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so far this morning. . .
i smile and breath deeply biking along the river. i laugh and wonder at the stories of my friend hedda. i swoon at bjork’s and
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Hopscotch Radio
A half-hour in direct sunshine then swaying and shakin'it to Heddalee's Hopscotch Radio. . .i'm smiling now and feeling sweet happy good-afternoon baby happy.
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STOP ANIMAL TESTING
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what i eat!
alright, i've done it for true. gone veganplusfish and avoided wheat for two weeks now! am amazed at how delicious meat- dairy- wheat-less food can be! sunday night i made an outstanding quinoa loaf from broccoli, parsnips, onions, potatoes, rice n oat flour, sunflower seeds, soy lecithin, miso, and quinoa of course. it was so fresh my dad called me swooning over the half-loaf we shared with him. and yesterday my mom, who's on board too, made the most tummy-warming, creamy comforting bowl of cauliflower soup i've ever tasted--using sesame tahini as the fat and oatmeal as the gluten. i'm a true believer in humans being meat-eaters. a believer too that the current relationship between most lower-48 meat/animal product-eaters and the animals they exploit is sick and ugly and i want way out. my understanding of this has been developing for about fifteen years and is all mine--it's a powerful thing to feel right in my skin about something that's caused me a lot of shame and anxiety. my value of respectfully giving and receiving gifts is still a strong one though and i doubt i'll turn down animal products offered me by one of my elders. hopefully they will understand and respect my choices though and not offer me any meat. another decision i'll need to make is whether to eat meat from animals raised by my family members or other local farmers when we gather for yearly family celebrations. hmmnnn. . .i'm up for the challenge of negotiating these choices! as for the fish, i have enough access to fisher-people through my family and work that i’ll be enjoying a little smoked salmon a couple times a week. plus, i have very little problem with the relationship between fisher-people and the wild- line-caught fish they catch and kill. here’s to a happy consience! and my cracking fingers (so much cooking, so many dishes) are crossed for good health in this big decision. |
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Bin Laden - Immortal Technique Feat Mos Def
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Dvinsk Clan-Le Parkour
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what's up. . .
the third floor has been erected on all four new condos next to our little rental. kens and barbies are rolling through the hood in cool rides, eyes hooded by cameras or irises afire with the dazzle of what will be. like those who sought the $385k condos across the street, these will ignore us--neighbors chillin on the porch, playing in the street, bumpin in our small homes--as they park in our driveways and scramble to admire and hope over their new $450k diggs. one rich bitch from the last round of condo shoppers shooed off the sidewalk my girl and me because we were "in her way!" as she leaned her shrunken little golden prune-head from her s.u.v. to take a photo of the infill. hooked on oolong tea. the whole pack of hormone medication hit the round file yesterday cuz ive turned bitch, it seems, since the first drop. how to stop the bleeding now? considering a long-range plan to further unplug my home from the bullshit (already no car, no tv, no microwave, no land-line, no computer, groceries local when possible and meat happy always.) talked with my girl and my friend about putting yurts on land out of town and making a small farm to feed and keep us. but the city calls, and i answer, with a heart full of love, that i will not likely abandon it. i've discovered psalm one, who spits nice and (bonus) is a sexy dyke as far as i can tell. time based art festival with hedda was fun. . .especially talking to edie in oakland on the computer. she drew us and faxed it on-site. we drew her and taped ours up with the other attempts to represent her pretty face. my knees are swollen still and bleeding from the tri-met accident (exactly one week later.) i found another lost dog (or did she find me?) and led her home on two shoestrings tied together, compliments of a resourceful elderly neighbor. sweet and soft girl who my neighbor took in. true to her nature, the little beagle is a barker. i love mangos. god in heaven, i love mangos. fictish and me bought a box of sweet yellow perfectly ripe bartlett pairs in hood river on sunday. what a gorgeous light full of hot autumn day. on the ride home, from tribal members at the bridge of the gods, lori bought 200 dollars worth of coho salmon. long silver bodies on ice in her industrial white coolers. they smelled like water and a trip in the fall of the year. she'll smoke them and share. i met delilah begay from sililo who said that her teenage daughter, weighing and handling the fish from the bed of the pick-up, is the tough one, the fisherman who caught these beautiful bodies.
