What I Do for the Portland Streetcar . . . a self-interview

As friends are well aware from tales and photos that appear periodically on my Facebook page, I work part-time as a customer service representative for Portland Streetcar. Over time, I’ve collected and re-posted some of my most memorable experiences and observations aboard the streetcar in 2014, 2015, 2016, and last year. (Check ’em out, if you haven’t seen them already; they’re highly entertaining!)

Here’s a self-interview about the job, in which I answered questions that one of my supervisors devised for me.

1. How long have you been working for the Streetcar?

Four years. I was hired May 28, 2014, started training in late June, and was working steadily by the first week of July.

2. What drew you to the job?

I liked the streetcar from the very beginning. I’d attended college in Boston, so I had spent a lot of time on that city’s century-old subway rail lines and Green Line street trolleys back in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

Oh, No . . . He's at it Again! (Best Loftus Puns and Wordplay of 2016)

Several years ago I started collecting the best items from my Facebook postings of the previous year for this blog -- for example, the best Portland Streetcar adventures of the year, the best Portland Walking Tour incidents of the year, the funniest typos and English errors in my editing work, and of course, the best puns and wordplay of the past year.

I’ve been so busy with other things that I actually missed two years of year’s best puns. So here’s the best of 2016. You have been warned. . . . 

Jan. 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 cod fish that swam over it during high tide and would become trapped behind it when the tide went out.

The tribe thought such a dam would be a splendid and easy way to catch many fish, after the initial hard work of having to build the structure. It seemed to 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.

Cod Fishing Summer, 1920

In the summer of 1920, Art Loftus made his first trip west at the age of 23. As he liked to put it, he “always gave all of his business to the Northern Pacific,” which meant he bummed his way by rail, riding the gondolas and freight cars with a buddy named Cliff Reisberg.

When they got to Seattle, the two signed on with a two-masted schooner called The Maid of Orleans, captained by J.J. “Codfish” Kelly. Raised in upstate Wisconsin, Art had never been on the ocean before, but according to his wife Dorothy much later, given his “Viking” background, he loved it. The Maid went up the Unimak Pass to the Bering Sea for cod.

Sailors went out at 5 AM for the day, in one-man dories that were about 14 feet, and hung out a pair of lines with baited hooks just above the sea bottom to catch cod. There was a windlass on board to weigh anchor, but Art pulled the tarred cotton fish lines with twenty-pound cod by hand, and slit their throats for distribution in bins aboard the dory.

"Exoplanetary" . . . life, work, and time travel in the 26th century and beyond

Perhaps the most ongoing fun I’ve had the past two years has been doing character voices for a science-fiction podcast called Exoplanetary.

The brainchild of writer-director C. Christopher Hart (who’s also producing and editing the show, as well as voicing some of the characters), Exoplanetary is set in the 26th century (partly), when pretty much everything -- including the surviving religions -- is owned by a handful of mega-corporations.

Exoplanetary, popularly known as “Exo,” is one of them. The company owns retail outlets, transportation systems (which is to say, rockets), mining operations on asteroids and moons, recreational theme parks, and other facilities throughout the solar system. Earth has been a blasted ecological wasteland for several millennia, though primitive life forms have been rumored to be thriving there once again.

Our Separate Honeymoons

I am not an outdoorsy kind of guy. I love and respect nature, but I’d rather curl up with a book and a bourbon-and-soda at home.

Not that I lack direct experience of the outdoors. My folks took their boys in Volkswagen vans and tents to Alaska and Mexico, and across the U.S. into Morocco and up through Europe. My brother Ken and I pitched a two-man tent in Norway, in Brittany, in Greece, and along the Dalmatian coast of what was then known as Yugoslavia … all before I was 15.

So when I met Carole more than two decades later, I still owned a goose-down mummy sleeping bag from U.S. Army surplus in Germany. She may have gotten the mistaken impression that I was an inveterate hiker and camper.

I did drag her up Mount Storm King in the Olympics for the view of Lake Crescent and the Strait of Juan de Fuca the fall of our first year together. We also went on an overnight camping hike up the Eagle Creek Trail (the one ravaged by wildfire last summer) with another couple, and climbed Saddle Mountain in the Coast Range east of Seaside.

We had been seeing each other for two years (more accurately, I had moved into her condo early in that window of time) when she suggested a kayaking expedition in Glacier Bay, Alaska.

The Folly of Guns Versus "Government Tyranny"

When gun owners say they keep a firearm at home for protection against “government tyranny,” I wonder: Have they thought this through?

Let’s follow the logic where I doubt most gun owners have taken it.

No government entity -- whether local police, county sheriff, state troopers, the U.S. military, Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, or even the IRS -- has any interest in in any of us UNLESS we are already involved in criminal activity, or pose an imminent threat to others.

Tasked with providing examples from history, Second Amendment enthusiasts raise extreme cases, such as the canard that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union took away people’s guns as a step toward oppressing them. In the case of Hitler’s Germany, this is simply false, since the 1938 German Weapons Act expanded gun ownership rights in general; the Nazis only confiscated weapons in the racist case of a minority: Jewish citizens.

