At the far end of town

where the Grickle-grass grows

and the win smells slow-and-sour when it blows

an no birds ever sing excepting old crows…

is the Street of the Lifted Lorax.

Yeap. That’s Dr. Seuss

Bernanke, trying not to slip in the patches of blood on the floor, struggled with Greenspan. The older man moved like a snake that moved like a former Fed Chairman who moved like a ninja. At last, Bernanke got a solid grip on Greenspan’s collar and hurled him through the fourth wall, knocking you to the ground.

Improvising a tourniquet from the remains of the snake left over from the earlier simile, Bernanke moved on through the hallways.

When xkcd takes down a fourth wall, it stays down. Got me? To read the rest of this story, which you will, the following link will prove most advantageous: Federal Reserve Skateboard

Out of the corner of your eye you see a pikachu wander by, as you fumble for change in your felt fluffed paws for a man with a chainsaw for an arm. He’s purchased three rainbow cupcakes and a lime cola (and could you pop the cola for him, please?), and needs change for a twenty.

Chainsaw man salutes, and hobbles off into the crowd where gun toting, spikey-haired teenagers are rubbing shoulders with bipedal coyotes. Across the row at Dark Horse Comics, wizards, belly dancers and zombies chat about their favorite comic books, then stagger on to the next vendor to peruse shelves lined with plushies of maids and demons. I wonder how half of them missed that year of middle school, when you learn about deodorant.

I thought I would be motivated enough to dazzle this ramble with lots of pretty pictures. But I’m lazy, and it’s easier for me to make a link to the album: Kumoricon ’08, where you can find a video or two of our kitchen prep, um, activities. On wheels.

I enjoyed playing around with the maids (while being snug in the knowledge that I am not one of you. A Qat has her pride). There’s something about hocking cupcakes to bright little blood-spattered faces that just makes you feel warm inside…Come to think of it, there were a lot of violently themed people at the convention this year. And zombies. I effing hate zombies.

After the convention we spent a few days just loafing, and I got a little half-assed poetic about the gorge we visited. It’s not really a poem. I wrote it on the plane home. But. Bad grammar and half-thoughts to follow, because I can.

It was like a day out of an Irish Blessing, with the warm sun shining on our faces, wind at our backs and the cold, clear Columbia water tickling our feet. Behind us, an icy stream bubbled up over a bank of volcanic rocks. The rocks themselves hail back to day when the hill before us, its sides now sheer and topped with a fuzzy outcropping of pine and hanging moss, was the inner core of some mammoth volcano.

A train winds slowly along by our side, the chug and rattle mingling with a blast of its horn. As the sound echoes out it meets the mimicry cry of an osprey, swooping and banking in the sky. A fish darts over my foot. On one side of the river is Oregon. We sit on the banks of Washington, and paddle in the border.

I eye the couple and their retriever in the Hobie Odessey. Jealous, but lazy–and also I don’t do dogs–I sit back and watch the kayak glide past. There’ll be other kayaks. Dogless ones…It’s just as well that I don’t teach Jen paddling fundamentals with a police boat on our tails. That sort of brush with the law might be one of her buttons, and I’m bad at making new friends.

I’m back on the Eastern side of Western places after a visit out to Washington. A body could settle pretty easily into those forests. While there I forgot how hard it is to sleep when the humidity makes you feel like you’re wrapped in steam sheets. So I’ll sleep in the fall. In the meantime, senility. There was a conversation about opossums. And. Tea?

I keep hesitating on moving out to the West coast. Maybe I only want to go there because I have a history of shirking all responsibility there. But I do want to work. And if I work here, I’ll end up either twiddling my thumbs in an office again, or waiting behind the wheel of an idling car outside of a bank.

Maybe I want to be a police officer. You can’t be sure.

The camera went on its own adventure midway through the trip, so all I have is this kitten bag:

In other news, there are a handful of sake distilleries in America. I learned this.
Click here!

Good company, appreciable alcohol in quantities, lots of movies, fruit canning, and of course–shooting (arrows and bullets? yes). Plus trees, lots of water and fresh air…what isn’t there to like?

And done. Or, more below.

Back home now, and I have reaffixed soul to body. It feels good. But because I justify my life through noun-verb agreements, I’ll prattle.

The thing that interrupted my marshmallow scorchings.

Passed Latin, and decided to go camping as a present to myself. At the same time, my family came to help me move out of the apartment, in what became the most disjointed camping trip I have ever had. Went to a Josh Ritter concert (yay!!), at a folk festival. Oh, and there was the graduation from university thing.

Not Montana, but close (not geographically).

What we couldn’t pack in the cars (the cat), we came back for after the weekend, Goodwilled the rest, and then chucked North of the Pennsylvania line. Tuletu and I went to Boston, then took a spin up to Plymouth –the place where I began my university career and where she completed her own. They put in a Thai restaurant next to the tobacco shop, and the main street now has a semi-functional roundabout. Elsewise, it’s still a one-street town with a university, skater flocks, and it still looks like a less organized Kelso, Washington.

