7 Days, 7 Photos on Facebook

Earlier this month, a friend handed off a Facebook challenge to me. It read:

I’ve been challenged.
Day __ of __ -- seven days, seven photos of your everyday life. No people, no comments, and tag someone to join in each day.

I had mixed feelings about this. I had seen my buddy going through this exercise on his page: he’s a stage and voice actor based in the Seattle area I had “met” online in a Harlan Ellison fan group on Usenet ’way back in the mid 1990s when he lived in Albuquerque. We’ve met in person several times since, both in Seattle and Portland. It crossed my mind that he might tap me to do this too.

My suspicion was that, like so many other tag-a-friend activities on Facebook over the years, this one had originated as the bright idea of some faceless staffer at Facebook corporate HQ in Menlo Park, California. These pretend to be spontaneous, grassroots ideas that just plain folks came up with to do with their friends for fun, but that probably wasn’t the initial impetus.

The goal is to drive up clicks, shares, and activity in general, so Facebook’s gross traffic numbers continue to climb and the social media giant can charge advertisers more money because (in theory) more eyes are encountering their ads.

If you’ve been active on Facebook a while, you’ve seen a lot of these. Back in 2009 and 2010, it was lists:

15 Albums

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums my friends choose. To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.

In Praise of Oregon Rain

We’re celebrating tonight in Portland, because the rain has returned. Not a lot; it’s a classic light misty Portland rain.

But we needed it badly to quell the Eagle Creek Fire that has choked our downtown skies several times since it started more than two weeks ago, on Sept. 2, because (allegedly) teenagers were playing with fireworks in the parched wilderness of the Columbia Gorge.

After an all-time record of cumulative rain and snowfall last winter (more than an average year’s rain in less than five months through February), Portland had had only a hundredth of an inch on August 13, and a hundredth of an inch on Jun 16.

In 15 days, the Eagle Creek Fire grew to more than 48,000 acres as of Sunday morning, when it was still only 32 percent contained; and the day before, we had the worst air quality in the nation.

Ummm . . . That's Not What I Meant to Say

Part of my free-lance income for the past five years has come from proofreading and editing copy for several Web companies that generate content for the Internet. The subject matter runs from real estate and investment strategies to gardening and dental/orthodontic treatments.

Of course I regularly run across delightful typos that might be blamed either on an enthusiastic and hasty writer or unhelpful meddling by auto-correct. Whichever the case, here are some of the doozies from last year . . . along with my “editorial” comments.

February 10: “If you have been given anesthetic, it should wear off in a few hours. Please be careful not to bite your check or tongue.”

Banks can be so squeamish about teeth marks on the paperwork.

April 22: “… allowing realtors to hint at features everyone will be clambering for in a year or two….”

Has the housing market become so competitive that house hunters have to beat one another up a rock wall to land the home of their dreams?

June 1: I was proofreading a dental-care website last night that assured patients “piece of mind.” So this practice does cheapie lobotomies on the side?

August 26: “_______ has always had a wonderful smile, but because of the condition of his teeth he would always cover his mouth or just refuse to smite.”

I can understand that. It’s tough to grin fiendishly while you’re raping and pillaging when you know you have bad teeth. . . .

Remembering My Faraway Friend, Jeff Weiss

Last Friday, I needed to get in touch with Jeff Weiss, the fellow who launched this blog nearly eight years ago. When I went to his Facebook page, I was shocked to see the caption “Remembering Jeffrey Weiss” . . .

Paging down, I read memorials, farewells, and tearful messages from friends and family of my ’net colleague. Further down, I found links to news stories about his death in a car collision near his home west of Atlantic City, New Jersey on June 17. Jeff’s car was stopped when another vehicle rear-ended it in Egg Harbor Township as he was heading home to Mays Landing, and Jeff was pronounced dead at the scene.

I had never met him in person, but we had worked together online for most of the past eight years, and occasionally talked by phone as well as chatted on live and recorded podcasts. I always assumed I would meet Jeff someday, but now I know I never will.

In the fall of 2009 I was going through huge changes: I’d been laid off in early July from the full-time job I’d held nearly five years, and was trying to secure unemployment benefits and temp jobs here in Portland while looking for another full-time position. But I was also launching a side career as a commercial actor and model at the fairly advanced age of 50.

