water water everywhere
I haven't seen the sun in four or five days. I think I might have spied a hint of blue streaked beneath a massive gray-white cloud on the ride back from the coast today, but on further thought it was probably just a distant hill-mountain. The roads were flooded in various towns here and there along the Pacific. I felt like a kid when I would get really excited watching the water spew everywhere as the spinning tires displaced it. We arrived back here in Eugene today after a 500 mile loop around the northwest section of the state. Yesterday I crossed a four mile bridge across the Columbia River while thoughts of Columbia, SC being submerged for an eternity crossed my mind. Washington was wet. I considered a jaunt to Anacortes, but it's pretty far away. Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia was sufficient enough.
I wrote a little travelogue while in Lincoln City, which is probably midway up the coast. Nice little town. Big waves. It seems to sum things up fairly well, since I was fairly drunk when I wrote it, so I'll let it do the talking. Oh yeah, I'll be Monday afternoon following a 4 hour layover in Dallas. Hopefully I'll be saturated enough to fend off the wild fires (but I'll more likely be too woodsy for such a thing):
a travelogue--
It's a winner! Shrill squeals, laughter louder than the thunder from conversing clouds, lights brighter, more magnificient and malicious than the ten-foot waves crashing monotonously outside a beachside window, slightly cracked to inhale the omnipotent mists needed to digest Melville's indigestible Moby Dick; or, The Whale, with any sort of literary justice that proved absent whenever Thomas and I rubbed our faces in Jeopardy's mess. You owe us Trebek, if not your life than your love. My God the lights! The entire spectrum contained within the limited life of a small six by three automated machine of logical patterns and statistics, chances and payouts. Is this casino life? The lights? Lights more illustrious than the Sun breaking through the casserole-pan of clouds lingering over my downcast head like concern on a madman's brow?
So begins in mid-life a mighty wave, foaming at the mouth with the lust and desire to breach the succulent and passive sands of mother mainland, of a continent so brimming with opportunity that a man can't help but fail at utilizing it. The honest man, in any case--the helpless man. This is how my travels begin, not realized or appreciated or seen until witnessed with agape eyeballs, the only globes I dare trust, until the lights overwhelm my senses, raise every hair on me and cause each follicle to stand in salute to a blinding and confused grandeur and the weight of the spectrum of possibilities before me--each ending in an empty tray, in the absence of the metallic clink of quarters and credits and coins and any other alloted value in life.
The Chinook Winds Casino, wrested snugly on the Pacific along Oregon's crumbling coast, offers much to the willing eye. Stepping in through the sliding doors, the lights!, it confronted me with what I had already seen heading there: immaculate house after house, each offering a window or two--and in most cases I will confess innumerable more--to that untamed charger the Pacific, each crashing wave an illumination and reflection of a soft somber light imitating a blonde mane, every pulsation of sound and every reverberation a clap of hooves against muddy earth's sparkling pavement. I can't speak of myself as much of a connoisseur in the field of equestrian sciences, plump and ripe and dry, but with a ready saddle inviting me for ride, I couldn't help but not resist raising myself onto that thoroughbred beast, his nostrils wet and frothy with anticipation and unbridled force. Not to say I rode the Pacific--that's ridiculous, I leave those red adventures for surfers at Seaside to encounter, mostly in fear of drowning at the image of gallons and gallons of seawater stinging the vulnerable tissue glued together inside of me. No, the Pacific I know to leave untamed--but the coast--yes, that I could approach, that I know is a victim left as of yet relatively untouched by Nature's boiling cauldron. A Casino? Nature's merciful hand at work? Especially an Indian casino, with lights and Keno served alongside your breakfast platter?
All this hyperbolizing would lead any reasonable reader to think that I lost or gained a great deal or sum at Chinook Winds. I lost six dollars. Two packs of cigarettes. A decent meal of Hashbrowns at Waffle House, an 18pack of shitty beer.