The Bolshevik example is more accurate, so far as it goes . . . but if you study the history of pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia and the Russian Revolution, you find a population that was mostly agricultural/pre-industrial and illiterate, centuries of state religion featuring a monarch regarded as God’s representative on earth, and a collapsing domestic economy after four years of world war that left in its wake massive national starvation and millions of returning, jobless veterans -- all significant pre-conditions that enabled a tiny cadre of Leninists to effect a violent takeover of the population centers of a vast nation.

How We Met

SFs seeking globally conscious SMs who are interested in reviving the endangered art of conversation for Sunday Salons at The Heathman. Send self-description, telephone, thought provoking topics. We're lively, healthy, over 21, professional, eclectic and ready for conversation. Are you?

On Feb. 21, 1991, the above notice appeared in the personals of Willamette Week, the longstanding alternative free weekly paper in Portland. The women who placed it had gotten the idea from the latest issue of the Utne Reader, whose cover essay addressed the revival of “salons” for intellectual and cultural conversations.

I had just arrived in town with the new year, barely seven weeks before. For more than three years, I’d been a full-time reporter for a daily newspaper downstate. Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market plunged 22.6 percent in one day, was my first day of work at the News-Review … a happy day for me! I left Roseburg “in a hail of bullets” 39 months later (with three off to tramp around West Africa).

The Willamette Week ad had been placed by a group of women of a range of ages who knew one another either in a yoga group or from skiing together. One owned a local restaurant. Another was an aide to Portland’s mayor, Vera Katz. The ad received a huge response, and when the women chose whom to invite to the first meeting, they had a wealth of suitable males … far greater than their pool of SFs.

An Open Letter to Second Amendment Enthusiasts

Has it occurred to you that you might have committed a fatal strategic error by throwing your lot behind the National Rifle Association?

Could you consider the possibility that over the past 40 years, the NRA chose a strategy that guaranteed it will ultimately lose the war to set domestic firearms policy?

Let’s not get into any of the specific arguments you’ve undoubtedly seen and defended in recent months and years: the nature and scope of the Second Amendment, the notion that guns protect one’s home, how many lives are supposedly saved by armed citizens versus lives lost, that guns will ultimately defend you against some sort of government tyranny.

Put those aside.

I want you to take a brief look at the big picture.

Please consider the possibility that the NRA’s never-give-an-inch approach to U.S. firearms regulation might ultimately have set up you and other gun owners for failure in getting to have a say on the design of U.S. gun policy.

In order to understand this, you’ll have to try to view the situation from the perspective of the majority of your fellow citizens who are not so enthusiastic about gun ownership and national firearms policy as it’s been driven by the NRA in recent decades.

More Tales of a Portland Streetcar customer service rep, 2017

Here’s the roundup of tales from my adventures and observations working for Portland Streetcar in 2017 . . . . 

Jan. 16:  I don't live to terrorize toddlers, honestly, but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

A family of four got on the streetcar at NW 23rd and Marshall: young couple with what looked like a pair of twin boys about 2-1/2 years old. The one with the father was Not. Going. To. Accept his Dad’s explanation that he had to sit on his father’s lap during the streetcar ride, and was winding up into a sizable shriek when I leaned down to him, nose to nose, and said, matter-of-factly,

“Them’s the rules.”

That shut him up.

March 8:  I could not get the on-board fare machine on 006 to accept either of the rider's two dollar bills or the one I pulled out of my billfold. So I went up to the operator's cabin to obtain a warning sticker.

As I selected an "Out of Order" sticker sign, the driver advised, "Don't put it on you."

Just Don’t Look at Him

It’s been a comparatively pleasant year of avoiding the news since the incumbent was installed in the Oval Office.

I had a good excuse to direct my attention and psychic energy elsewhere in 2017. But I also made a conscious decision to click away from headlines, and photos and memes about the president . . . and to switch channels on the remote whenever he came onscreen during those rare occasions when I watched the 11 o’clock news (typically for the next day’s weather or an occasional local breaking news story).

As I said ’way back in mid December 2016, I do not regard the occupant of the White House as a proper public official. Time and again throughout the campaign, he demonstrated utter ignorance about or disrespect for the U.S. Constitution and basic tenets of the law . . . not to mention the truth in general.

Every other president has undoubtedly lied to the public, but usually for a strategic reason: to get Congress and/or the American public to go along on a policy initiative sought by the administration, or to distract enemies and allies. During the campaign and in office, this president has appeared to lie effortlessly and repeatedly, for no strategic policy reason . . . but to entertain, to divert our attention, to grab headlines, to shock, to look great or effective when he is neither. And he has lied multiple times a week, even per day.

He’s an entertainer who has treated the highest office in the land as just another TV show or business. (And I have observed little skill or honor in his business practices, which too often employed the tactics of a playground bully.) Doing so was enough to put him in office, but it’s insufficient to govern.

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.