It's Raining in Portland Again . . . but It's Ashes This Time

Right now I have too many events and issues close to home, that affect me directly, to write about . . . as opposed to the usual mélange of national/international politics or celebrity misbehavior and weird crimes.

I have been working on a series of commentaries here about homelessness as well as a few other topics, but a one-two punch of hot weather and a wilderness fire only forty miles east of the city struck this week.

Originally forecast to hit 99 or 100 degrees Monday and Tuesday, temperatures in downtown Portland did not get that high after all . . . but that was because the city was blanketed in smoke from a fire that began along the Eagle Creek Trail, not very far above and south of the Columbia River, inside the edge of the Mount Hood National Forest. (That’s the morning sun in this shot, through the haze and between the towers in South Waterfront on Tuesday morning about 7:25 a.m.).

More than 150 hikers were trapped up the trail by the fire overnight Saturday, but most of them got out safely. By Monday evening it began to rain white and grey ash all over Portland. The air tasted foul. The full or nearly full moon turned a rusty brown or nearly blood red for the past few nights. (Below, the Fox Tower on the left, and Park Avenue West on the right, behind the signpost in Pioneer Courthouse Square, with the smoke-dulled sun behind me reflected in their windows, about 9:20 a.m. Tuesday.)

Homelessness in Portland, part 3: The Road Warriors

At this juncture, I want to point out that my comments are not intended to be authoritative or exhaustive on the nature of homelessness in Portland. Rather, they’re an accumulation of observations and information gathered by a longtime downtown resident.

I’ve had close-up views of people on the streets for decades now, but that doesn’t mean I understand everything about their situation or their origins, let alone their motivations. I merely offer my remarks as an addition to the general public discussion.

We have come to the group that causes much more of the problems on the street that we attribute to “the homeless” than some of the actual homeless people I described here last week.

And I would argue that this group should not be classified as “homeless.”

Category 4: Road Warriors / Vagrants

A type of street person that has become prominent in recent years are folks the police and social service workers refer to as “road warriors.” These individuals tend to be young -- teens and early twenties -- but some are older.

They travel up and down the West Coast with their gear, following the good weather from city to city (and possibly dodging fines, citations, and potential or actual stopovers in jail). They may be in couples; they may have a pack and bedroll, and a dog. So you are more likely to see them in Portland during the summer and fall, when the weather is its best, and you encounter them far less often during the rest of the year. Unlike some of the folks in the preceding categories I’ve described, I’ve never recognized any of them from one year to the next.

Brangelina . . . and Your Duty as a U.S. Citizen

Friday afternoon I dropped into a pharmacy-variety store downtown and saw the rack of magazines below on the counter between the cash registers, which I photographed. I want to draw your attention to three of the four publications: the one at the upper left and the two on the bottom . . .

In case you can’t make out the full text about the cover stories, the Vanity Fair cover reads: “Angie Solo…” and there’s some sort of subhead about “…Became Difficult.” The current US Weekly issue proclaims: “Angie & Brad: The Divorce is Off! Inside the incredible story of how they’re fighting for their marriage, family & love.”

There He Goes Again . . . Puns and Wordplay from 2016

And the silliness runs on. These are some of the puns and plays on words that occurred to me last calendar year. . . . 

January 10: Faces-the-Sea was chief of a coastal First Nations tribe. One day he had the bright idea of building a breakwater in the bay to catch codfish that swam over it during high tide and would remain trapped behind it when the tide went out.

The tribe thought this dam would be a splendid and easy way to catch many fish, after the initial hard work of building the structure. It seemed as if it would work; the pool behind the submerged stone wall captured many cod.

But alas, the breakwater collapsed as the tide went out again, and all the fish escaped. In disgrace, Faces-the-Sea exiled himself from the tribe. The people agreed, it was a cod dam shame.

February 21: Although the King had a Queen for appearance’s sake, he preferred to spend his time with pretty young men. The Queen began to suspect the truth when she overheard him singing to himself, “I’m always chasing reign beaus. . . .”

