thoughts here.
They might be reviews of equipment and strains of marijuana, both THC and CBD.
It might be just ranting.
I have political views.
I have views about holistic care that even organizations such as health care maintenance programs are embracing in their own dysfunctional ways.

So there is a lot to talk about.

 

.Salmagundi's.

All those mutterings about communication, follow through. Keeping up. With whom? The Jones?

My last blog entry was six-ish months ago?

Yeah, well, perseverance is not my strong suit.

I took a trip shopping today. I don't do it much at all, shopping that is. Not at the malls. No, I shop for groceries and the like. It's painful now. I do not partake in once a year pairs of shoes at Nordstrom, for instance, with the rationalization that I am getting them at the yearly men's shoes sale, therefore I was saving money. Most times, when I go to the mall now, it is just this bitter taste in my mouth of something that used to taste good.

At first today's adventure was just as it has become: this painful look in a world that is no longer mine. Then the self-loathing washes over me that I would ever consider such a life meaningful or worthwhile. Looking at all the metrosexuals and mousse-monsters preening and considering each piece of clothing, each item carefully, deciding if it is "them" or not.

This time, for some reason, I put that wall of bitterness aside for a few minutes to remember back when...

Every time I step in the mall there is a little part of me that steps into South Coast Plaza, circa 1984. I thought nothing of a day at the mall window shopping, picking up a couple of doo-dads. After all of that, lunch at, say Salmagundi. Lunch wasn't cheap there. Six or so soups, all scratch made that day. 

Isn't this sad, but I could probably walk you through the line. Grab your tray after looking at the chalkboard menu. Flatware, then to order your salad, soup, quiche if you were having it, and I always did. Salmagundi's was the first place that I ever had quiche at and I made a point of having it every time I ate there.

In the dimmest awareness then, though very clear to me now, was that quiche was one of the first things that I made a point of learning how to make, I loved it so much. I was just started to grasp that if I was going to love all of this fancy food and eat it on a regular basis, I damn well better learn how to make it because there was no way I would ever be able to afford it otherwise.

I guess even then I knew that I was never going to be a financial powerhouse.

At this point one would receive these dishes and order your drinks. Pick up the French bread. What were they? Crisp and a good chew to the outside, small enough for a serving for one--a Bâtard? It was the first time that I remember having such breads, and with sweet butter.

Dessert fallowed as you made your way to the cashier, and as wonderful as that all looked, I knew enough to know that I would have no room for that. That and a drink. How much did I spend? I remember it being breathtakingly expensive. Ten bucks? Probably. I looked up on a site with that number in mind. What was breathtaking then, is breathtaking now, once you adjust those dollars. The estimate that I got would be that I would need to shell about twenty dollars for that lunch if I were to have it now.

If I could.
And I would again, in a heartbeat.

This one should have been stopped in the quality control checkpoint

So. Sixty pounds overweight. My idea of exercise is tying my shoes without making little "oooff-y"noises. I have had one heart event, one stint, one roter-rooter thingie they do now somewhere in my heart, so my heart looks like a taped up muffler on an old Dodge Dart.

Up until a couple of years ago, I was a raging but-oh-so-sneaky "functional" drunk. And as I keep noting, all of my teeth are falling out. I barely graduated high school, I flunked out or quit college four...was it five? times. I am so dyslexic that I can puzzle a "left/right" up/down" situation to the point of tears. What else can I admit to? I pick my nose.

I was answering a letter to a complete stranger that I have met online. It is the odd thing about the internet that you can have all of these relationships on so many levels with people that you have never met. I was trying to explain that metaphorically I have taken a fork and stabbed my hand repeatedly in my life. I felt that others,  must be in the same situation. Maybe they need to know that there are others using a fork for the wrong purpose, too. It makes one feel so much better that they are not alone. There must be others in the same boat, or in a boat similar to mine.

Which leave me the question that I ponder regularly: Why is it so difficult to comprehend that none of us are perfect? And trying to figure the degrees of perfection is just silly and there are so many more productive, or at least funner ways to obsess.

