Wayward Landlubber

     It is said that the states are the laboratories of democracy, and that may have at one time been true. In our present day, the states have become the petri-dish from which monsters emerge. Not all states, it must be admitted, but a significant number of them. States where elected office-holders cannot tell when the word democracy should be capitalized. States where a prominent politician from its dominant party thinks that bacteria is grown in "peach-tree dishes" and conflates Gestapo with a cold tomato soup (you can bet MTG doesn't pronounce that particular fruit, to-mah-to). Another state, not too far from the left coast and which is desirous of increasing its size to become some sort of "greater" entity, has a state Senator whose inflated sense of humor led him, a dairy farmer of four decades, to opine that his experience milking cows gives him a sufficient understanding of women's rights. He was forced to apologize for that faux-pas but the damage h...

     "I'll  break his goddamned neck, that's what I'll do, I'll break his goddamned neck!"  That was my line and it was not selling. I knew it, Doug knew it, Dr. Sitton knew it, even Brad in the projection booth knew it.       Doug and I had become good friends since we first met when he was playing the lead role in, Beckett, Or the Honor of God. He had even introduced me to Frank Peter's, who owned the bar Doug worked in, Frank Peter's Inn, on 4th and Taylor. Peters was opening a new bar on 3rd and Burnside and was looking for workers. At first to harvest the wood from Coos Head Timber Company in Coos Bay, which he sold to developers of upscale shopping centers in California. Old dimensional timber, 4x4's, 8x8's, 4x8's and other wood that had begun life as old growth timber in a time when old growth timber in Oregon's forests was massive. Frank Peter's saved the best pieces to construct his bar. Doug was an actor who worked a norma...