Portland: day 1

Hey my hotel room has a view of a distant mountain AND the back of an enormous Volvo sign. SO FANCY.

Here is what happened today:

Got off plane at 4-fucking-AM in San Francisco and realized that 55 degrees in my head is not NEARLY as cold as 55 degrees on my physical person. I was not cold when I was packing, why should I be cold ever? Solid reasoning.

Bought airport coffee. Discovered that in San Francisco, airport coffee is made of poison. This is no good. Began chattering like a purse dog on the flight to Portland. From the sky, the city looked like a cloud bank with spires. It was kind of magical, until the pilot announced that the temperature was 38 degrees. THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES. I threw my knitting in my bag. Would not be able to knit a full snow suit in 20 minutes.

Retrieved bag. Dragged it through baggage claim to find a non-poisoned coffee stand.

Drank coffee while poking at the TriMet ticket vending machine until it spat out a day pass. Like a good little citizen, I sat on the train and clutched my ticket, waiting for a red-cheeked porter to come by and check it. Instead, a couple of drunks fell in and then staggered out a few stops later. Nobody ever emerged from the engine room to check our tickets. Mysterious. The rail wailed and screamed through tent cities and yards of shipping containers. I was almost sure I was going to get mugged for my suitcase by the time the rail stopped at Providence Park, but the neighborhood took a sudden nice turn and I realized I only had a couple blocks to walk to my hotel. Except nobody told me that the streets around here go straight up. I dragged my case all the way up an 80 degree incline, stopping to eyeball some of those green scooters that people have been menacing the city with. I could put my suitcase on a couple of them, and then jog along beside them all the way up the goddamn hill! And then lose control and roll all the way down. I kept walking.

Checked my luggage at the desk, and then went out into the streets to kill time until a room was ready, with eyes like two holes burned in a blanket. It was 10am. WHYYY was it only 10am? HOW? Found a cheese croissant for lunch, then walked back down to the bus stop and waited with a guy who was laughing at something I couldn’t see. Drove back over the bridge (bridges? There are about 20 bridges in this city?) and I spent SO MUCH MONEY at Nucleus gallery. Got to see Nicolas Uribe’s paintings in real life, and he had a painting of his own feet up there on the wall, so it was pretty wonderful.

Then I rode back, bought the entire contents of Trader Joe’s, got my room at the hotel, and passed out on the bed for a 30 min nap like a person hit in the head with a cast-iron pan. I didn’t even get the blanket over me.

And now I am at the Kells Brewery, drinking my way through... well, two drinks. But they are REALLY good, and I am REALLY tired. They’re playing all my music. This is ok.

HNL - SFO - PDX

Hold my plane up, folks. Tonight I'm giving United another chance to drag me off the plane by the ankles or smother me in an overhead compartment. Then it's three solid days of painting, where I will learn to paint straight goddamn lines. Some sort of advanced methodology is probably involved; like using a ruler.

I avoid painting backgrounds, on the basis that they are the worst and I just don't want to, and that is exactly why I'm taking a city street painting workshop. I'm going to crack this thing and be a better painter.

Gave it a practice run in my moleskine. WTH.

lines, how do they work?  

(the page warped backwards a bit, he doesn't really have a stubby torso)

I expect to produce a whole lot of marginal art this weekend, and come out of it with freshly forged skills I can wield in all my future work. Or, at least, a deeper conviction in my prejudice against backgrounds.

Halloween 2018: the year of the cockroach

It was a sad thing to realize that with Halloween falling on school nights for the next few years and the older children aging out into their late teens, our golden days of trick-or-treating at grandma's house with the cousins were over, and a new tradition would have to be established in our own neighborhood, amidst the guard dogs and long dark streets lined with broken-down cars.

Heartily, I said, "fuck a whole bunch of that," and skipped out on work 3 hours early, stuffed the kids into the car, and drove across the island with a pie and two rotisserie chickens to crash my mother's house.

The older cousin, who had ditched us for four years running in favor of pizza and video games, suddenly found himself pulling together a costume and hitting the streets for candy, running around in a nostalgic excitement like an old man who had been transformed into a child for just one night. Gavin had been ready to hit the pavement in a massive Chewbacca onesie and furry gloves when he realized he would get heat stroke and die. Fortunately, my aunt showed up in a homemade cockroach costume and jammed the antennae onto his head at the last minute, so we were saved from having to drag his unconscious body around the neighborhood.

It was fantastic. At nightfall the cat and the weenie led the charge, with the big kids in pursuit, and my mother and I trudged along as designated pack horses/costume repair technicians, extra bags for candy tucked under our arms. Our neighborhood is a good one for not giving teenagers any shit about trick-or-treating, although the drunker of the dads, without exception, called the storm trooper "Darth Vadar" and made strangled breathing noises, so that Teddy began stomping around and preemptively announcing, "I'm a storm trooper!" at every door like a dingledong.