When I went to the first dentist, he was the first doctor to blithely suggested that for $32,000 he could hook me up with some new teeth. I had just put, what? four grand into my mouth maybe five years prior? How could it all go to hell so badly?

Now that you all know all of my warts, I immediately figured it was all my fault and was yet another example of what an idiot I was and how I had taken the fork to my metaphoric hand again. As Darrell drove us home, I cried softly and let my mind wander to different family members that, when I was a child, would pop their dentures loose in their mouths to freak me out. I had visions of seeing false teeth in glasses of water. Like a slide show in my head, the faces of people with that awful pulled in look around their mouths where their teeth used to be, slid past in my mind's vision.

Since that line of thinking was so terribly depressing, I started looking at everyone else's teeth.


I remember telling Darrell excitedly last year that I thought Randy Jackson looked like he had some sort of fake uppers and nasty yellow lower teeth. Which meant, he must have been as broke as we were, and he was still allowed to be seen on national television! Or, maybe he is rich, but just doesn't give a damn what other people think! You have to figure he must be made of money, right?

And a snide side note: I'm always amazed at people that have so much money, yet they do not know how to dress and/or have ugly eyeglass frames. There are so many better things to choose from. Doesn't The Dog know about personal shoppers? I do yet, when I do buy new clothes, which are normally from Target, I pick them out because I have to. Even I know about personal shoppers. I mean, he could afford to pay someone to floss his teeth for him, for heaven's sake!

Yeah, now as I look at his picture here, I'm thinking the same thing you probably are; this Dog got the thirty-two-kay specials. I was lying to myself...once again.

And, I say to Randy Jackson: You Bitch.

Then I just decided to close my eyes and pretend it wasn't really happening.

Not that I have ever been good about getting out and mixing it up with people in social situations, definitely, as far as I was concerned, I now had a superb reason to hide behind the ficus tree at get-togethers.

So how many months pass before I find a new dentist, and am starting to get the work done? Six months at least, I put it off. The Denial. The Anger. The...well, you know the five steps dealing with death. I can tell you after the first "surgery" (the polite way of saying "having a bunch of teeth pulled"), it did not hurt any where as bad as I thought it would.

I don't look any more like a freak than I did before the surgery. It has affected my speech a little more; I have to be careful as I speak to enunciate carefully.

And I am getting into the humor of it more. And as long as I can laugh about it, the world can burn down.

This is where I am now. Looking a little gappy. But smiling. I had a lady come into work a couple of days ask me for a recommendation in dental care. I just looked at her and smiled when I asked "Are you sure I would be a credible source for such information?"

is your lawn broken?

I love Google search; that  title as a query yielded a result. And it appears to contain some practical advice, not something along the lines of "First, find three thousand dollars..." because everything to fix a house costs that. We have been here since May last year. This we know.

I am packing around zip locks baggies that contain samples of all sorts of things that I do not know what they are. They grow; are they moss? Some are just dirt, I think, but green dirt? Is this good? So far, the difference between soil here in Hillsboro and soil in southern California seems to be the amount of water in it. Both are clay. Too bad I don't have a kiln. I could make a hellava pot out of my front yard.

I have a new doctor; every year, it seems our insurance changes so we get to find a new one. And they all read from the same script. They look at my belly and look at my blood test results and say "For heaven's sake, put down the fork and please, would you take some exercise??" I would if I could have it on a nice French baguette, a little mayo and a nice piece of cheese.

This all ties into the gardening thing. When I gardened in California, strangers would stop when I was out in the front yard and comment on how lovely the yards were. Stop snickering. They did! And that is a big deal because people do not make eye contact with you in southern California anymore unless they are going to sue you or kill you. Or both.

When we moved up here, my poor Darrell, desperate to make me happy and quietly terrified that we would get up here and I would have a nervous breakdown, did everything in his power to make me happy. We got a 32 foot moving truck and moved every damn plant that we had at my Mom's old apartment up with us. This poor man! All I have to do is give him some special look--and truly I don't know what it is, but he does--and he doesn't protest, he ever-so-slightly slumps his shoulders and quietly takes care of whatever the thing is that I am going to go bananas about it.