February 28: I will never forget the time I worked with a playwright who was casting a new play. She loved my audition, but didn't really have a suitable role for me in the production ... until she got the idea of ripping several scenes out of another piece she was working on and inserting the character on those pages into the pending project.

You see, she was tearing me a part.

March 3: Joe wanted one of those smart houses -- you know, the ones where you can remotely control the HVAC, electricity, water, etc. -- and everything responded to his mobile except the faucet next to the microwave and range.

So he had everything but the kitchen synch.

Homelessness in Portland, part 2: The Professionals

There’s a certain class of panhandlers you may encounter on the streets of Portland that should not be classified as homeless. The reason is simple: They have homes.

These are, for want of a better term, professionals … though they probably aren’t registered as a small business or full-time worker subject to withholding, and they may not pay taxes on their income at all.

I do not intend the term “professionals” in any sarcastic or disparaging sense, but in a strictly neutral one . . . because this is what they do. They ask you for money on the streets of the Pearl District, on Broadway, and outside supermarkets week in and out, year after year, but they probably go home at the end of each day.

There’s Larry, “the blanket man,” who tends to wander SW 10th and the South Park Blocks near the Portland Art Museum. There’s a second blanket man, Mike, whose activities center more in the Pearl District and on the streetcar between the west and east sides of the Broadway Bridge. And there’s the tiny elderly woman who used to beg on her feet outside Art Media when it was on SW Yamhill between Park and 10th in the 1990s and the turn of the millennium; but these days she may be seen sitting in a wheeled walker along the brewery blocks, on NW Couch between 10th and 11th.

[Note: None of the photos on this page depict actual street people, which would raise permission and privacy issues; they’re all of me pretending to be a homeless person in various commercial or indie film projects over the past seven years.]

Homelessness in Portland, part 1

During my Aug. 1 Best of Portland walking tour, a guest from Santa Clarita asked about “the homeless” in Portland. Very helpfully, a passing street person overheard her and began yelling his opinions on the matter as I went into my three-minute explanation of the situation (and why “homeless” is a misnomer) in Portland.

I also mentioned offhand that I intended to write about this on my blog. (I’ve been saying that for years.) Nearly two hours later, as I wrapped up the tour on the west bank of the Willamette, the woman asked: “Where do we read your blog?”

A bit startled, I didn’t even have a business card to give her, but I told her my full name and the title of my blog, which she might or might not remember. I thought: Dang, now I’ll have to write something. So here goes.

Does Portland have a homeless problem?

Well of course it does . . . but, in some senses, the answer is no. There are massive legal, economic, social, and political factors, of course, but before they can be addressed, we have to clarify what we’re talking about when we say “homeless.” Much of the public disagreement and rhetoric arises out of confusion over categories.

When we use the word “homeless,” we’re often speaking of at least four fairly distinct populations (and maybe more), with not a lot of overlap between them. I would argue that at least two of these groups do not qualify as homeless in a technical sense, and those two may include most of the people on the streets who cause most of the problems we automatically blame on “the homeless.”

So let’s separate ’em out.

Celebrating My Beloved Wife, Carole Barkley

Yesterday (Monday, April 24, as I write this), was Carole’s birthday. It did not start out auspiciously: We were scheduled to meet with her oncologist first thing in the morning to go over the results of an MRI last week (her third in seven months) and probably undergo her tenth round of chemo for breast cancer.

But her oncologist came in to tell us the tumors had shrunk so much that they no longer show up on the MRI. Her recommendation was to continue with two more rounds of chemo, including that day’s, and consult with a surgeon about two remaining lumps that were likely nonmalignant cysts.

Dr. Rebecca Orwoll actually sang the good news to us to the tune of “Happy Birthday” and my eyes filled with tears. So after the chemo, we went to see a feel-good movie (“Going In Style,” a stylish piece of comedy-caper fluff with delightful performances by Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin, and nice supporting turns by Ann-Margret and Matt Dillon).

In celebration of the happy news, a selection of recent verbal snapshots from a fun marriage:

My Work as a Portland Walking Tour Guide

Five years ago, I became a guide with Portland Walking Tours. It was the first of several “ambassador of the city” jobs I do now (the other is Portland Streetcar, which I joined as a part-time customer service representative two and a half years later, in June 2014).

