My thoughts, commentaries, and jokes during Week 9 of our new reality. . . .
WEDNESDAY, MAY 6
10:02 a.m. — What’s rather ironic about many of our fellow citizens who are yammering to “get out” is that I suspect most of them are really talking about getting IN — to retail outlets, restaurants, bars, and supermarkets — and spending money.
I’ve getting out just fine all along — every day, for hours at a time — to enjoy the spring flowers, the nearby forest, birdsong, other folks’ lovely gardens, the many little surprises around my neighborhood that I never knew existed.
The selfie here was taken Monday on the footbridge across Interstate 5 and Macadam Avenue with the OHSU Center for Health and Healing and tower for the aerial tram to the top of the West Hills in the background.
And none of this has cost me a dime, or strained my household budget any further than if I had stayed at home.
Everyone else could do this as well, instead of chomping at the bit to get back in their cars and race around to meaningless jobs and opportunities to consume further goods they don’t need.
It’s a perfect opportunity to take a longer view; to assess oneself, one’s goals and aspirations, one’s place in the universe, the things one might possibly have overlooked or missed.
But how many people are doing that?
10:24 a.m. — Gosh darn it.
Whatever happened to “every year it rains in Portland through Rose Festival and doesn’t stop until after the Fourth of July” ?!
I KNEW it was a mistake to get borned in Oregon based on its bogus reputation for wet and cool springs. . . .
THURSDAY, MAY 7
11:37 a.m. — “The real number of deaths are higher than the Mortality Bills show,” Pepys told him. “The clerks are falsifying the accounts and some of the poor aren’t being counted. The bills show seven and a half thousand last week.”
“And the real figure?”
“Nearer ten,” Pepys replied grimly….
It can’t just be the air, he decided. Some other agent carries the plague. But what? Dogs and cats? … God knows how many cats and dogs had been destroyed by now on the mayor’s orders. Twenty or thirty thousand, he guessed….
By mid-September it had become harder and harder to cope with the plague. The living were no longer obeying the mayor’s orders. People were no longer observing the quarantine rules…. victims were being concealed; people were refusing to remain cooped up in infected houses, or trying to smuggle their children out to safety….
… sextons were continuing to pile the bodies into the graveyards until the top ones were covered by only a few inches of earth. In one yard, he had actually seen feet and arms sticking out of the ground. — London, a novel by Edward Rutherfurd (1997), pp. 575-577
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Two weeks ago, in a dual bio of Madison and Jefferson, I read about the yellow fever strike that killed thousands in Philadelphia and nearly did away with Alexander Hamilton in 1793.
This morning I read the above, then, a few pages (and six years of history) later, the Great Fire of London occurs and a gang attacks an immigrant — a French Huguenot — because they claim he started the fire:
“… the rumours had begun. A fire like this could not be the work of chance. Some said it must be the Dutch. But most — perhaps half the good people of London — had a sounder suspicion by far. ‘It’s the Catholics,’ they said. ‘Who else would do such a thing?’
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. . . .
1:55 p.m. — Last I reported, I finally could give up dialing the Employment Department dozens of times a day to catch a busy signal . . .
. . . and occasionally graduate to the triumph of connecting to hold for an hour or more, and listen to an endless rondo of two or three recorded announcements interspersed with smooth jazz featuring a lazy soprano sax à la Kenny G
. . . because Carole managed to dig up my more than a decade-old “customer ID number” from the LAST major recession
. . . so I could finally change my mailing address in the state Employment Department system from the place we lived in 15 years ago — just in case, you know, the department might want to send me some unemployment benefits (of which we have seen not a penny, as well as no sign of federal stimulus money).
In the mean time, however, the department has officially denied at least three weeks of benefits due to “a question regarding your self employment.”
So I’ve spent most of the past day and a half constructing spread sheets of my 2019 income (see my entire rundown of individual revenue sources here), my 2020 income so far, and estimated lost income since March 22 . . . and a 2-1/2 page cover letter that attempts to explain it all.