12 feet of the back of the truck full of plants. Behind that, a car hitch dragged that awful piece of junk Chrysler that he drove, always known in my writing as the Chrysler Armageddon. This was hauled because it rarely went more than fifty miles without throwing a part. My car followed this and was full of Dad's paintings and all of the Family Heirlooms, like some odd circus caravan. All of our Family Heirlooms are crap that came from whatever the equivalent of Target was 120 years ago, I am sure. So, there is a lesson there when you are about ready to toss some seemingly  discount store objet d'art. Hold onto it long enough and your great, great grandchild will cherish it in a way that will make your ghost blush.  Darrell treats this reverently because as much as I belittle my family and these mementos, he has none, and that humbles me. So, all of that was in my car. So were all the birds and the cats, lurching up to Oregon like some preposterous ark.

I sent the first, well, now that I think about it, the first, what? five years? trying to cope, and being rather ungraceful at not accomplishing it. The hallowed plants, starts from my Grandmother that she stole from K Mart's plant department or Alpha Beta's florist shop. She always packed around a plastic bag and when something attractive came within view she would pinch off a leaf, take it home and grow it into these lovely plants. This is the same women that would always  take handful of sugar packets at restaurants even though she drank her coffee black as any respectable Dane would do, with the argument that the sugar came with the coffee so she was entitled to the sugar caddy full of packets that she would dump in her purse.

That dear, sweet woman, that taught me so much, that I love just as much today as I did when she passed away in 1976, saved enough sugar that in 2005, when we moved up here, we still  had "Alphy's" coffee shop sugar packets. You'll just have to trust me that they had been out of business for years by this time. Grandma had saved so much sugar, her daughter, my Mother, passed on that year and even she hadn't used all of it.

So these plants all made it up here, were carried up flights of stairs and were placed on our patio of the first place that we rented here. They all died in the first good frost. For some reason, I just never made the connection. I had Killed The Family Plants!

First year away from Placentia. First year away from this old smoked stained apartment that Ma first rented in 1975. First year without Ma. I killed the plants. Poor Darrell. He never had a chance.

Probably the only thing that can be said positive about this is that that poor man had never had a happy Christmas in his life. And even the tragic awful Christmases in the first couple of years together were better than he ever had and he cried he was so happy to have Christmas with me and all of our pets! I just cried.

I had given up on us ever getting a house. I was to the point that I was looking on Craigslist for cheap land in eastern Oregon with a glimmer of hope that maybe, if we were lucky, we could get a double wide there and call it as-home-as-it's-going-to-get. Darrell, makes me nuts sometimes. He doesn't really think, he just does. He went into a bank last year and asked if he could buy a home. They said yes. He had told me that he was out buying food for dinner and comes back with the news that he had been pre-approved for a house! What? I had to co-sign for him to get a checking account at Bank of America his credit was so shaky.

Who am I to complain. I am typing away right now in our house that he bought for us.

There was a lot of rumbling about many things as we considered this place; much around yard work, but that got settled, sort of. I had said that I would do the planters and shrubs and inflict my design sensibilities on the overall exterior ambiance. Darrell still hasn't figured out that I can see what goes on behind me if I apply myself and I know damn well when he rolls his eyes at me. He did about that last bit.

The only positive thing that can be said about our yards is that anything grows in Oregon--without thinking about the frost part--and everything is growing here, that's for damn sure.

I spent about an hour and a half pulling up a lort of that weird weed cloth that they slapped down and put enough wood chips to make the front of the place look acceptable. Below that, depending on where you look, we are fully equipped with worms. And I have found another layer of what appears to be black trash bags to the front of the place. Liquid sunshine started to really come down and I could feel my back seizing up like ungreased ball bearings, so I can say, with a complete straight face to my new doctor, that I am exercising. And it ain't pretty.

And I have many concerns about the plastic bag up front under all the bark and weed cloth and worms. We don't know a lot about this house other than it sat unused for a year or so. I watch just enough of those awful shows Darrell favors--CSI, Without a Trace and whatnot to be real creeped out about it. And if it is a dead body: does it go in green waste "other" recyclables or regular trash? Or shall I just chuck it over to the scary Baptist minister's house next door..?