I arrived in Oregon on December 19 to a bitter cold ice-storm that almost completely shut down Portland. I was lucky to have not been redirected to Boise, where I would with no doubt have spent an entire night in the mind-numbing agony usually wrought by the cheap floral-patterned carpet that's so very fertile in the soil of American airports. I sat waiting for the better part of two hours waiting for Sandra to get there and gather up the mess I had made of myself on the floor by the windows on the other side of the loading/unloading dock. My writing is starting to get sloppy, that filthy inkwell lodged in my brain prefers accidental abortion than parturition. It was an accident that lodged it there anyway. Years ago, on a ship, bad storm, long story. My hand doesn't really write fast enough either. It's either one or the other, can't find a match to light my way, only suffocate with sulfur and smoke. But that's just rambling best left to editing. We don't care about the writing process anyway, just like the writing. Cut the fat, burn the blubber, bury the heart. It's the only story worth telling. True stories aren't omnipotent.
But I do digress, a justifiable admittance. This is about Oregon, and traveling. Isn't it? Yes, a story is always better when it involves Lewis and Clark, not a lost wolf with no internal compass. L+C have a memorial outside of Astoria. I went to see it. Kids participating in an historical recreation activity burned it down a year ago. The ranger showed us the site anyway. Is that really any better?
Gray clouds, gray water, gray land. The sun comes out to give one single spasmodic and devilish wink, maybe a few minutes a day but not lately. When it's out in full, its powerful rays bounce off the reflective wet road, eyes burn, senses blind--no cars wreck, life continues, gray porridge overspills onto the range again.
But still, the lights! sitting at the bar, leaving the hotel room by the sea with a bed bigger than my old room for a night to break the gray stalemate, the monotony, the endless unrelenting penetration of spurting waves on rock, otherwise known as sediment solidarity. I couldn't escape the manic draw, the whirlwind buzzing and coughing and laughter and shouts and gasps and scoffs of despair and triumph! Life and death in those very selfsame lights! Sitting at the bar through 5 beers and a few handfuls of revolving people, I felt it all. Pull out, light, inhale. exhale. breath. Pendulum of lights on the television, holiday something or other happy this happy that buy my beer okay i'll have a coors...no, nevermind, ill have that one from Bend, that's local right? nice commercial though, pretty lights, no sound so i didn't have to listen to it. only have to listen to the wheel of fortune, "AH! bankrupt?! no! try again!" mixed with U2, god I hate them--but this is a good song. Stop...okay, better, better to sit and stare at the mirror. I couldn't see any of the bar patrons' faces, I looked only straight ahead; also because the mirror receded back into the wall further at the other sections of the bar, keeping me from seeing someone standing right next to me. Indian haints, every one of them, the casino must be built on a burial ground, better give them a few more dollars because i feel sorry for them having to do that. and to keep the haints at bay, the beer can help with that too. They existed in other realms, these people, dimensions too bright for my limited perception. But i could hear them over the menagerie of sounds. Their thoughts were spilt beer for me to soak up like a napkin layered in salt to keep it from rising any farther than it should from the countertop. "I rather lose my money here than out there!" scratchy smokey old voice, spoken by one of those prophets, left to die in the streets and be eaten by stray dogs at the coming of their revelation, our revelation. red skies. coyote howls. hollow, repetitive "dings!" of metal mating to produce an ugly unnatural beast with foaming fangs hanging like icicles from his black gums. She left herself to die in isolation, however, giving up the bar to return to the world that she despised after but one hearty drink, to face the waves with Virginia's mettle.
I compensated for that loud woman's fated exit from the bar with a struck-up conversation with a heavily-bearded fellow from Boise. Grandfather, grew up in Florence, talk between us mostly of geography and meteorology, my youth coming out in occasional and unintentional confessions. He was the first person I'd talked to in hours. Flooding, water abounds, major concern on the people around here. obsessed with water, follows its path of hoove-marks on the penetrating quest inward. The wavering manner of his voice as he discusses a friend's trip to Georgia hints that the water gives life only so often as it rightfully reclaims it. Fertility becomes excessive, and excess is destruction, the spectrum by which we light the path of our bubbling lives.
I go to take piss before finishing my last beer--free courtesy of a drunken man recently endowed with the gold he always mined for--and he leaves.