It was a renaissance Halloween; one of the good old days.

Pictures:

 WINNER

Someone couldn't find their firefighter helmet and reluctantly let me jam them into a cat costume. 

She was cool with it once the face paint came out.

Tired old tart/candy poison taste tester. 

I've got about six Milky Ways jammed in my mouth here. For safety.

Next year I will endeavor to wear an actual costume instead of putting on a vest and skirt and calling it vaguely witchy. Again.

painting Pan

Guess who is flying to the mainland next week and still hasn't done her workshop homework? That's right, I spent my day off painting the cat, instead. Will end up taking cityscape pictures on the walk from my hotel to the studio with a corner-shop waffle sandwich stuffed in my face. Last year I had all the logistics and transportation mapped out, paid for in advance, and printed out in a detailed itinerary, and this time I am kind of winging it. Does the TriMet have an app? Is my apple pay set up so I can pay for bus fare? How does Lyft even work? WHO KNOWS. I will worry about it when I'm trapped in the baggage claim, mainlining coffee and wishing I had worn a warmer coat.

This is Pan, the cat with the built-in fig leaf of modest white fur. Pan is short for Pantalaimon, but he also gets called "Pan Pan", "Pan Panny Pan Pan Pan", "Panty Liner", and "GAVIN COME GET YOUR STUPID CAT". He is the love of my teenage son's life.

I posted the little painting on instagram before heading to work, and a few hours later my painter friend plunked down next to me at the library. "Look, I've been sick for 3 weeks so maybe it's the pneumonia, but I could NOT figure out that cat. Where is it? What are these swirls? Is its head on backwards? WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?"

So I went home and painted out the carpet. Kind of badly, because it was dark in the dining room, but at least now even a person on Dayquil can tell it's a cat.

I'll give it one more sitting. And then it is right back to neglecting my packing and preparation.

home improvement action - handmade counter tops

All of our home repair efforts have been devoted to undoing all the terrible shit Larry the Mason's offspring did to his house. The cheapest carpeting nailed to hardwood floors. Surplus, mismatched linoleum tiles glued to the bedroom floor. Bottom-of-the-line office ceiling tiles nailed to the bathroom walls as soundproofing. Hammer-shaped hole bashed in the roof, with an aluminum baking pan underneath to catch the rain. And now, in the kitchen: chipped, swollen particle board glued over a layer of old linoleum counter top. 

Before (ok, this is the right-hand counter because I forgot to take a picture of the left, but same idea):

Oh look, they even nailed together two small pieces of whatever the hell that thin stuff is 

to make it fit across

After (shiny! solid! wood!): 

 Nobody better cut any bagels on this thing OR ELSE

It took about a month of gluing, sanding, and patient layers of tung oil, but now we have lovely oak counters. On one side of the kitchen. And by comparison, the cupboards now look like absolute hell. Larry's offspring put about 8 layers of peeling paint on those drawers, slopping over and preserving generations of cockroaches and geckos and small rodents for future archaeologists to discover, so they're going to need to be stripped down and sanded; if they're even worth saving, instead of rebuilding entirely. IT NEVER ENDS. Which is fine. Renovation projects to last a lifetime.

I forgot to take any pictures of the trimming or sanding or oiling, but here are the boards being glued with fancy new clamps:

such wow

Terrible action shot, with embarrassed elderly refrigerator:

That is a fake magnetic ice dispenser stuck on the fridge, with labels like "cheese" and "hot wings"

The other side is getting oiled and ready to mount (leave it). Was I supposed to plan on the backsplashes before installing counters? Oh no.

the angel doggo

Look, I am not even the kind of person who thinks pictures of other peoples' dogs are cute, but I was having a weeping-in-the-library-toilet kind of day and this very good girl came trotting in like a meatloaf on legs and did yoga next to me. Her owner told me to say "chicken", and she made a face like she was pretty damn sure I didn't actually have any chicken for her stuffed down my blouse, because she is a GOOD SMART GIRL.

That is all.

moleskine painting and frantic knitting

Time is getting away from me; I am back to scraping together weekend and evening minutes in my sketchbook. Painting is a difficult thing to do in nips and fragments; there is mess and solvents and pacing that needs to happen, but that is life. You get what you get. 

It is the two-week countdown. Revelation to nobody but myself: two weeks is not enough time to knit a sweater on lunch breaks. The thing is not going to happen. But I could knit a shawl, right? Cold people wear shawls. When I was a kid in Newfoundland we had stocking caps that were so long you could wrap them around your neck like a scarf (or tie yourself to lamp posts/friends/the dog, etc) and probably I should have just knitted one of those, but TOO LATE. I picked a nice, easy triangular shawl pattern and set to it while watching cold case detective shows over lunch, imagining how 18th-century chic I'd be in my sexy granny shawl.

