Boots

As R will attest I'm a big fan of the colder seasons, mostly because of a particular change in fashion.  A change not without its price.  I suspect a similar event happened when i first met my wife, too bad the concussion wiped it from my memory.

The author in Southwark, London, UK

It’s been a long and surreal day of suburban planning.   What I wouldn’t give for a pint of real ale in a truly ancient pub.  Perhaps a fire and only a short stroll from home.

Homelessness Sucks

It's 4am and I just had a homeless person evicted from my porch.  First time in over four years of living at this address.  I feel bad because the man was sleeping rather soundly in a tidy arrangement of blankets and tarps, trying not to disturb anyone or be a burden, though his snoring was so loud it woke me up on the other side of a closed window.

At first we thought it was the cat, not entirely out of the question if you know the beast, but time and volume proved otherwise. After 30 minutes of internal debate with myself and my half-awake wife, I called the police and guiltily requested an eviction.

As with any temperately weathered city we have our share of homeless and destitute.  A few are junkies, a fair number are psychotic or delusional, but most are harmless in my experience.  It is hard to witness their suffering, even on the best of days, and one learns to live with a certain hardness of the heart.  Unfortunately my porch is neither a shelter nor a refuge.  There is also the question of safety and sanitation.  If the adjacent Catholic and Anglican cathedrals actively evict homeless sleepers from their porches, why shouldn't I?

The best I can do is hope he finds himself help at the new Bud Clark Commons or one of the other homeless shelters and kitchens down in Oldtown.  If you're unfamiliar with BCC, it's a fabulous piece of architecture that assembles a shelter, transitional housing, and social services all in one building. The idea is provide a unified center to deliver basic daily needs (showers and laundry), access to social services like mental health and addiction treatment, and 130 studio apartments for those ready to move off the street.  If you weren't aware of the building's purpose, it would be hard to mistake it for anything other than one of the swank new office or condominium projects going up in the neighborhood.  Just blocks aware are other shelters run by the Catholic Church and other nonprofits, all are well used and overburdened given the lines one sees on the sidewalks.

I happen to know at least one person who resides at one of the shelters in Oldtown.  A pleasant and gentle man who cleans my office but has obviously known hard living in another life.  I don't ask about his past, but am happy to see he's got a future.  Let's hope there are more stories like his.

Back to the Future of 1961

Hello Sexy

Nice curves, wanna make some memories together?

Sunrise and Sunset

These movies are great bookends to each other.  Snapshots of chance encounters full of hope and yearning and trying to pack far too much into far too little time.  The antics we pull off as youth, and the more restrained but clear headed behavior of adulthood.  Not quite chick flicks, otherwise I wouldn't feel compelled to watch them periodically.  In fact I'm watching Before Sunrise now, and feeling very old as a result.

You see, it was filmed the same year I was studying in Nottingham and bumming around Europe during university holidays (1993-1994).  I even made to Vienna for a week, and the movie rings true with some of my random encounters along the way.  Granted, I never spent all night with someone as delicious as Julie Delpy, but you get the general idea.  The movies also capture the grand yet human scale of two amazing cities that I explored in days gone by, and who wouldn't love that if not a city planner.  Could this movie be filmed in an American city?  Probably not given the lack of human scaled public spaces, save for a handful of coastal cities like New York or Portland.  Anyway, I shan't go on and will end with a shot of me and a strange soul I met in Prague...

Bachelor Weekend

Streetcar on the South Park Blocks.

Fall is here and Portlandians are moving indoors.  Or in my wife's case flying to SoCal to visit a new baby while I dusted off sweaters and lived the manly life.  Contrary to popular expectation, this weekend was not the bachelor fest of years past.  There was no naked HALO, no strippers, and no pub crawls.  More of a meandering through inner Portland combined and an attack on my Netflix queue.  I wandered down to the Lan Su Chinese gardens, had a sketchy lunch in China Town, checked out the Art Museum, and in general poked around and met up with a colleague from work.  

A big highlight was the three day Portland Humanist Film Festival, the second of its name and fairly well attended with at least 100 viewers at any one showing or lecture.  As some of you know I self-identify as a secular humanist and atheist, more so the former than the latter as it's better to state what you are as opposed to what you're not.  The topics ranged from serious to silly, documentaries to The Life of Brian (banned in several european countries after its release).   Beyond the joy of communing with like minded folk, I benefitted from one director's thoughts on the meaning of life.  After literally flying around the world asking clergy and physicists, brahmins and beatniks, he concluded that there is no universal answer.  The question isn't what is the meaning of life, but rather what gives my life meaning?  For him, and many others he suspected, it was the act of creation.   This could be children or cooking, art or ideas.   Such a simple concept, even pedestrian, yet like a zen koan it's had me thinking all weekend.  To that end I'm looking forward to the new camera I ordered last week, but that's for the next post...