I told him I would be back.
I saw him again at a verdant table, but I took the coward's path. Walking through another row of slots, I sat down, wanting to join with a burning heart those hopeless souls around me, their eyes wide open, processing with some little comfort the ghastly glow of opportunity 9 inches from their pallid faces, all odds against their favor. I managed to lose six dollars in three minutes.
I wrote a little travelogue while in Lincoln City, which is probably midway up the coast. Nice little town. Big waves. It seems to sum things up fairly well, since I was fairly drunk when I wrote it, so I'll let it do the talking. Oh yeah, I'll be Monday afternoon following a 4 hour layover in Dallas. Hopefully I'll be saturated enough to fend off the wild fires (but I'll more likely be too woodsy for such a thing):
a travelogue--
It's a winner! Shrill squeals, laughter louder than the thunder from conversing clouds, lights brighter, more magnificient and malicious than the ten-foot waves crashing monotonously outside a beachside window, slightly cracked to inhale the omnipotent mists needed to digest Melville's indigestible Moby Dick; or, The Whale, with any sort of literary justice that proved absent whenever Thomas and I rubbed our faces in Jeopardy's mess. You owe us Trebek, if not your life than your love. My God the lights! The entire spectrum contained within the limited life of a small six by three automated machine of logical patterns and statistics, chances and payouts. Is this casino life? The lights? Lights more illustrious than the Sun breaking through the casserole-pan of clouds lingering over my downcast head like concern on a madman's brow?
So begins in mid-life a mighty wave, foaming at the mouth with the lust and desire to breach the succulent and passive sands of mother mainland, of a continent so brimming with opportunity that a man can't help but fail at utilizing it. The honest man, in any case--the helpless man. This is how my travels begin, not realized or appreciated or seen until witnessed with agape eyeballs, the only globes I dare trust, until the lights overwhelm my senses, raise every hair on me and cause each follicle to stand in salute to a blinding and confused grandeur and the weight of the spectrum of possibilities before me--each ending in an empty tray, in the absence of the metallic clink of quarters and credits and coins and any other alloted value in life.
The Chinook Winds Casino, wrested snugly on the Pacific along Oregon's crumbling coast, offers much to the willing eye. Stepping in through the sliding doors, the lights!, it confronted me with what I had already seen heading there: immaculate house after house, each offering a window or two--and in most cases I will confess innumerable more--to that untamed charger the Pacific, each crashing wave an illumination and reflection of a soft somber light imitating a blonde mane, every pulsation of sound and every reverberation a clap of hooves against muddy earth's sparkling pavement. I can't speak of myself as much of a connoisseur in the field of equestrian sciences, plump and ripe and dry, but with a ready saddle inviting me for ride, I couldn't help but not resist raising myself onto that thoroughbred beast, his nostrils wet and frothy with anticipation and unbridled force. Not to say I rode the Pacific--that's ridiculous, I leave those red adventures for surfers at Seaside to encounter, mostly in fear of drowning at the image of gallons and gallons of seawater stinging the vulnerable tissue glued together inside of me. No, the Pacific I know to leave untamed--but the coast--yes, that I could approach, that I know is a victim left as of yet relatively untouched by Nature's boiling cauldron. A Casino? Nature's merciful hand at work? Especially an Indian casino, with lights and Keno served alongside your breakfast platter?
All this hyperbolizing would lead any reasonable reader to think that I lost or gained a great deal or sum at Chinook Winds. I lost six dollars. Two packs of cigarettes. A decent meal of Hashbrowns at Waffle House, an 18pack of shitty beer.
I arrived in Oregon on December 19 to a bitter cold ice-storm that almost completely shut down Portland. I was lucky to have not been redirected to Boise, where I would with no doubt have spent an entire night in the mind-numbing agony usually wrought by the cheap floral-patterned carpet that's so very fertile in the soil of American airports. I sat waiting for the better part of two hours waiting for Sandra to get there and gather up the mess I had made of myself on the floor by the windows on the other side of the loading/unloading dock. My writing is starting to get sloppy, that filthy inkwell lodged in my brain prefers accidental abortion than parturition. It was an accident that lodged it there anyway. Years ago, on a ship, bad storm, long story. My hand doesn't really write fast enough either. It's either one or the other, can't find a match to light my way, only suffocate with sulfur and smoke. But that's just rambling best left to editing. We don't care about the writing process anyway, just like the writing. Cut the fat, burn the blubber, bury the heart. It's the only story worth telling. True stories aren't omnipotent.
