Dan Rather's Last Day

I should be watching his news channel, but I'm not. I never did like him that much.

St. Helens blew up. We were driving up Powell and saw the plume. It was happening just then. Right then. It was great to be aware at the same time it was happening. There have been other monumental events that I was unaware of--the seventies come to mind--and the first half of the eighties. Anyway, we dashed, as did half of southeast Portland, up to Mt. Tabor, which, it turns out, ain't all that great of a view. But the thunderhead-like cloud of smoke and ash had mostly dissipated anyway, and we went on to look at a fishing boat.

My husband wants a boat. We have nowhere to put one, but that doesn't seem like much of a barrier to him. He'd carry it on his back, I'm thinkin'. Greg, the fishing god, says that the fish are biting now because of St. Helens. It shook them up, he thinks. I think its just that he finally caught two springers. Big ones. My husband will be impossible to live with until he catches one.

There are a million things to blog about, but I'm exhausted from giving bad news to good people. Remember Ruby Miles? The one who called me and said she was lost in California? Well, today I had to tell her that she had to try harder in therapy or her Medicare benefit would run out. Try harder. She's ninety fucking years old. Try harder than what? Than she did when she was eighty? Come on. She examined me with the watery gray eyes of the weary, and said, "Do you like being a social worker?"

Well, I don't. Not at all.