theology&geometry

Sunday in Oregon started with breakfast at the Sassy Onion in Salem, which served me a fabulous slice of French toast, whose toppings included the hilariously named marionberries. I wish all fruits shared names with disgraced politicians. How could anyone pass up a heaping plate of bacon and fulliloves? Mmmm.

Chock full of carbs, Jason and I dropped Alanna off at the house so she could complete the week’s trivia questions, and we took off toward Portland.

Our first stop was Washington Park, home of the zoo, the rose garden, and the Japanese gardens, among other attractions. We followed the twisty road until we were sure we had gone too far, and then realized that we had arrived at our destination. We hit the Japanese gardens first. It was odd going from bustling park atmosphere with cars and people everywhere to reverent, nearly silent wooded area within mere seconds.

The Japanese gardens, for me, are a study in texture, pattern, and light. I filed away little ideas to take back home for my house and garden. At the top of my list: Those little smooth hand-sized pebbles lining the walkways. Oooh, and moss.

The gardens — and all of the area, I found — were also a study in spiders. Good god almighty, they were everywhere.

I’d be poking my head this way and that, trying to take pictures or get a closer look at something, only to find that three webs populated by three spiders were hanging mere inches from my face. Mercifully these were not evil kamikaze jumping spiders, but small laid-back hippie garden spiders who had no interest in injecting my face with their deadly skin-rotting venom. I suspect their presence was at least partially responsible for the fact that I didn’t get eaten alive by mosquitoes even while in the lush woods. That’s right: Lovely weather, no humidity, and no mosquito bites. Heaven is populated by a bunch of spiders. What a fucking rip.

Jason and I both have fastwalk syndrome when it comes to being inside a place we’ve paid admission to (see also: museums), so we saw all there was to see of the gardens in no time. I suppose you’re meant to walk around and meditate or contemplate or pontificate or whateverate, but I’ve never felt comfortable paying money to have deep thoughts. Except when I went to college. Ba-zing! Wait, that wasn’t even a good zinger.

The Japanese gardens are within walking distance of the rose garden, which is just kind of a ridiculous place because it is just bursting with color as far as you can see. I mean, it seems improbable that so many varieties of roses can be so beautiful at the same time. It’s a bit overwhelming. Jason and I made our way leisurely through the rows, stopping to smell the blooms when we thought about it. That was part of the fun — not every rose smells great and there’s no real way to tell which ones will.

After our sashay through the gardens, we were ready to get out of the sun. So we drove on into the city and made our way to Powell’s, that giant beacon of literary retail fortitude. I thought New York’s Strand was huge. Ye gods. Powell’s is the kind of huge that becomes kind of impossible to contemplate right away. It’s constructed and laid out like a confusing old thrift store, which I kind of loved. I ordered a refreshing tea type drink from the cafe and roamed the aisles, marveling at all the esoteric sub-departments. I did not allow myself to buy any books, although I did get suckered in by the stationery knicknacks on sale. I’m weak.

Once Powell’s was conquered, Jason and I found ourselves in need of a novelty doughnut. We were in luck, because Voodoo Donuts is just a mere sunny-day jaunt from Powell’s.

I suppose I can forgive Voodoo for stealing what could have easily been my personal slogan (hyuk!), because they make an obscenely fine novelty doughnut, for which which we waited out in the sun for MULTIPLE MINUTES, in a line wrapped around the building like iPhone-on-release-day fanboys. Jason found himself unable to resist the pull of the Bacon Maple Bar, while I found myself seduced by the Old Dirty Bastard. Jason was kind enough to let me sample the BMB, and it was unbelievable. Like pancakes on a doughnut. My ODB was ridiculous as well; it’s a glazed doughnut with chocolate icing, crumbled Oreos, and a swizzle of peanut butter. That’s right, America. I hate my arteries. (Full Voodoo menu here; I regret that I did not try a Memphis Mafia.)

Gut bomb successfully dropped, we walked around a bit and decided to rejoin Alana in Keizer so we could have dinner in Salem at McMenamins (Boon’s Treasury). Aside from waiting forfuckingever for drink refills, the dining experience at McMenamins was pleasant, and I enjoyed two glasses of Ruby. I love that the proprietors hunt for interesting old buildings to transform and inhabit.