It’s complicated because I have two part-time employers (for the past 6 and 8 years, respectively) . . . two long-term free-lance employers (both for roughly 8 years or more) . . . at least three occasional but regular piecework employers (job assignments that occur two or three times a year for a total of no more than about a dozen days) . . . residuals from my single, 90-second appearance on the NBC TV series “Grimm” back in 2012 . . . and last year, at least, more than a dozen single-job clients (a little voice work, a little acting, helping people update or created IMDb pages, and even the guy who paid me a little money to discuss books with him) . . . plus a couple of other commercial clients who paid me through my talent agency, and thus qualified as “one” collective employer.
Anyone want to take bets on how much longer it will take (if ever) for the state Employment Department to decide I really am a productive member of society who’s earned some return on all the withholding my various jobs have paid in over the years?
9:47 a.m. — When I started taking long walks around the city a month ago, by chance I ran across at least two Little Free Libraries, at very different parts of town.
This gave me an idea. First, I have quite a few old used books I’ve read and can get rid of. (Normally, we would pack those off to Powell’s Books and the library for resale.)
Second, I need further exercise, and the motivation to obtain it, given that I’ve seen so much of my immediate neighborhood already.
So I decided I would locate and visit as many Little Free Libraries as I could, and carry books with me to trade for whatever they might have to offer. That way, I’d have plenty to read during the pandemic stay-at-home period, without having to depend on the library and my Kindle (which is still a poor substitute).
My plan was to photograph each library, take a selfie for extra proof I had been there, and trade a volume for volume at each one, if possible. (As it turned out, I ended up taking at least four photos of each library: a portrait of the facility, a selfie with the facility, a closeup of the library’s Little Free Library charter plate and number — at least one was missing that; at least, I couldn’t readily locate it — and a photo of the book I surrendered to it.)
Here are the first two I saw on Tuesday. I’ll show you the others later.
SATURDAY, MAY 9
10:02 a.m. — Carole just took a robo telemarketing phone call (no rest for the wicked) regarding our car’s extended warranty.
It has been 18 years since we’ve owned a motor vehicle.
Guess they haven’t gotten around to updating their records.
10:09 a.m. — I saw two lady bugs in the grass this morning when I took the dog across Macadam Avenue to the wild strip of ODOT land just below I-5, two blocks west of our apartment.
I love lady bugs.
5:28 p.m. — Here is the third of the five Little Free Libraries I visited in Southeast Portland on foot, and with whom I exchanged books, on Tuesday. This one was especially distinguished from the rest by its eco-roof.
8:57 p.m. — I was hoping to finish the 829-page novel [London by Edward Rutherfurd] I’ve been reading for the past four or five weeks so I could concentrate more on the 701-page novel [Perfidia by James Ellroy] I started this morning.
But maybe that’s not going to be possible just yet.
9:05 p.m. — I can’t help feeling sorry for trees and plants — especially flowering bushes like this rhododendron and more roses between various exit and entrance ramps for Interstate 5 and the west end of the Ross Island Bridge.
They spend their entire days and years surrounded by the constant roar and exhaust of cars and trucks.
What a noisy, smelly, oppressive life it must be for them. . . .
8:48 a.m. — Happy Mother’s Day, Mitzi Asai Loftus. You’re the greatest.
(This photo is from our annual family get-together a year ago for playing card and board games, eating, and sharing stories; we had to cancel this year’s, which we’d scheduled for the weekend of March 27-29!)
There are brief political commentaries, books read, walks taken around the city, finches on the balcony, a voiceover recording session in a makeshift home basement winery, and plenty of wine. . . .
4:26 p.m. — I count the start of this from March 12, the morning I showed up with the rest of the cast of “The Journal of Ben Uchida” for two shows at the Winningstad Theater and no one came.
The NBA had canceled its season the night before, just as my book group was sitting down to dinner and chat about Last Go Round by Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs, and on the 13th the president bowed to reality and declared a national health emergency.
So today is Day 60 of the pandemic according to my timeline, and this is how I look today. I had gotten a professional dye job on Feb. 25 — the first day of tech rehearsals — in order to portray a man 20 years younger. By March 12 we were halfway through the run, my roots were starting to show, and I was trying to decide how soon to get them re-touched.