From Plymouth we drove to nearby Peaked Hill Pond. In the morning, it was gorgeous. But getting there was a web of lies and treachery most foul.

I was told it was 1/4 mile. It was not 1/4 mile. It wasn’t supposed to be cold and raining that night. It was cold and raining that night. I should have proper gear for such occasions. I don’t. I could keep writing this way.

An Aside

Mostly, I’m still sore about the loss of my bag (not as fancy or new as pictured). After ten years of solid abuse and one year of literally, living in it, my silk cocoon went flat. That night I lugged a Wiggy woolbag up-hill, and that night, my childhood died just a little. That bag, it meant something. When…when we got it…We all thought I was going to be tall.

Ahh, the yesterdays.
Back to the day.

A bit more nature than the average PSU garbage squirrel.

That morning, I slipped out of the tent and was greeted with nothing short of the be-all New England landscape. Fur-tree lined bog and pond (that I didn’t photograph), bear’s path, fresh moose trails. We were the only people around, set up on a soft bed of needles amongst a copse of pine. My sister surprised a button buck, and found the digested remains of a coyote’s tasty turkey dinner.
(How a bear yawns.)

At least he said it was new.

From Peaked Hill we bid New Hampshire goodbye and drove down to visit a friend in Connecticut (Why? Hello, because he has a lakehouse). There, Original Steve –that has it’s Own Story– pimped out the compost toilet he got off of craigslist. New. The sister and I have been trying to convince the father that it’s a good idea to put one into use at our house, if for nothing else than water conservation.Note! “Humanure” is not the word to use to convince a hard-lining Republican to conserve.

(Canoe Man despises your technology.)

We spent a few days at the lakehouse, where we rescued a chair floating helplessly in the lake, and I got to pretend I was captain of a rubber ducky –which was really a plus-sized foldable kayak in canary yellow. By comparison to eachother, that thing was a monster, and I, a midget. But the 6′ Amazon that served as my rudder-person kept us afloat.

Have begun to notice that I know a lot of 6′ women.

Also, I took a lot of pictures of feet.

“An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life.” – Anon.

React to this quotation by reflecting on how it applies to you and your future. Do you feel your education has taught you how to make a living and how to make a life?

Last week my flatmate and I went to get ice-cream (heath bar crunchy goodness). Inside the Creamery, we first decided to look for a table, which we found, next to some man in a suit. As we got closer to the table, it occured to me that the security woman standing in the background was glaring at us. Then I noticed the black-coated gentlemen by the Cheetos, also looking at us. There are a few other people watching, but only a few. Maybe a coach of some lesser-type, I conclude, as we sit down and start talking about icecream. We notice he cameraman for the first time.

‘Who is it?’

‘I dunno. The guy in the blue suit?’

Eventually we go up to the counter–Flicker-flash of cameras in the background– and far too unsettled, we ducked sheepishly beneath one of the cameramen, gather our things and decide to eat outside. That’s when the flatmate’s friend showed up. He explains.

When it comes to the grind, my education has done little. On the upside, four years of university has led me to believe that I am adequately prepared to someday grow up. Perhaps at 60.

What this has really taught me, is that I have a few things to do before buckling down to debt and a life of teaching. I want to teach, but I’m somewhat burned by “those who can’t do, teach.” Well, I can do…so, while I can, I guess I should. I can always do the can’t doing later.

First, I need to look at photos of politically important people a bit more thoroughly.

Second, third and fourth: Something religious, something outside and finishing up that story. In the end, I don’t know if I’ll like any of those. But I’m an ox, and I’ve put my hoof in the dirt. Let the earth shake~

Did my education teach me how to live? Not…specifically. But it did teach me how to procrastinate.

Banjo. <3

I like names for groups of things. A flock of geese, a herd of deer, school of fish, flotilla of swans, a murder of crows. Murder should be used more. When McCain and Bush are in the same room? A murder of republicans. …I suppose that could be easily misconstrued. Bill Clinton (as Hillary’s proxy) and Obama visited our university last week to give speeches. It was a murder of democratic values. See? Fitting.

I did not know that the Lorax went to war. It’s an…interesting kind of propaganda, I suppose. Kind of surreal…

“In the morning it was raining. A fog had come over the mountains from the sea. You could not see the tops of the mountains. The plateau was dull and gloomy, and the shapes of the trees and the houses were changed. I walked out beyond the town to look at the weather. The bad weather was coming over the mountains from the see.”

Write a passage the conveys a mood by describing the weather.First, if that’s the way Hemingway ordinarily wrote, then I do not understand his lasting popularity. It reads like a hacked quote. 

My grandfather called it bone cold. I sit in my chair, fingers throbbing, soaked through by the air. No amount of blankets, woolen hats or mittens could keep it from getting in. Not a day of rain to make the mood official. Nothing so dramatic as thunder. If anything, a graying. Here fog clings to the edges of things; drifting over slabs of the driven snow, creeping quietly across the field like an aged hand. Pools unseen in the trees. It pervades all things. I sit, and it seeps into me.

My take on gloom and doom. Others? Betters? Happy thoughts?