I should also probably note that while exiting the car to go in to McMenamins, a bird shat on me. Well, actually, near me. On the car as I was getting out. I received some residual splashback. It was my first bird shitting ever. I’m glad it could happen in Oregon, where the bird shit is organic and free-range.

Anyway, my trip was shorter than I would have liked, but it gave me a taste of life in a region that is so vastly different from where I live now. I can’t wait to go back.

I nearly mucked my trip up entirely, but the fine people of Delta Airlines got me to Portland safe and sound and mostly sober (wine is now $7 on flights and therefore out of my price range) early early early Saturday morning. Jason, legendary Sidelines alum and current evil muckraking boss of Keizertimes, was such a trooper, and picked me up at the airport shortly after midnight. He may or may not have brought a Welcome-to-Oregon! Gatorade bottle full of syrah for the hourlong trip back to his house, during which he gave me a pretty comprehensive overview of local politics and civics and culture and the $300 million Portland is about to spend on bike lanes thanks to the efforts of those damned feisty cyclists in the Pacific Northwest.

I love traveling to a new place and getting the rundown on the local controversies and scandals and even the mundane political shit that plagues every municipality. Sure, every city is kind of the same but every city has its own weird shit, and when you venture into a truly liberal part of the country, that weird shit just seems so far-fetched. I love that Portland has an openly gay mayor who shares a name with a beer and I love even more that he’s not even three years in to his term and he’s already had a pretty scandalicious sex scandal.

Saturday morning I managed to get up bright and early at 9:30 local time. Jason was out at the local RiverFair festival, so Alana and I got breakfast in Salem and swung by the farmer’s market for some fresh-cut flowers and blackberries (which turned out to be so unbelievably sweet and awesome when dropped into a glass of bubbly). Salem and Keizer are cute as can be (Jason and Alana will argue this, I’m sure). They’ve both got sort of a bustling, idyllic smallish TV-town feel to them — Salem especially because it’s older — but Salem’s obviously not small, being the state capitol and all. There is something about Oregon’s statewide urban planning regulations that makes even their suburban towns feel very accessible and pedestrian-friendly and homey. I dig that a lot.

Alana and I met Jason at RiverFair Saturday afternoon and perused the booths. I was tempted by glow-in-the-dark artisan jewelry. And dogs. God, I’ve got the dog lust and it needs to quit.

Then it was on to the Willamette Valley wineries, starting with Firesteed, which I see locally all the time. We tasted a flight of reds and whites and then all chipped in for a bottle of riesling and went on our merry way. We also hit up Left Coast, where I bought a bottle of pinot noir rosé, and Johan, where I bought nothing but was very impressed with both their estate and reserve chardonnays. I usually hate chardonnay but they take it easy on the “oak” so it’s not nearly as much of a mouth punch as some others. Mental note: See if this is carried locally. We ended the day’s tasting round at Eola, where I bought a couple of bottles without regard to how I was going to get all that booze home safely (happy ending: I left a bottle for my hosts and got the other two home, wrapped in clothes in my suitcase, intact).

The valley itself is beautiful to look at and it seemed like every time we topped a hill, an even more beautiful vista laid itself out before us. I love Memphis but I am tired of flat West Tennessee landscapes. I need drama in my horizons.

This post is getting long and I’ve got to head to work so I better wrap it up and continue my travelogue in a new post later.

First, I’ll say this:

As I’m getting older, I’m really starting to appreciate the fact that so many of my friends have situated themselves all over the country. It’s a marked luxury to have all these interesting places to go and my friends to greet me there and show me a good time. I’m not sure how I lucked out in that regard, but I am incredibly grateful for the experiences it has brought me.

Last weekend I traveled to my hometown to reunite with two of my very oldest friends, Tamara and Crystal. We were thick as thieves in high school (with bouts of adolescent spattiness throughout our friendships, of course), and then went our separate ways after graduation. Tamara and I — with the exception of some months of no communication because we are sometimes stubborn, foolish girls — have mostly kept in constant contact, but I lost touch with Crystal. The three of us got together in Alabama back in … 2003? My memory is bad. But that was the last time we all hung out. Until last weekend.