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earlier i said "silly" optimism, right? well, still feeling fine and i've just been permanently laid off work. putting all my eggs in my next monday interview basket. . . |
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i'm in the eye of my work storm today and yet, am bubbling with silly optimism.?? wrote and mailed this letter to the keep company: Hi Keep, from Portland Oregon. I’ve just returned from seven glorious days on the Oregon Coast, my summer vacation away from work and the city. My girl Amie and I spent quiet days reading, swimming in the Wilson river, hiking, frolicking on the beach with Birdy and Gus, the dog members of our family, and kayaking. Estuary kayaking in Tillamook County is extraordinarily lovely. We caught an incoming tide at Netarts Bay one afternoon and spent several hours floating with curious harbor seals whose disappearing sandbar forced an end to their sun-soaked lounging. To our surprise and delight, three of them had silvery babies nuzzling close on their backs! The weather was excellent, cool mornings, and warm days with peaceful fog and cloud breaks. Perfect conditions, really, to break out the Keep owl sweatshirt my girl gifted me months earlier. Oh how I love this sweatshirt and how I hugged and kissed Amie for this thoughtful gift! She saw a little photo of it in Fader Magazine and thought of me right away. Owls have special meaning to me as an urban Yup’ik Eskimo person, representing spiritual insight and vision. Keep’s owl sweatshirt does not trivialize the owl by making it cutesy, nor does it villanize it by making it appear sinister. Instead, the artwork is serious and the design of the sweatshirt with the graphic swooping around the body gives the owl both gravity and flight. Did you know that the Keep owl sweatshirt is designed very much like a short-version Yup’ik kuspuk?! In spite of how much I love my Keep owl sweatshirt, and how well it matches the clothes in my small stack of pants and t-shirts, I’ve worn it only three times before my summer vacation—once when bumping to “The Coup” live in Portland. (Bomb show, by the way.) You see, I work at the Native American Rehabilitation Association Indian Health Clinic which serves primarily American Indian people. While the owl is significant to my Indian cousins too, its medicine is in its messaging ability, often bringing news of death. You can see that wearing my Keep sweatshirt at the Health Clinic would be offensive, so I’ve saved it for evenings and special events. So now I come to the reason for my letter. I got my Keep owl sweatshirt dirty for the first time on the beach during vacation. No problem, I thought. . .the rental has a washer and dryer. So I did it—washed it on the cold wash/cold rinse setting as per the instructions on the tag. However, when I pulled it from the wash to hang it dry, my favorite sweatshirt was warm (?) and very small. I am sad about it and don’t understand how it shrunk so much. I’m including with this letter a picture of my dog Birdy and me (in my Keep owl sweatshirt) running on the beach at Oceanside, Oregon, my shrunken sweatshirt, a copy of a popular Yup’ik song about a snowy owl, a photo of one of the owl masks i’ve created, and a burned “Drums of the North: Traditional Yup’ik Songs” for your enjoyment. I would be most grateful and would promise not to be so careless as to subject it to an unfamiliar washing machine in the future if you could replace my sweatshirt. Thank you for your time, for hearing my story, and for considering my request.
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we did dusk in our ‘hood by second-hand rollerblades yesterday. i sustained an ideal knee scrape (small and deliciously stinggy) just out the gate on my jet down our concrete drive. the night was cooler than the days before it and i felt content in the breeze. on the first block we waved at twelve year-old herman, shutting down the day by himself, bumpin’ in his mother’s van to a faggy mixtape. then five kids from the tiny duplex played ball and laughed on their concrete patch, a milk-crate hoop wired to the cyclone fence caging their quarters. two twenty-something rockabilly girls smoked, eyed us silently from the stoop as we scooted up stairs opposite theirs, peered into the emptied apartment to see what we could—which was little except a vision of ourselves, kicked out of our perfect spot in some near-future condo invasion, setting up house brand new again. two uniformed teams of mostly blonde kick-ballers traded polite shouts in darkening “flea bite park” and i was reminded of the oak-lined trees and congenial folks i met one summer day in des moines, iowa. we rolled past men bent with heads under hoods of broken cars, past lawn water-ers, and easygo-ers seeing all or nothing from their porch chairs. lovely dusk for true.