Then everything crashed to the ground. Shortly thereafter, I saw jokes online about how soon we would learn who’d been dye-ing their hair — a notion that would have had little personal meaning for me before this year.
Over the next two weeks, in the latter half of March, my roots seemed to explode, especially on the sides where my coif had been sheered in a 1940s hairstyle. The effect reminded me of the undercoat on a Siberian Husky or a wolverine.
Since then, the process seems to have slowed. My hair is undoubtedly still growing, but for many weeks the silver-white roots appear almost to have stabilized. I remember the stylist telling me back in February that hot water would wash out the color faster, so I had scrubbed my hair sparingly under cool water during the play run . . . but having returned to my normal showering habits, I’m surprised how tenacious the color on top has remained.
MONDAY, MAY 11
11:15 a.m. — It has been six days since I’ve gone on a long walk. I did Little Free Library runs on three consecutive days last week — Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday — but those were 3-to-5-milers and fairly leisurely: lots of pauses, lots of close-up sightseeing of everything from blooming flowers and tree boles to interesting graffiti.
Then the hot weather came, and I didn’t care to go out in that, not with a mask and not to face probable high levels of cycle and foot traffic.
So I was pleased to see cooler and potentially moister weather forecast starting today. I got up and headed out around 8 a.m. intending to power through a long walk with few pauses or stops.
It may have been around 50 degrees . . . nippy, but I wore shorts and a short-sleeved linen shirt because I knew I’d be striding hard and doing some climbing — including some fairly steep changes in elevation up to 400 feet — with my trusty Pendleton cowboy hat to keep off any dew or sprinkles.
Basically, I chose the opposite loop from the trek I did on April 6: up the hill to OHSU, south on Terwilliger across Barbur and I-5 to Taylors Ferry, and down the hill to Johns Landing and home. About 7.6 miles in just under two hours.
This is one of the little free libraries I ran across earlier in April that gave me the idea to visit them all. It’s at the south end of Johns Landing, not far from the offices of Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Sellwood Bridge.
I first happened upon it on April 6, after I’d already seen one at SW Hamilton above Barbur, and two days before I saw a third ’way across town on N. Concord near the outer northern edge of residential Portland.
But this one’s unofficial. All the others are listed and pinned on a map at the world Little Free Library web site (more than 100,000 across the globe!), and carry a sign that cites their individual charter number, which I also photographed on all the libraries I’ve visited — save for one that appeared to be missing its ID.
This one has no identity plate. It’s not registered with the LFL site. And if you study the closeup photo, you’ll see why I won’t be visiting it again with a book for trade . . . because there’s nothing in there I’m interested in reading.
TUESDAY, MAY 12
1:47 p.m. — One of the most noxious facets of car-dependent suburban culture: no sidewalks.
I can’t imagine too many people have walked the length of Taylors Ferry Road between SW Terwilliger at the top of the West Hills and Macadam/Riverside Drive along the Willamette River. I’ve done it twice: up the river on April 6, and down from the top yesterday morning. Never again, I think.
It’s a lovely, wooded green region of the city; some residential neighborhoods on the north, several cemeteries to the south . . . but as I say, most people would be foolish to attempt it on foot.
Not only are there no sidewalks on either side for almost its entire length (just short of a mile), but significant stretches offer almost no asphalt shoulder or a sufficiently flat or cleared land beyond to walk along.
It’s a shame, because there are so many desirable, walkable areas within an easy stroll of this menacing strip of roadway.
To give you a sense of the pedestrian challenges, here is a hedge and “shoulder” on the north side of SW Taylors Ferry between SW 3rd and 4th. This is still nominally a residential neighborhood barely two blocks east of Terwilliger and a number of businesses at that intersection — for example, Chez Jose Mexican Cafe, Burlingame Veterinary Clinic, a Shell service station, and Tryon Creek Sports Bar. That’s the Boones Ferry Road cutoff turning right, next to the Beth Israel Cemetery in the center background.
