Author: chiselch

A fog from a fire and the fog of arrogance and the fog of incompetence and …

September 12, 2020 / chiselch

I love fog. I’ve got fog, but I don’t love this fog. This fog is the devil spawn of fire. Smoke, shoved west from its forest home by flames a-billion, then back east by a shift in pressure and wind.

Now it’s ours to enjoy, and not so much the folks to our west. It’s rated hazardous, on the scale of deep breath-to-stop breathing.

North to south, our state is ablaze. Nearly a half-million people have evacuated their homes. They have gone … somewhere. God knows where, but I don’t. They might be at Safeway.

We live just north of Mt. Hood, the blessed 11,000-foot barrier between our county and the burning county to the south. Maybe that county’s residents fled here. It seemed, if that was the case, that they had first decided to stock up in the middle of our Covid-19 pandemic at Safeway.

Mid-day on a September Friday in which nobody was going anywhere for fun, for lolling by a lake, for sipping a beer and dipping one’s toes in chill water, for grilling mashed pork in the skins of mashed pork, I’m standing six deep in a line to buy eight items.

I would love to go camping, but who wants to do that when the smoke is beyond healthy, even for my dog. Satchel tired out earlier than his usual point of fatigue when I took him up into the gloom to chase his sticks and takes his drinks in Indian Creek. (Sorry, that’s its name; no offense intended.)

So we hunker down further, again, more, after months of hunkering from Covid-19. Now we open our doors, and we can see the attacker. We peer out at the smoke lowering like the invasive gloom of a John Carpenter movie (“The Fog”. If Adrienne Barbeau emerges, I’m fine), and wonder if we should inhale, or hold our breaths until all this abates.

Or pack our cars with essentials and legal documents before we flee for our lives.

All that notwithstanding, my wife is off to one of her opportunities to cook. She will endure untold indignities and suffer ridiculous fatigue for the chance to stand before a stove and paint a masterpiece.

She is offering her labors to support a local education foundation. The people for whom she donates time seem to have no clue that it takes a kitchen and utensils and flatware and recycling and trash to make it all happen.

Numerous calls to the winery in charge of provisioning liquid excellence go unreturned. Should my dear show up there to receive their contribution, or not? Eventually, one of their beknighted tribe returns a call.

No, she does not know how many bottles of each wine to assemble for my wife to pick up.

“An email was sent.”

“Sorry, didn’t get it.”

My dear is so restrained. She does NOT say, “Well, talk to the idiot to whom I sent the email and figure it out, because you’ve had a FUCKING WEEK to do that, and I’ll be there in 10 minutes.

No, she says, “thanks for the call.”

At the other end of the line sits the definition of arrogance. If you are paired into an enterprise designed to elevate your brand and share your product, please, do your part. Your wine will not arrive in the glass by divine grace.

No matter, the people who are blessed to view and consume this thoughtfully created meal when it arrives before them will appreciate it mightily. But not nearly enough. If they do, they never say. It is all hay to cattle such as they. The winemaker, for whom a plate was set, fails to show. “Fucking great,” one of the professional drug dealers says as he and his team of profiteers depart.

Fifty or a hundred years from now, the auctioneers at Christie’s will collect bids from people who have heard about this evening, and wish to buy a memory of it.

Millions will change hands.

And my lovely bride will be dead.

But I will be there with her, in the beyond, to smile down on the people who seldom appreciate genius in their own time, because they are too busy celebrating (or trying to get others to celebrate) the geniuses they imagine themselves to be. Opioids will do that to you.

Sigh.

Two Hawks Quarterly features my story “Loaded”

June 28, 2020 / chiselch

So happy and proud that the editing team at Two Hawks Quarterly found merit in my short story “Loaded,” and have included it in the spring 2020 edition. Check it out.

The finest line

June 23, 2020 / chiselch

When is it abuse, and when is it guided introduction to the mysteries of life? When is it “criminal,” and when is it a rite of passage?

There’s a fine line between the two. A sense of gratitude on the part of the student probably tilts the answer. Follow this link to read a recent examination of such an experience, published in The Maine Review.

Letter to my son and his lady friend after a long and late night with

January 12, 2020 / chiselch

Dear Max and Hannah (please share this with her; I don’t have her e-mail),

We’re alive. Up, finally, and pouring coffee to the veins. Arrived home at 11:30, then decompressed with whiskey and snacks until 1, then bed. Ugh. Long day, but so worth it. Wanted again to thank you both for the lovely gift of art (performance art). It was magical, to see a live performance of the play, so well done, with such good company.

