Wayward Landlubber

    On 2:53 AM, March 24, 2022, Pinky Conklin was relieved of the chronic pain that had bedeviled her most of her life. She was 79 years old. I was only with her a few short years, 3 of them where she was reasonably ambulatory, but we had some fun together. When we started our relationship she was living with one of her sons and his wife in Prineville, Oregon. She was 8 blocks from a senior center, but had no public transport to get her there and she walked unstably with a cane. I thought she could get better treatment in Portland, she was trying to get hip replacement, but I lived on my little 27' Bayliner cruiser. I was living the dream I had held in my mind for some four decades. I did not think she could handle the rigors of marina life, but my purchase of the boat, and the necessary costs of maintaining a boat were taxing my resources.       For a while she was able to live with a relative in Tigard. We joined the Tigard Senior Center and she had peopl...

     I'm a liberal. We get accused of wasting money on people who don't have much, and not wasting enough money on people who will never lose their wealth in 10,000 years.      My blood glucose testing strips ran out and I called my prescription renewal in two weeks from this penning. Without a prescription my Medicare won't cover them and I would pay $90 bucks out of pocket. The next business day after my call to the pharmacy was a Tuesday, Monday being a holiday. I had not heard the recorded call telling me that my prescription renewal was up, so I called to see where I was in the queue. They had not been called back yet by my physician, so I called the Doctor. A sudden snowstorm had closed the office. Finally on Tuesday, one week later, I recieved the recorded message. When I got to the pharmacy, they had filled my prescription with a whole new blood-testing kit: lancets, reader, and test strips. It goes without saying that the various parts are not comp...

     Over the Christmas holidays a friend of mine gave me a book. In a time when one of our two political parties would rather burn books it is important to acknowledge the importance of passing on knowledge by people smarter than us, namely writers with the necessary knowledge to inform us within their area of expertise. The name of the book is, Signature In The Cell,  and it deals with intelligent design, a concept of which I am suspicious. The author, Stephen C. Meyer is a PhD in the philosophy of science and is director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. A quick Google tells me that the Discovery Institute's raison d'etre is to spread the concept of intelligent design, which would mean to my understanding, they have moved on from discovery and wish to promote it, as if it has not been promoted already. I am not merely suspicious of intelligent design, i dont see how it can make sense.  I should also reveal that I hav...

     Truth, it seems, is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. There is no "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" as admirable as that may sound. Mark Twain is often quoted, saying: there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics".  This may comfort the MAGAts who do not know that he was a satirist who made jokes about their intellectual forefathers, but what would they know of truth? Statistics takes you deeper into the truths than mere lies or damned lies, those often spread by Tucker Carlson. The truth may be, that it's not what you know but how much you know, that delivers us the better truth. Or the bitter truth.      As a young man in my mid 20's I had the opportunity to learn SCUBA diving and carried both PADI and NAUI certifications. From those lessons I martriculated a little farther thanks to a couple guys whose boat could often be seen in front of the Ala Wai Dive Shop. They were members of the Hawaiian Malacologica...

    I'm pretty sure that I worked with a member of the Weather Underground years ago. I say this cautiously because it is supposition, not outright fact. A supposition based on clues he provided in our infrequent conversations.       It was the late 70s and I had taken a job at Salishan Lodge as a bartender in the Lobby Lounge. The owners, the John Grey family, took better care of their employees than they were required to, and one of those employee benefits was a hot meal in the lunchroom in the late afternoon before the night shift went to work and as the day crew was coming off work. Good food in a common room. There was this guy I'll call Scott who tended bar in the banquet department and allowed the day bartender in the lobby lounge to take a break. We had had some conversations and eventually politics came up. Scott was very conservative and was a vocal supporter of Ronald Reagan's presidential run. He was also a chain smoker, I was a reformed smoker and y...

     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...