Even sadder than a street with no sidewalk? Possible evidence of a former sidewalk that’s now neglected and overgrown. This is further down SW Taylors Ferry Road between Ahavai Sholom Cemetery and River View Cemetery. The Riverview Abbey Funeral Home and main entrance to River View Cemetery are only a couple hundred yards ahead . . . but accessible only by car for most people — or bicycle, if you’re especially intrepid.
Finally, below is one of the hairiest stretches of SW Taylors Ferry Road midway down the hill from Terwilliger to Macadam and the river.
As wild as this looks, the highly stroll-able acreage of River View Cemetery is just through the trees to the right. Roughly a third of a mile ahead is a Zupan’s Market grocery store, Rovente Pizzeria, Lotus car dealership, the headquarters of Oregon Public Broadcasting, and the southern end of the Johns Landing neighborhood.
But this isn’t even a particularly safe or friendly stretch for cyclists.
11:19 p.m. — So glad the weather turned cold and damp again this week.
The hot days last week prompted a fear that permanent global warming had set in early.
11:34 p.m. — It was an amusing and strange sign of the times to run across a story in the Wall Street Journal about the many work-arounds people have devised to reduce breath-fog on their eyeglasses when they’re wearing a face mask.
An absurd hue and cry has arisen among citizens who have taken umbrage because local retail outlets such as (I believe) New Seasons and Costco have insisted shoppers have to wear a mask.
I can understand how this would be an issue if you’re an essential worker who has to face a constant stream of customers for hours.
But shoppers? Grow up, folks. If you’re outdoors or in your car, you probably don’t need to wear it (though I choose to). If you go on a temporary errand in an interior public space, just endure it or take your glasses off.
Here’s my personal solution (I do this even late at night when there’s nobody around, but the cold air makes my glasses fog up especially fast and easily): Change the rhythm of your breathing.
Most of the time, we breathe evenly: roughly the same amount time in and out (say, two seconds in each direction), with a pause between. It’s mostly the blast of our exhale that drives damp air out the top of the mask and into our spectacles.
So I inhale deeply and fast (maybe one second total) and immediately breathe back out — slowly and gently (three to five seconds). The slow expiration minimizes the blast of condensing air into your glasses, and the powerful inhale may even pull in enough cooler ambient air to help clear them.
* * * * *
If you haven’t seen my thoughts, observations, political commentaries, and jokes during the preceding weeks of the the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic, you can go to them via the links below:
“A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 8”
(which includes another visit to downtown on foot, an online reunion of most of the principal cast of “Grimm,” our address courtesy of the USPS, how the pandemic outed the real “snowflakes” and made “socialist Sweden” the unlikely hero of U.S. libertarians, and my first official visits to Little Free Libraries)
“A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 7”
(online video chat with family, my brother’s remote musical video collaborations, a long walk from the northern border of the city, birthday wishes to my wife, a happy quarantine coincidence, and my discovery of Little Free Libraries)
(the yellow fever epidemic that almost killed Alexander Hamilton, post-lockdown pleasure reading, invasions by Russian bots, capitulation to the Kindle, more long walks about the city, the distinction between an “excuse” and a “reason,” and an outing by car to run errands and finish a video voiceover job)
(long walks through NE and SE Portland, tactics for maneuvering through the streets in mask and gloves, the current plague of faux certainties, and visits to the Rose City Book Pub and Reed College campus)
(the start of my exhausting efforts to obtain unemployment benefits, first long walks about SW and SE Portland, idiocy from the governor of Georgia, an online reading with the cast of my March play production of a new short play by the lead actor, and how this is all Obama’s fault)
(a visit on foot to a remarkably deserted downtown Portland, my analysis of the initial patterns of coronavirus testing and spread in Oregon and major metro counties, several dismissals of the worthless Incumbent)
(the remarkably dry and beautiful weather that has brightened our self-isolation, a library books pile-up, a visit to the Portland Farmers Market after lockdown, the Whole Foods “early elders shopping hour,” a hike up the hills to visit my best friend from grade school, and thoughts about Nevil Shute’s On the Beach)
(the weird hand-washing behavior of men, the shutdown of Portland arts events, and the run on guns and toilet paper)
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