On that note, and linked back to your table thoughts on college education, degrees, BA vs MA/MS vs. … 3-month certificate. It’s a fascinating debate, a bit now of a pendulum swing, which is depressing interest in the humanities (which give us “Fiddler on the Roof”) to the favor of CTE (career and technical ed, as you must know).

Here’s a piece in today’s NY Times addressing that …

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/opinion/sunday/academics-humanities-literature-canon.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

and an earlier piece, if you’re a glutton for punishment, on the same topic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opinion/oh-the-humanities.html

I’ve always been a humanities person, but got nudged toward a practical application (journalism), not exactly engineering, but clearly with a professional application in mind.

I recall the prof who thus nudged me noting that an English degree wouldn’t lead to a decent job. And, later, another English prof advising me that I could become a “hack” (i.e. journalist), or pursue art (i.e. literature, and … well, he didn’t do the economic calculus that his colleague had, which may have been why, no matter how much I loved literature, I tilted toward journalism). I should note that the latter gentleman was a lovely gent of Persian descent, who I knew as M. Zavarzadeh. I Googled him. His first name was actually Mas’ud.

Back in the day, there were no journalism degrees or programs. People came to it from the humanities, after studying all the things that go into good journalism — sociology, history, poli sci, literature, and (tech tilt here) economics.

For your world (K-12), there’s a case to be made that some students really may prefer a CTE track and get on with it. But who decides? And how do we decide? It seems a crime to deprive them of the opportunity to explore the humanities, to see if that resonates with them, before somehow (the test?) determining that they should take shop class. That’s how they did it back in my day — the kids with better grades and more dutiful attention to their studies got into the college-prep track. Everybody else took home ec and auto shop. Human potential is so mysterious. People who are really good with their hands and mechanically inclined can also be good thinkers on other topics. Farmer Wendell Berry comes immediately to mind. The duality is complementary, not competitive. It’s not either/or, but both/and more.

So much for a Sunday morning brain dump. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

Exit signs

January 10, 2020 / chiselch

My dog and I were out in the circle early this morning, when my neighbor emerged from her house with her dog, Lucky.

Jane had been laid off several months earlier from her admin job, the same day her husband was laid off from his drafting job, each from the same employer.

He got a new job, in San Diego. He stays in a condo they own down there.

We live 1,082 miles north, in Oregon. His wife stays in the house where their two kids are finishing school.

They get together, every so often.

She said she could move down there after the last kid leaves home, in two years.

“And keep your house here?” I asked.

“Probably,” she said. “If we sold, we couldn’t afford to buy another one if we decided to come back.”

Jane told me the same company that fired her as an employee (with benefits), is the company that rehired her on a contract basis (no benefits). She’s working at that company, but being paid through a staffing agency.

She wasn’t hired to do the same job. It was a new thing. She goes around the building and checks the EXIT signs to make sure they’re lit.

“That’s good,” I said, “so I know where to go if I ever need to get the hell out of your building.”

“Right,” she said. “Or the next time I get laid off.”

She turned and walked back inside with Lucky. She had to finish getting ready for work.

If you haven’t, by all means take time to read Alice Munro

December 21, 2019 / chiselch

I’m retired. Most of my time is mine to use as I wish. Odd, then, that I find (or carve out) so little uninterrupted time to just sit and read.

I love to read. I have piles of books and magazines on end tables and nightstands and the sofa and book shelves in my office, and yet it seems a struggle to set aside a good hour to just sit with one, to start and engage and finish a story or essay.

I need to remember, then, what happened today, when I finally picked up Alice Munro’s collection of stories, “Runaway,” tucked into the title story, and after a brief break for dinner, rejoined it and rode it to completion.

This was perhaps the third story of Munro’s that I have read, and I wonder why I have not read more. Perhaps because so much other excellence demands and deserves my attention, but I have let volume get in the way of engagement.

Munro takes simple people with simple dreams and extracts the complexity from their every thought, their every move. With Munro, still waters do indeed run deep. No fireworks here, just a prose master, taking us on a gallery tour in which we view her subjects from every angle, inside and out, wrestling with dreams and desires, fears and frustrations, simple charities and tragic reversals of will.

In a world so jammed with flash and volume, bright and shiny spectacles, I must suggest that you do yourself a favor and get to know Munro.

She was honored with the Nobel Prize for her work exclusively in the short story form. The talent leading to that honor lies in every word choice and finely crafted phrase, every description and mannerism through which her fictional small town Canadians live as large and wide as their sprawling landscape.

I regret many an hour wasted on some dizzy video extrusion. I regret nothing of my time spent with Munro.