Daily Blues & Views

Having been a seeker, I danced with watercolors, I traveled among leather-clad musicians, who always fed me well. Having been a thinker, I slept upon waterfalls beneath iron mountains, jumping below on occasion to drink poetry in blue-black corners, As  a politico, I made choices from the heart, stopping every few decades to pick up the box of assumptions left hanging in a distant wind. As a laborer, I worked every hour for the price of admission to the tent show called "the system," I sat through each performance refusing to show my appreciation for being allowed to survive. When I had been aged enough, I came to believe in afterthought, Early mornings are best to recover all that has been lost.

When I tell people where I live, they always have a comment on my neighborhood.  "St. Johns," they say, "It's an up and coming area."  My response, though not shared vocally, is I wish it would already get there.  It's been "up and coming" ever since I moved to Portland over a decade ago.  So why does this label stick?  Probably because, like so many other places, the time for gentrification has arrived.  But up here, in this far NW corner of the city, where the Willamette River meets the Columbia, change is coming slowly.  Maybe that's the best way.  I'm coming to believe that it gives us time to savor the old before everything gets replaced by the new. Here's the kind of thing I'm talking about.  I know an old guy named Charlie who used to work on the railroad.  Charlie knows the Pacific Northwest as well as anyone and used to frequent a mercantile business in St. John's to buy his overalls and hats.  Jowers was run by an el...

In this year of all maladies, a new malaise has descended upon the U. S. of A.  From here on, let this also be known as the year that sexual harassment allegations became daily and commonplace. Every day this week provided a new assertion.  There is a major dose of "the time has come" going around, and the truth is that only those inside particularly thick bubbles doubt the accusers. We need to remember that there are always reasons a woman (or man) will sometimes wait decades before voicing their experiences and allegations.  Just put yourself in that place and if any doubts remain, seriously check yourself. Ironies abound.  The current occupant of the White House seems to slide off this stage even when the evidence is clear.  Many of the accused are the purveyors of supremely Christian family values.  I pause here to remind the reader that there really is no such thing as family values; family, itself is a value.  What is likely t...