Vision:

Probable outcome:

At least it matches my chicken hat. Which I still haven't found. Because I haven't actually looked for it. Occam's Razor: a child wore it ice skating, so it is going to be dropped on the floor of the truck. Hire me now, Cold Justice detectives.

Pattern: Reyna

world's worst detective is on the case

Recap: the last mystery I failed to solve was the one where a school kid reported a severed head in a valley nearby and our library-coffee-usurping cop wouldn't get a shovel and go digging for it with me just because I didn't actually know where it was.

This mystery is maybe less thrilling than a misplaced body part, but SOMEONE has been disappearing all my winter travel clothes. A few months ago, the man brought a bag full of old shoes to the Goodwill, and now I have one winter boot. He denies donating just one boot, on the grounds that that would be super stupid, but now we have a clean closet with just one boot in it. Suspicious.

And now my chicken hat has gone missing. When everyone went walleyed and shrugged vacantly, claiming not to have seen the most perfect of hats since I wore it last year, I pulled up an instagram photo of Leif wearing it ice skating a few weeks ago. "Oh yeaaaaah, that chicken hat." As if we have an excess of chicken hats around here.

Still no hat. Still one boot. I should probably stuff my winter coat into a locked box before someone uses it to line a pet carrier or something.

human contact

A mom at the library asked me my name, and then turned to yell at her husband, "THIS IS THE POTTY BOOK LADY." He came vaulting over the toddler chairs and gave me a high-five, then grabbed my hand in both of his and said the little board book I had written was the thing that worked for their kid, so thank you. It was really weird being touched by another adult, but I was really glad that they liked the book.

quality literature

With my painting trip to Portland in just about 3 weeks, I started digging through the library donation pile for a throw-away paperback to read on the plane. We have hundreds of these things. People paid actual money for them at one time; one of them must be good, right? Wrong. And in the pile of red-covered cowboy romances and super lawyer novellas, I realized that I did not need a good book; the thing I needed was a really bad one.

My top 3 picks, in descending order:

3rd place

Little Heroes, by Norman Spinrad, 1987

In the near-future dystopia of the 1990s, the world is a nightmare of kibble-eating teenagers with machine guns, and music is being made by synthesizers. A drug-snorting muzik executive enlists a leather-pants-wearing retired rocker queen to create a virtual pop star using computers, with the help of some "fat, sloppy" nerds. Some guy named Paco joins the Reality Liberation Front and they do something to fight against whatever it is this book is about . Many asses are wriggled - wriggles of seduction, wriggles of anticipation, wriggles of discomfort by the reader. The hard-ons are all raging and the nipples are all rosebuds in this misanthropic novel written by a man who now blogs in all-caps about stupid people at his bank, Vladimir Putin, and how he's been unfairly blacklisted just because he self-published a book about a sexy Bin Laden that everyone is too political to appreciate. How dare you. DON'T YOU KNOW WHO HE IS? HE IS THE WRITER OF BUG JACK BARRON.

The fun of this book comes in seeing where the author was accidentally correct about anything. 


2nd place:

Books of Blood, Volume 2, by Clive Barker, 1984

Before there were gratuitous torture-gore films, there were the Books of Blood. Grossly sensuous descriptions of impractically elaborate murders and dismemberments are held together with scraps of plot. Sometimes. Teeth will melt, tongues will spurt, skin will fly off hands like gloves. You think these things are physically impossible? Not when you are a shapeshifting monster who can grow breasts on his own chest until they burst apart like wet tissue. HA. Shows what you know.



1st place: THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN*

Venus on the Half Shell, by Philip Jose Farmer, 1974

Simon Wagstaff is a one-eyed Space Wanderer with a pet owl, a dog, and an electric banjo. He drinks the elixir of immortality while bonking a cat woman, and then hooks up with a sexy, cynical robot who is programmed to hate birds. They battle "zeppelin things", get into an ax fight with a hunchback, and get drunk while telling a story about a spaceman who's space suit is operated by his penis.

If we can't give future generations any great works of literature by which to gauge our society, this is the book that should rise to the top of the ashes for archaeologists to puzzle over. Folks, this book has everything.

Science!

This was called the Unavoidable Transdimensional Shift in scholarly journals but was privately referred to as the You-Grab-My-Nuts-I'll-Grab-Yours Hypothesis.

Romance!

Her kiss was soft and hot with a tang of milk shake and ketchup. 

Complex characters!

"No," she said, "My name has always been Pussyloo. But it was Dunnernickel you were talking to yesterday, and Goobnatz the day before. Tomorrow, it'll be Quimquat."

Poetry!

"To hell with Euclid's beauty bare!
Liz, get your ass out of that chair!"

(An ode to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, after which the poet is clubbed to death by a wino.)



Literary perfection.


A QUEST: Go out and find yourselves some very bad books, and then leave them on park benches somewhere to pass it on. Every one of these books were proof-read, edited, and then approved for publication. The least we can do is to not let them live it down.



* As determined by 10 minutes of page-flipping