But I do digress, a justifiable admittance. This is about Oregon, and traveling. Isn't it? Yes, a story is always better when it involves Lewis and Clark, not a lost wolf with no internal compass. L+C have a memorial outside of Astoria. I went to see it. Kids participating in an historical recreation activity burned it down a year ago. The ranger showed us the site anyway. Is that really any better?
Gray clouds, gray water, gray land. The sun comes out to give one single spasmodic and devilish wink, maybe a few minutes a day but not lately. When it's out in full, its powerful rays bounce off the reflective wet road, eyes burn, senses blind--no cars wreck, life continues, gray porridge overspills onto the range again.
But still, the lights! sitting at the bar, leaving the hotel room by the sea with a bed bigger than my old room for a night to break the gray stalemate, the monotony, the endless unrelenting penetration of spurting waves on rock, otherwise known as sediment solidarity. I couldn't escape the manic draw, the whirlwind buzzing and coughing and laughter and shouts and gasps and scoffs of despair and triumph! Life and death in those very selfsame lights! Sitting at the bar through 5 beers and a few handfuls of revolving people, I felt it all. Pull out, light, inhale. exhale. breath. Pendulum of lights on the television, holiday something or other happy this happy that buy my beer okay i'll have a coors...no, nevermind, ill have that one from Bend, that's local right? nice commercial though, pretty lights, no sound so i didn't have to listen to it. only have to listen to the wheel of fortune, "AH! bankrupt?! no! try again!" mixed with U2, god I hate them--but this is a good song. Stop...okay, better, better to sit and stare at the mirror. I couldn't see any of the bar patrons' faces, I looked only straight ahead; also because the mirror receded back into the wall further at the other sections of the bar, keeping me from seeing someone standing right next to me. Indian haints, every one of them, the casino must be built on a burial ground, better give them a few more dollars because i feel sorry for them having to do that. and to keep the haints at bay, the beer can help with that too. They existed in other realms, these people, dimensions too bright for my limited perception. But i could hear them over the menagerie of sounds. Their thoughts were spilt beer for me to soak up like a napkin layered in salt to keep it from rising any farther than it should from the countertop. "I rather lose my money here than out there!" scratchy smokey old voice, spoken by one of those prophets, left to die in the streets and be eaten by stray dogs at the coming of their revelation, our revelation. red skies. coyote howls. hollow, repetitive "dings!" of metal mating to produce an ugly unnatural beast with foaming fangs hanging like icicles from his black gums. She left herself to die in isolation, however, giving up the bar to return to the world that she despised after but one hearty drink, to face the waves with Virginia's mettle.
I compensated for that loud woman's fated exit from the bar with a struck-up conversation with a heavily-bearded fellow from Boise. Grandfather, grew up in Florence, talk between us mostly of geography and meteorology, my youth coming out in occasional and unintentional confessions. He was the first person I'd talked to in hours. Flooding, water abounds, major concern on the people around here. obsessed with water, follows its path of hoove-marks on the penetrating quest inward. The wavering manner of his voice as he discusses a friend's trip to Georgia hints that the water gives life only so often as it rightfully reclaims it. Fertility becomes excessive, and excess is destruction, the spectrum by which we light the path of our bubbling lives.
I go to take piss before finishing my last beer--free courtesy of a drunken man recently endowed with the gold he always mined for--and he leaves.
I told him I would be back.
I saw him again at a verdant table, but I took the coward's path. Walking through another row of slots, I sat down, wanting to join with a burning heart those hopeless souls around me, their eyes wide open, processing with some little comfort the ghastly glow of opportunity 9 inches from their pallid faces, all odds against their favor. I managed to lose six dollars in three minutes.