Since my first tour in early 2012, I’ve introduced the city to visitors from Palm Springs and Detroit, Berkeley and the San Juans, Iowa and Alaska. I’ve had guests from Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Japan, Taiwan, Paris, Brazil (both Rio and São Paulo), the Ivory Coast, Stockholm, even a UN interpreter from Tajikistan. Just yesterday my tour group included two young women from China and third from New Delhi.

Every December and January, I host tourists from Brisbane, Perth, and Sydney, because it’s their summer break. More than once I’ve had guests from Fairbanks, Alaska who said they’re familiar with Loftus Road, a short street near the University of Alaska campus that’s named after my grandfather and his brothers because they had a cabin there while attending school in the late 1920s.

There’s a small but steady stream of guests who have either recently relocated to Portland, are visiting because they’re thinking about it, or are scouting local colleges with their parents. Every once in a while I get a longtime resident, even a native Portlander, who is finally checking out our tours, either for herself or to show the city to an out-of-town friend or relation.

It Was a Blizzard . . . of Postcards; You Didn't Hear?

It’s been a tough week for the White House.

Democrats and news sources are trumpeting the “failure” of the President and the Republican-led Congress to ram a replacement for what they call Obamacare through the House.

Characteristically, the Chief Executive laid the blame anywhere but at his own door, and in this case, far from where it belongs. He blamed the Democrats . . . when in fact it was primarily the most conservative Republicans who dug in their heels and said “repeal and replace” didn’t go far enough to suit them.

But the White House could potentially claim one victory this week . . . though nobody’s talking about it publicly -- not even the Oval Office, which would probably prefer to see absolutely no mention of it whatsoever, anywhere -- so that’s what I’m going to discuss.

A BIT OF PREHISTORY

On the day after the President’s inauguration, the Women’s March on Washington drew at least 500,000 people to a rally on the National Mall against him. A total of about 2 million took part in D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle alone, and all were peaceful; no arrests were reported.

Another Year of Portland Streetcar Adventures - 2016 Roundup

Time for my annual roundup of memorable adventures on the job with Portland Streetcar. These are some of the things I experienced and observed in 2016. . . . 

Feb. 18:  There were a couple of dicey-looking characters when I got on the streetcar at 12:30. But one went digging around in his billfold and pulled out a couple of ragged but unused Trimet tickets, by which I gathered he was offering one for his companion as well. I took them and punched them in the validator.

When he finally gathered that a rider is supposed to validate a Trimet ticket with today's date in order to have valid fare, he said he'd been carrying around 20 or more of them that his P.O. (probation officer) had been handing out to him month after month. That’s good, I said; now you have a lot of future rides paid for -- just make sure you punch one each time so you don’t get caught and fined. Oh, I don’t need ’em all, he replied; I’ll give ’em away to other folks.

Even better, I said.

That's Quite Enough Out of You, Mr. President

That’s it. The President has disturbed my sleep.

I don’t say this to try to be funny. It’s a plain and sorry fact.

All my life, I was never the kind of person who had trouble sleeping. I’ve been a light sleeper, in the sense that many things could readily wake me up, but I nearly always returned to rest with equal ease.

Over the past several months, I’ve felt a mixture of rue and pity for my friends when they’ve declared on social media that they’re upset or terrified by the new President. Me, I’ve chosen the practice of steering clear of any “news” about him. I did my best to ignore him.

There wasn’t anything he had to say that I cared to hear, and I didn’t feel I should needlessly stir up my emotions by paying him the slightest bit of attention … not least because he seemed to crave it so badly and demand it as his due when he had nothing of substance to offer.

Much of what he did and said appeared self-aggrandizing and a performance mostly for effect, not as an expression of any deeply felt beliefs or aspirations on his part. So it was certainly not anything I needed to worry my head about, especially since there was nothing I could do about it.

I woke up early this morning after having gone to bed later than usual last night. I did everything I could to go back to sleep; even plugged in my iPod and programmed soothing progressive jazz by Oregon, but it was no go.

