july

Its difficult to believe it is summer when we haven't had a day above eighty. I love it here. It is the time of the Blues Festival in Portland, and we went to see Buddy Guy Friday night. There are some people who just needs to be seen in person.

Work: It is work. The building is beautiful, and the people who are moving into it, who have been incarcerated in the State Hospital for years and years, think it is the Hilton. They may be crazy, but not about that. My office is the last thing to come together, as it should be.

Home is home. It is difficult to find energy to write just now, so much is going on. I have my Subaru, and it is strange to pull into a drive-thru coffee thing and have to look so far UP to order my large coffee with lots of cream. LOTS OF CREAM. I am accustomed, in the narrow streets of my neighborhood, to round a corner and start up a hill and have other cars make way for me. Not anymore. I'm on my own. I am invisible. Silver bullet car. Tiny little miniature Outback. I am everywoman. It may not be sexy, but when I filled the gas tank and it was 26 bucks instead of 55, I was pretty darned happy.

My creative spirit has left me, it seems. She's done it before, and I fear the Hemingway curse, that I can only write drunk, then I remember.... HEY! I couldn't write drunk!! I talked about it alot, but accomplished really very little.

It'll come to me. It is me.

I got a rearview mirror on my bike!! It is so much better. I don't hear that well anymore, and never know when people are coming up behind me. In small towns, in other parts of the world, it may not matter so much, but here in bike town it really does. There are cyclists who are so competitive, so car-like in their manners.... They tailgate, they pass without signaling. They fly up behind me and pass within a hair's-breadth of my quaking handlebars, and whooooosh, they are gone. Leaving me in the rubble, clinging to the railing over the Willamette River, my choice at that moment seems either to be splattered on the metal gridwork of the Hawthorne bridge or swim for it, my bike so much nautical history. The Titanic Schwinn. I hang on for dear life and begin again. Commuters. They are rude and dangerous and wear stretchy clothes. I'm sure it feels better, but blue spandex on a 40-something man... not so good. But with thighs like cannons, you don't want to point out the fashion don'ts.

Okay. enough of that.

Life is good today.