ode to declerye

here only the trains sound the same,
i miss dancing in the kitchen and singing on the porch,
i miss the jungle tireswing and magnolia turnip riots,
i miss sitting by the woodstove with amiga in my lap,
plants in the pink bathroom, and mirrors on the walls,
i miss pictures with messages of hope and defiance,
the scratchy record player,
tims banjo, jb's guitar, andy's accordion,
suzie's guitar and tj's box of tricks,
i miss the sound of chopping wood, of bike bells, and the slam of the security door
i miss the smells of the kitchen, of coffee and spices and frying things
silly songs, christmas lights and valentines day decorations lingering from last year,
zines in the bathroom and postcards on the wall,
strangers on the couch, and friends on the porch,
i miss the faces of those i've left behind, and loved best,
the kids of memphis.

weekend rant roundup

do i want to get up at 5 am just to buy some crud at walmart or mervyns the day after thanksgiving? hell no. but you know what i just love...going to movie theaters...really.








what could be better than listening to inane commercials (thanks a lot to the idiot who decided previews weren't enough), and having some kid kick the chair throughout the film is just fabulous. i'm sure i don't know what is up with that shit. i swear people don't know how to act outside of whatever barn they musta been raised in. it's apalling.


almost as bad--the guy on the train going "meth? meth? meth?". i realize this things gresham bound but damn...give me a good ol' fashioned crack head any day.

the other thing that i just gotta disrespect on for a moment is smokers.
god i didn't realize some many people in this hippy ass town of portland liked to puff on the cancer sticks...don't know why people can't just smoke pot like everyone seems to do in canada. it's the oregon way after all...
and you know i couldn't care less about what people want to do with their money and time, except that i have some wicked asthma, so whatever these folks do affects me just as much as if they decided to stick the damn thing up in my face...which is about what ends up happening anyhow...
so i'll be trying to stand somewhere, and inevitably someone slides right on up next to me, and whips one of the damn stinking things out and lights it up. "umm, yo, the cancer section's right over THERE. yeah."
Or i'll be trying to walk down the street mindin' my own business and someone in front of me invariably will start smoking and let that nasty shit drift back my way.
all i'm trying to say is that it really sucks when you literally can't breathe and have nowhere to go to get away from the source of the problem, but i've taken to walking in the streets instead of the sidewalk because it seems to help.

So the other night, I was gonna go see the treelighting downtown. Sure it was cold, sure it was raining, and sure it was crowded, but you know why I had to give up and go back home? because i couldn't find a single place to stand without someone next to me decide to start smoking, driving me away every time. after moving 5 times i gave up, got on the train and went back home.

This shit just makes me so mad. Like I said, I don't care what people do, but when I gotta start planning my life around other people's addictions, then it just makes me want to do some good ol' fashioned retaliation.
Should I--
a: start carrying around a fire extinguisher and screaming "fire! fire!"?
b: eat more beans and let the gas take care of business?
c: carry around a backpack blower and start that shit up when someone lights up?
Honestly, i won't be doing any of these things...but it just means I don't get out much on account of wanting to breathe normally. Concerts are a drag, public events are unpleasant, and well there's a whole laundry list of places i can't frequent anymore. all for reasons that have nothing to do with my personal preferences (unless you count breathing as a personal preference...)

Now that we've gotten that out of the way...hopefully i can finish all my homework assignments, finally projects and keep sane when loads of rich white folks bring stuff in they want mailed out that needed to be there yesterday.

hagakure 12 steps to the post-capitalist self

the original purpose of the Tea Ceremony is to cleanse the six senses. For the eyes there are the hanging scroll and flower arrangement. For the nose there is the incense. For the ears there is the sound of the hot water. For the mouth there is the taste of the tea. And for the hands and feet there is the correctness of term. When the five senses have thus been cleansed, the mind will of itself be purified.
we had been overpowered by the spectacle...
Of people who regard water lightly, many have been drowned.
only by empowering ourselves...
Plants such as peonies, azaleas and camellias will be able to produce beautiful flowers, end of the world or not. But people become imbued with the idea that the world has come to an end and no longer put forth any effort. This is a shame. There is no fault in the times.

the decision to reclaim our lives...
Human life is truly a short affair. It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.

entirely ready to get off our asses...
One should every day think over and make an effort to implant in his mind the saying, "The time is right now."

subvert.
When there is something to be said, it is better if it is said right away. If it is said later, it will sound like an excuse.

asked others for mutual aid in our struggle...
"Not to borrow the strength of another, nor to rely on one's own strength ; to cut off past and future thoughts, and not to live within the everyday mind . . . then the Great Way is right before one's eyes."