The proximate causes of my restlessness, I suppose, were a rebuke I posted to a slight acquaintance from high school who probably voted for the new President (although like many of his supporters, he’s not appeared to be all that proud of the fact but unaccountably cagey; he hasn’t been eager to come right out and say so) and had just posted an insulting witticism about Senator Elizabeth Warren, so I typed a stinging riposte just before shutting down my laptop and going to bed . . .

And the death of a friend.

Moving Forward with My Grandmother, Dorothy Roth Loftus

As I reported here, I made a pledge to myself to cut way back on my pleasure reading in 2015 to concentrate on writing my next book, about my grandmother. It took until March 2016 to pound out a 140-page first draft. Over the subsequent six months I read a lot of secondary research to try to fill the gaps (both in my knowledge and for the reader’s benefit) about the history of Alaska Territory and the city of Fairbanks.

I ran into some unanticipated roadblocks in each of the past two autumns, however. In the fall of 2015, my wife Carole suffered an accident that put her in the hospital and made the local news. In the fall of 2016, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and has been undergoing chemotherapy ever since. Both events knocked a bit of the stuffing out of both of us, and my book project was one of the things I mostly put aside.

Now I feel ready to get back to it. You can go back and read my first post about this project for the basic background. Here’s a collection of some of the best short excerpts I posted on my Facebook page last year for friends and family:

 *     *     *     *     *

The log cabin at 57 Second Avenue in Fairbanks would be Dorothy’s home for the next two decades, until after her marriage in 1928. In her judgment, “It was worse than sleeping in a tent.” Ice filled the corners, and long lines of frost “like railroad tracks’ could be seen along the dining room and sitting room walls where the logs met. Nearly all the nail heads in the walls looked “like a white Russian fur cap” because they were tipped with frost. “We were forbidden to pull at the ice because Mother said the oatmeal from the wallpaper would come off, too. Oatmeal paper was very stylish then.”

Dorothy often liked to place a cup of water on the stand next to her bed so she wouldn’t have to get up for a drink. It usually froze overnight. Known as a granite cup or enamel cup, it was made of iron coated with enamel, as were many cooking ware items then. The freezing and expanding water popped bits of the enamel off the surface of the mug. “I didn’t know we were cold, because that’s all I knew. But Mother really suffered. And we lived in that house from 1909 until she died.”

Where I Am, How I See It

I wrote the tidy passage below in late August 2015 -- almost 17 months ago -- as the conclusion to the report to my college graduating class that the school invites us to submit every five years. It was printed and published with my classmates’ reports and contact information in a paperbound book by the reunion committee for our 35th reunion last June. I did not attend.

So its official publication date might be said to be 2016. A few things have changed since: my wife was struck down and injured rather dramatically (and not just because it made the local news) by a cyclist less than two months later, then diagnosed with breast cancer a year after that. On a more trivial level, I can no longer claim not to own a smartphone; my carrier forced me to get one last May, but I’ve never surfed the Web, read a book, or watched a video on it. I have sent text messages, though; probably fewer than a hundred in eight months. Mostly I call my wife.

I can’t say the three paragraphs below are necessarily the best thing I published last year, but they’re probably the most significant: the most pointed and honest. I think about them more often than anything else I’ve written in many a year. Not a few times in conversations, I’ve tried to reproduce the gist from memory to someone because it sums up where I’m at in my life and in the world. I usually forget one essential detail or another.

So, only slightly edited, I offer the following as my statement of position for this year and, undoubtedly, a number of years to come . . . 

More Play With Words

Last March, I gathered up the best examples of puns and wordplay that flowed across my Facebook page in 2015. Another good crop developed last year, but (everybody could use a good chuckle, right?) here are my best from the year before, 2014:

Jan. 10: So, we're talking a mega-crossover with the Star Wars franchise for the final Hobbit movie. They won't let us use any of the major Lucas characters in Middle Earth, but they'll let us have the Wookie.

He would be the Tolkien Chew.

Jan. 28:  I think my favorite mixed metaphor will always be “you’re beating your head against a dead horse,” but I just ran across one that’s almost as good: “There are four ways for habitual wallflowers to come out of their shells….”

March 7: If you have twin redheads in high school, is the one who was delivered second when they were born the beta carrot-teen?