ahhhh

Saturday morning. Clinton street is alive with walkers, cyclists, rain or no. It doesn't seem to matter around here. When we were down south last week, I noted the absence of two-wheelers in general. Why is this? The weather in the Rogue Valley is certainly more conducive to bicycles, not to mention that flat-landers wouldn't need so many gears. I didn't have any when I got here, and soon (well, eventually) realized my oversight, huffing up the hill in front of Hosford Middle School, dying for a full breath and the loss of 50 pounds. Its all luggage.

Tis the holiday season, and, master of the obvious, I am happy to be home. I asked my honey to make me a stained glass window and nothing else. He feels the pressure of my request, I know, but I really want one. I need nothing. Nothing. After many commercial years, I am hungry for a homemade christmas. I bought cards, and will write them out this evening, some lame christmas movie playing in the background. I am so passe. You each will receive one.

Asia will show me how to post pictures, and I can show you our new bikes. New USED bikes. I can show you my new bathroom. I can show you my dog and his pen. With any luck, we can catch him pressing his head through the bars, hanging like a Salem Witch in stocks--isnt' that what they're called--where their head and hands are locked up? He doesn't like his little prison, but who does? I think he is cold. We debate the relative temperature of dog-life to ours, and his skinny little naked nearly hairless body. I'll knit him a sweater for Christmas and take a picture of that. But if we let him out of the pen and into the open yard, the yard will soon seem the prison and so on. It is one of those things like holding a mirror up to a mirror. It just goes on and on....

I sent off my application for another job. I am adjusting to the one I have, but really, it is such a long drive. Oh!! I had a flat tire on the way to work. It has been a very very long time since I had a flat. Very long. I knew the sound, though. The tic tic tic, sh sh sh, of air escaping the gaping hole, and there I was, 6:30 in the morning, just the other side of King City (which is not really a city I think, but just part of Tigard) and well into the no-man's land between there and Sherwood, and I knew I had to turn around. I knew there was a gas station behind me. But nowadays, most gas stations are just run by minimum wage crack-heads who wouldn't help you change a tire to save their life, and this one was. Fortunately, a nice young man pulled in for gas and I asked in my blondest voice, "Where would you look for a jack on a Subaru?" and he walked over. Caught. He helped me and would not take money. Thanks to Mike from Gresham with the year and a half old baby who just moved to the burbs. I didn't have a lug wrench, and the jack that comes with the car was so obscure as to not be recognizeable to me as what it was. I could never have done it myself. And the spare tire was like something off a toy truck. I told him, "I think we have the wrong spare!" and he assured me that all modern little cars have these now, and they can't go more than 5o miles, at 50 miles an hour. Why? I really wanted to go 60 at 60, but it was early and dark and cold, and I was wearing a skirt and shoes that would be a drag to walk very far in, let alone crawl out of the ditch in which I had made my point. But really, it is good. I never could see the sense in buying five whole tires, and then, never plan to really use them up. You know? Living in poverty, we USED our tires. We didn't let the racist white boys at Les Schwab tell us our "tread was beginning to show wear." We waited until we were going seventy-five on the freeway, passing a semi, for a blowout. Now that was the essence of frugality.

I remember one time driving my '65 Dodge Polara with the plywood back seat that I had to smack the starter with a shovel or 2x4 to get it to start--I had two flats at the same time, going around a corner on my way to buy meth from Tony the Bearhunter at 3:30 in the morning in November. Ah, those were the days.

Another day on Clinton Street.