I’d like to be able to say it was just like old times, and I guess in some ways it was, but it was incredible how much we all had changed. And not just the way we’d changed, but the ways in which the very worlds around us had changed and changed us. Our families have expanded and contracted, often simultaneously. We’ve had to confront the mortality and vulnerability of our parents and our own bodies. We are no longer invincible, and we know it.

It is always so interesting getting with your oldest friends and telling old stories. They remember what I’ve forgotten and I remember what they don’t. Except some things they remember seem so improbable to me (Crystal said she remembered being at my house the night Princess Diana was killed, and how we’d spent time at my grandmother’s house, trying to sneak cigarettes; I would have DIED of stress overload trying to smoke around my house or my grandmother’s house), and really prove that memories are just stories we console ourselves with. What I think I know about myself — or anyone else — is not necessarily what’s true. (Yes, please do insert “what is truth?” tangent here.)

Crystal brought along another of our classmates, Tim, who showed us pictures and video on his phone of his two kids. These are not tiny baby children; he is a proud pop of a little girl who is old enough to know all the dance moves to some popular song I’ve never heard but who is still too naive to realize her dad is making a video of her on his phone that will embarrass her for the rest of her life, if he thinks to put it on a disc. It is not quite right to think of anyone I went to school with as being in charge of anyone else’s tiny life, but as I coast into my thirties (and Facebookstalk everyone from HCHS who friends me), I’m willing to bet that my and Tamara’s and Crystal’s childfree status puts us firmly in the minority. I’m taking bets on which one of us will end up knocked up first.

“Are y’all going to the reunion?” Crystal asked us. Without hesitation, a chorus of “uh, no” erupted from all mouths in the room. Although, I’ll admit, I’m conflicted. There are some people I really would like to catch up with. I do still get a little sick to my stomach when I think about high school, but I wonder if I’ve not grown up enough to be over most of that by now. It wasn’t all that bad, was it? I imagine the sickness I feel is actually shame over how I acted in high school. I was a wet blanket — a stone-faced high-horsin’ bitch a lot of the time, partially as a function of what was back then clearly some serious social anxiety. I’m terrified that I will never be forgiven for that, the way that I still have not quite forgiven some people for being who they were in high school too.

Whew. High school. What a country.

I want to get up to Buffalo to visit Tamara this winter. Yes, that’s insane, I know. But that’s when I’ll have time off and, well, winter is just around the corner, don’t you know, and if I am going to truly experience her chosen home for its charms, I think in the middle of a backbreaking snow storm would be the perfect way to do it. I hope the manfriend isn’t sick of me by then, so we can both go and he can go see his beloved Bills lose in person. Heh.

It was freaking hot hot hot Sunday but once we surrendered ourselves to back sweat and frizzy hair and $7 Ghost River beers*, I dare say we had ourselves a grand old time.

*Okay, okay, okay. I was the only one surrendering myself to beer.

There was a point within the first ten minutes of Nick’s and my hike up Lookout Mountain Monday morning where I honest to shit thought I was going to die. This is mostly because I am dismally out of shape and unaccustomed to coaxing my body to do much more than stand, sit, and — if I’m lucky — writhe a little every day. Suddenly I was using obscure leg muscles to propel myself up trails littered with rocks and trailing leafy vines, and it felt a bit like the entire universe was pulsing inside my brain with every thud of my very flabbergasted heart. I was a smidge embarrassed at how much a mild trail kicked my ass, but by the second leg, which was undeniably more laid-back and leisurely, I got hiking. And I had regained my breath enough to be able to crack wise when Nick squealed like a little girl when he nearly ran face first into a giant spider web.

We reached the waterfall we’d been striving to see, and I’ll be damned if the thing wasn’t bone dry thanks to Chattanooga’s lack of seasonally appropriate rainfall. Would it be accurate to call the deluge that then ensued ironic? I don’t know. That word has basically lost all meaning for me because I can never use it correctly. The point is, it began raining like a motherfucker while we were sitting leisurely stop the big rocks, basking in the afterglow of a long and somewhat hard-won walk. We traipsed the three or four miles back to the car in the downpour, both of us soaked clean through, me secretly grateful for the rain because it masked both my sweat and my heavy breathing. I would be lying if I said the endorphins didn’t do wonders for me all day.

So yeah. Hiking. Cool shit.