a list of all accomodations we had made to the dominant culture
People who talk on and on about matters of little importance probably have some complaint in the back of their mind. But in order to be ambiguous and to hide this they repeat what they are saving over and over.
strive to create better ways to live...
Covetousness, anger and foolishness are things to sort out well. When bad things happen in the world, if you look at them comparatively, they are not unrelated to these three things. Looking comparatively at the good things, you will see that they are not excluded from wisdom, humanity and bravery .

through meditation, agitation, relaxation, masturbation, gyration, demonstrations, defacement, parody, subversion and satire, to improve our conscious contact with the world around us
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue.

a personal and social awakening...
It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this.

practice these principles in all our affairs...
Nothing you do will have effect if you do not use truth.
http://www.critpath.org

life's little questions

Question 1: What's the point of being on time to anything, if no one else ever is? And I hate it when people complain about how cold it is...Yo' don't tell me how cold it is between the door of your car and the store...I sit out in it every day waiting for the bus to come, then walk up the hill to get here while you're flying past in your suv. You really wanna talk about the cold with somebody, go talk to the Salvation Army guy in front of albertsons, he's probably got more experience with cold than you can imagine...

Question 2: What 5 things make your life worth living? (from morgan)

Question 3: Why did they play the same song twice in a row on the radio today? you know, if I hear the same song twice that doesn't mean I'm gonna like it more.

Question 4: Does it make you feel good to be rude to someone who's job is to listen to you blame them for things beyond their control? As my daddy says, "If you ain't got nothin' nice to say to somebody, don't say nothin' at all."

Question 5: What's so "country" about a country song about being stuck in traffic on a freeway in LA? (I'm not too crazy about country music, but it's a captive audience situation and at least I can hear some southern accents once in awhile.)

Everyone's heading off for Thanksgiving now that it's only a couple of days away. It's pretty weird to not be doing the whole mad airport shuffle. I was just reading this article in the wall street journal about how airlines are gettin' so stingy with service in order to save money. Can't blame 'em I guess, but I'll just save my money and rock the greyhound if I want the no frill experience. But it really doesn't matter, I ain't goin' no where no how. Suitcases ain't gettin' packed 'round here. i'll be staying here an' makin' my own damn gravy. word.

Your element is earth: Wise, solitary, mysterious
and loving. You are very wise. Your wise as in
you know things others do not. You can see past
the stereotypes and see the real people behind
their facades, people will often come to you
for help and advice. Quite solitary and
somewhat shy around people because you prefer
animals and plants. Animals aren't afraid to
show themselves or what they are feeling and
plants are fun to nurture. You are very strong
in your silence, if you set your mind on
something you will often times pursue it to the
end. Sometimes you just want to get away, so
you seek refuge in the forest where you can
have time to think and try to sort out your
emotions. The sound of the wind usually calms
you, especially moving through the trees. Life
to you is something precious and should not be
taken for granted.


.:-|What is your true element?|-:. -With Anime Pictures and detailed answers-
brought to you by Quizilla

CON(servative govern)MEN(t)

hee hee hee, i thought this was funny.




seriously though, those wonderful folks that brought us the (we might as well shoot)Patriot (missiles at ourselves because we) Act (like chumps) are at it again. if you find yourself with a little free time inbetween basting turkeys, you might want to swing on over to

<http://action.aclu.org/call> and give them a piece of your mind,
especially if the FBI having access to your personal information just
for the hell of it gives you the willies.

About the only conservative ideas I want to see cozying next to my
government is folks getting serious about conserving: natural resources, the
environment, family farms, the value of education, jobs and
the military budget (just think how much money you could conserve
by not fighting stupid oil wars in countries that had nothing to
do with either osama bin laden OR september 11th).  oh well, i can
keep on dreamin'.

sunday and vines

my crack dealers are just down the street. yep i'm talking about the corner coffeeshop, tiny's. i get positively ansty if i haven't had my hit of stumptown french press with soymilk. nothing else does it for me like those guys...

...i probably shouldn't take this literally...it's a little too weird to take literally, i think maybe it means that something i have been hoping for is going to come up empty again, and i probably know it deep down inside, but have been pretending otherwise.

i've been raking up the withered corpses of summer and piling up the dead squash vines, digging trenches, and covering up the beds so that the weeds don't take over the whole garden. there's formidable forest of grasses, solanums, mallow, himalayan blackberries, creepers, henbit, and so many others that i'm probably forgetting. stiff competition for my free time. i don't have enough time or energy to fight them all, so i'm thinking of taking the easy way out with black plastic...it's tough work clearing out that much spent growth, but it's surprisingly relaxing. i pulled down the rest of the beans and shelled them, saving their seed for next year. they were very prolific. so were those curious little red peppers, the yellow squash (which makes some members of this household groan just to hear its name), and the brocolli did well. if only more people would eat it...

there are some gorgeous maples down the street...unbelievably beautiful. i can't believe they're still in the full blaze of their glory this late in the year.