What did Larry look like as a kid, I wonder..?

My daddy died in the spring of 1966; I was 5 going on 6.

And it was a bit spooky to me because at that age  I was on the cusp of really understanding what death was, but young enough to still be puzzling the implications. Now, I'll tell you, when Walt Disney died that December after Dad did, I was really starting to get nervous. Two of the Adults that I really felt warm and comfy with, went "Uhggg" and dropped dead.

You just don't have a whole lot of experience at that age. Is this normal, do the Old Ones pop off suddenly like this? (When I was older I learned: well, yes, they do) But when you are 5 going on 6 you are formulating what is normal; what is not. "Normal" always seemed to be scampering around me. Others seemed to have tamed it for themselves but I found it to be a greased pig then as I do now.

Adults as a species were something that I somewhat feared as they never understood me and I rarely understood them. I knew that they felt that John, Paul, George & Ringo were the devil with shaggy hair. But my brother & sister, who were quite a bit older than me, thought that they were groovy. Ray was a god and Diana was a goddess so their opinion were just a skosh more relevant to me than adults. Despite this, I knew it was best to keep my mouth shut. I puzzled the possibilities of these guys, why would they be hated by some and revered by others? What relationship did  their music have that was so abhorrent to adults and their music?

Wasn't music, music? I really didn't understand music anyway. Ray had me convinced that listening to two radio stations together was special music he called a "medley". I'm sure that my mother passing by as I listened like the RCA dog to the discordant noise of two stations whose signal bled over the other worried her that not only was she husband-less, her youngest child was showing signs of being  truly addled.

See, when I was 5 going on 6, I was three and half feet tall, I had a little skinny body, and even at that age, a size 9 head which in profile was shaped like a football. That big goofy head was covered with little tiny yellow hairs that some thought made my orb look like a light bulb. When this is you, you are already skimming pretty close to Freak.

Add to this was the fact that even then I was plagued with rotten teeth; I had either presented nothing but a gaping black hole where teeth should have been or shiny silver capped teeth grinning out at you like some goofy boy-pumpkin. I know of only two photographs of me smiling back then that still survive. With a flash to light up the subject, you saw not much other than reflected light from these silver covered teeth on the photograph.

I always had scabs somewhere visible. I was clumsy, no doubt about that, but at 5 going on 6, I  feared the death of others, not the possibility of my potential demise. Gravity seemed to be another elusive concept. My shirt would be covered with whatever I had eaten thus far that day, whatever color of Kool-Aid I had fancied; with a gaping teeth, some things just never made into my pie hole.

I would talk like a freakish adult with that squeaky little voice that little boys have then. I asked my mother, "Do you think that Lawrence Welk looked like Paul from the Beatles when he was their age?"

She looked at me trying on different faces, seeing which one fit this particular moment. She gave up. "That's nice, dear", she said distractedly as she went for the bottle of, what she told me was, adult grape juice that she kept on the top shelf in the kitchen.

I shrugged my shoulders and went back into the living room to listen to another medley.

What kind of fish are you?

We live in a city obsessed with food and in an odd way, culture. I really didn't know that before we hopped the barbed-wire fence from California. This town is somewhat dysfunctional about it. Stumptown wants to be thought of as a trend-setting avant-garde metropolis, but with flannel shirts, Birkenstocks, and maybe a mountain bike to commute with, but we are clearly not up to the challenge. So we flit back & forth between affected snobbery and disdain of any established emblems of taste or mature self-actualization.

In other words, Portlanders are stuck in their insecure twenties.

The way I fit in so nicely here is that Portland wants to be a big fish in a small pound rather than a small fish in a big pond; and that is my comfort level, too. Yet another example of serendipity. I am flotsam.

I stare at this and I am not sure if it is really right. Did my personal growth stop in my twenties? I find myself toying with idea that maybe I have been stuck in neutral in the ensuing thirty years? Is this what happens when you smoke a lot of dope at that age?