The rest of my brief but lovely trip to the ‘Noog involved indie rock shows and good food and ridiculous jukebox choices, overly enthusiastic panhandlers, tappas, drunken goopy text messages to the manfriend, hazy vistas, frizzy hair, army cots, and cheap, frozen booze. And drunken walks through Nick’s very hip, very cute neighborhood of St. Elmo. The more I visit Chattanooga, the more I really like it. They are doing good stuff over there in the bends and hills of Tennessee and I’m always happy to go back.

(Cross-filed in the shameless friend promotion cabinet)

Check out these sweet page designs featuring Shane McDermott’s artwork. The Facebook page is my favorite, even though Shane had to bust ass to get it done on deadline since his original sketch was lost to the ether thanks to some kind of shitty Illustrator-related technical glitch. Shane, when he reads this post, will probably leave a comment saying that he likes the Facebook illustration, just not as much as the original one he did. And then he will sigh heavily.

Up early, the Brooks, rock ‘n’ roll photography, Italian boot envy, inappropriate giggling, sunshine, stromboli, messy hair, naps, rushing to be late. Goodness.

There’s a jungle outside my window — one of creeping vines and reaching grass and, infuriatingly, browning hydrangeas. In my zest to kill that fucking trumpet creeper with paintbrush applications of undiluted Roundup, I think I accidentally treated some flowers I actually do like. I don’t know how; I was careful not to get the poison on anything I didn’t care to see die a miserable wilty death. And yet, for the past two weeks, I’ve watched my beautiful blue hydrangeas brown from the bloom down. I suspect some Roundup dripped onto them somehow (they were in close quarters with the treated vine), and started to do its evil magic. It also looks like it got into one of my pots with a dahlia and some creeping Jenny in it. I am become death, destroyer of flowers. And still there are trumpet vines busting up in new places in the yard. I give up. I don’t want a yard I feel like I have to fight. I will call a truce with the vines that make their way through the other flowers and just settle for pulling them up, but I will continue a chemical assault on the ones that appear away from the fold and threaten my vinyl siding.

My zinnias are starting to bloom. I’ve got a hot pink one. Yessss.

I bought some super-discounted nearly dead dianthus with really odd fringed greenery. They look dead and they may well stay that way this year. I’m rooting for them to surprise me in 2011, though.

My dahlias are a mess. They bloom and then fall over and wilt. Immediately. The greenery is starting to look yellowish near the pots and I thought for a split second I might be overwatering them. But honestly? There’s no way. Not in this heat. Mom thinks maybe they just need to be put in the ground, that their pots are too small. Even though the pots are a good size. It’s as good a guess as any. I don’t look forward to transplanting them but I really, really want pretty — and sustained — dahlia blooms.

I really need to mow. That back yard is especially wild looking. I just haven’t had time. Oh, that’s ridiculous. I have had plenty of time but I have chosen to spend it in other ways. Tomorrow Lesley’s coming to see the house for the first time and I had so hoped to dazzle her with my “See, I’m a grownup who takes care of things!” badassedness instead of my “I miss having a landlord!” sheepishness. Le sigh. Guess I’ll just have to get her extra drunk so she won’t remember how high the grass was. And I’ve got to make sure the cats know to be in extra cuddly mode.

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My sister is at home with my parents now, slowly recovering. She says she’s weak — going up and down the stairs wears her out — but she’s feeling better all the time. She had a wacky near-disaster with a $2800 prescription for antibiotics that turned out to not be necessary to her recovery. Dear doctors: Learn what drugs cost and then TELL YOUR PATIENTS IF A RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE DRUG IS NOT NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL. Jesus.

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I just spent two hours trying to update my iPhone to iOS4 to get some of that sweet app folder/multitasking action. The phone bricked and I had to do a factory restore, then imported my backed up content, except it didn’t resync any of my apps. When I tried to manually resync them, it was like, “Nahhh, don’t really feel like it,” so I’ve been manually resyncing them three or four at a time. I think everything’s OK, though. I feel such guilt when I get bogged down in and stressed out by tech wonkery. Like I should just shut up and keep my technical issues to myself since there is so much actual suffering in the world. Argh.

I watched as the manfriend poured ranch dressing on his slice of garlic chicken pizza at the Pizza Cafe.

I said, “You are going to be able to taste nothing but ranch!”

Incredulous, he said, “Why would you want to taste anything else?”

My friends are effing funny.