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camas
i'm finally finished writing the hippy dippy grant and have a few minutes to relax and update my journal. . . i visited camas, washington with my mom yesterday to hand over nine of my left shoes for repair to a grouchy and wonderful elderly cobbler. on my way to the restroom, i got a sneak peek behind the counter at his 42 year-old itty bitty shop. . .all that wood and metal, order, and tools to fix and assemble, built fast in me the thrill and ambition that only workshops and fancy kitchens do. the cobbler’s retail space is organized in three distinct sections: model trains and accoutrement, moccasins for the family, and a hodgepodge area of hand-etched belts and purses, shoe care supplies, boxes of fur and leather scraps, and random american indian paraphernalia. i was shocked to find dangling above the counter an authentic eskimo yoyo (two conical shaped “balls” stuffed with polar bear or reindeer hair and covered in seal fur with a base of some soft skin. . .the balls are attached by a length of sinew with a bone handle. the object of the game is to get the balls swinging in opposite directions.) “wow! where did you get an eskimo yoyo?!” “from an eskimo,” he answered. an old lady, now passed, whose name he could not remember, financed her way from a remote alaskan village to washougal, washington years ago by making and selling things. he and she became friends. and the yoyo has hung above his counter, unidentifiable to most customers, for twenty odd years. to my excitement, it was for sale. i’ve not spent $15 in a better way, ever. further down 4th street in this same small mill town, we came to an art gallery with a rob wurzer carving in the window. i recognized it immediately and pulled my mom inside to show her his work and to tell her about my conversations with this artist who spent most of thirty years as a logger in oregon and washington forests. during that time he collected rooms full of antlers and bones and grew a mystical connection to the land, animals, and spirits of the woods that he began expressing through carving these left-behind animal parts. his visions are fascinating and his art is fantastic and in-demand nationally. my mom and i chatted with judy, the gallery owner, about rob’s pieces as well as some masks by lillian pitt also in the gallery. not having heard of lillian, my mom confided in judy, that “although these masks are nice, the ones my daughter creates are more interesting and much better.” !!yikes. i was embarrassed and nervous and now had to answer the gallery owner’s curious look. by the end of our conversation judy said she’d be willing to look at my work sometime. so, driven by the idea of my masks hanging in a gallery with rob’s and lillian’s, i sped home, retrieved three masks and photos of others, and returned within the hour. to my great surprise judy liked the pieces i brought in and asked if i’d be willing to exhibit them in the gallery. woah. i said yes.
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i did something mean. . .a going-away party was held today for a woman i share an office with. she is a disagreeable sort of young person who perpetually expounds on the bitterness of each aspect of her job and the people she knows and the people she meets. plus she's been most ungracious to me during our five months of shared space. somehow i forgot her party and, wanting to contribute something to the pot-luck, dropped by the local ethiopian market on my morning break to the coffee shop. i spent $6 on sour grape juice. "sour grapes for a sour girl," i snickered to myself and almost told my sport to the shop owner as i paid. this afternoon, i learned that sour grape juice is made from unripe fruit and used in persian recipes in a way similar to the use of lemons or vinegar. shaken up with olive oil, mustard, honey, salt, and pepper, sour grape juice makes a delicious salad dressing with fruity overtones. sour girl and other brave pot-luckers got a puckering sip of my mean idea. "i've just burned a hole through my stomach!" she exclaimed after one tiny taste. others were polite, merely passed looks of "eeeewwwww," and only made fun of me after my early departure from the party (i was told.) i slunk away feeling guilty for indulging in rich stroganoff, a spicy spaghetti, and gorgeous green salad having contributed just a tiny farewell joke that i kept to myself. |
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dream last night, april 3, 2006
A flounder i fished from the indoor pool lay gasping on the tiny table between us. you, my friend hedda, sat glancing, at it then me, perturbed, and shiny as the fish and your name. we wondered in silence, will we eat it? i thought not since it came from a pool. you worried over a patch bare of silver scales. it is true that a flounder was waiting there between us, but i was cheerful. we sat together, afterall, in mutual deliberation. and in spite of your mood, the light coming off you brightened and warmed the entire room. |
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Itzo EZ burned tracks round the pack friday night and fast made a roller derby fan of me. i squealed and hollered with the best allies of Guns and Rollers and booed, even, the sexier Break Neck Betties on cue. not since 1984 at my first and last rural oregon homecoming dance had i willingly entered a dark and sweaty auditorium with a herd of white folks hopped up on pbr and ac/dc, until friday. a haze of cigarette smoke hung low on the snaking line of rockabillies and dykes downing their big-gulp cups of beer before hitting the door. (some jackass, not paying attention, threw the last of his warm beer on my friend, Lori: “hey, watch it! there’s a line of people behind you.” JackAss: “not in my world.” My Girl A: “your world’s about to get it’s ass kicked!” Me: “jeezus christ, A.” My Girl A: “these cats aren’t ready to bring out their balls.” and lucky for us they weren’t.) soon though, all the action was on the track and the derby settled into a comforting call and response—the skaters blocking and jamming for thrills and points and the joint roaring and clapping for more. i dig roller derby! check out itzo ez and the league: http://rosecityrollers.com/rosecityrolle
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