we went and did the thanksgiving grocery shopping and the damage wasn't too bad. i thought it would be a lot spendier than our usual weekly groceries, but it really wasn't... i'll see if p---a wants to come over for dinner, it would be nice to have someone other than just the two of us, and i have this corny vision of southern expats holing up in portland having a decidedly non-traditional thanksgiving. we'll see. i'd love to have a weird assortment for thanksgiving...i guess it would remind me more of my family, than not.
in the meantime i have a strange week ahead. only one class, no tutoring, and lots of work, and no doubt a number of cranky customers (with a major holiday looming ahead). i hope brian gets better soon, but so far i've been resisiting the plague, although i have been way more tired than usual. we'll see about that...

bus stop stories

she was sitting in front of the stop for the #9, as i walked by, a mountain of a woman in a coat of many colors, with a sad and thoughtful look on her face. i saw the bus come but she didn't get on it...
a long while later, i wandered back down the street.
she was still there. in the faintest voice, she told me the saddest thing i've heard in a long long while...i don't care how you look at it. the facts and details are irrelevent. when you are where you are, you have the right to have this kind of public conversation. where you are is a place that i can't begin to fathom. who has the right to judge you? you were given what you said you needed, but i still have my doubts...you need more than the kindness of strangers, when you are falling through the widest cracks of thin safety nets.

good thing it's thursday

i'm starting to run out of stamina. i screwed up some numbers that negatively impacted several people. my hand is starting to resist the feel of paper and pen.

went over to starbucks for the first time in a long while. why you may be wondering? for the gingerbread latte. kinda corny i know but it's a good flavor and i actually had some money for a change. if someone else wants to get in on the game, i won't stand in the way. it's taste-tastic

it was slow enough that i was able to write part of my paper at work. crazy...
i got home early, but had just enough time to finish it, print it out and stroll into class 5 minutes late.

we talked a little bit about trans issues, which is always interesting because of the people i know who grapple with this. but then again, if you know a tranny, you grapple with the issue too because it affects your life with them, in a way that other types of identity don't. there's a lot more i could say on this subject, and maybe will sometime, but i'm too tired to get into it now.
the thing i love about this class is we have the best discussions. we talked about evangelical christians, personal space and taking your city slicker kids to the country and them freaking out (over outhouses, the fact that "the food" is wandering around right outside and catching and killing dinner is how it normally gets done, and eating at roadside stalls instead of hygenic health department seal of approval restaurants). i was feeling pretty tired by 9 pm though. i can tell i'm getting sick...i've gotta keep fighting though, there's a lot on the line these days.

my whole family is assembled back at the ancestral homeland...without me. i wish i was there too, but alas it is not to be. i'm sure i'll survive, but not very happily. it's tough being so far away from la familia, but there's reasons why i'm here and i've gotta remember than when i get homesick.

papers out my ears

been kinda busy writing papers...papers on the left, papers on the right, papers keepin' me up late at night.
brian's been sick, so it's been rough around here. i'm bound to get whatever he has, it's only a matter of time. when i'm not straining my eyes looking at computer screens (wish i could change the background on word to something other than white, i think it would help), i'm usually on my way to or from work. glad to have some of that these days, but it's challenging at times. lots of stuff to remember. and i realize sometimes no matter how hard you try to solve problems, there's gonna be factors out of your control that will ultimately win the game. so we spend our time putting out fires...
the worlds i pass in and out of are always on the horizon. i keep walking in the dark wondering what happened to the time. winter is hard on me because i have to spend so much of it in the dark and the cold. i'm slowly watching the colors of the leaves fade in the twillight of autumn. winter (fo' real) is gonna be here real soon.

salmon pink sunset

today was surprisingly warm (it's been pretty cold lately, i'm up to 3 or 4 layers on average) and true to the name of "sunday" was kinda sunny, or at least not rainy. i'm not arguing, i like having a day off from umbrellas once in awhile.

spent a restless night not getting much sleep so i slept in way late this morning, and spent the whole day writing papers for my two classes, and making lunch and dinner for the whole rest of the week. (kind of important because i have no time to cook these days, but no money to avail myself of those who do). i think i've read enough about attachment disorders, breast feeding and temperament to last the rest of my life.

the sunset (which coming at 4:30 seems too early for my taste) was a bright salmon pink with steel grey clouds (that remind me of the winter color of the river) fading to tan and grey above the line of bare trees. brian says it reminds him of ashland...

here's to hoping i don't get whatever plague everyone else seems to have. i really need to not be sick, there's so much hanging in the balance this week.

bob dylan's dream

Riding the bus in the rain, I was listening to this bob dylan song which reminds me utterly of declerye and the time that i spent there... ...I dreamed a dream that made me sad, Concerning myself and a few friends I had. With half-damp eyes I stared to the room Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon, Where we together weathered many a storm, Laughin' and singin' till the early hours of the morn. By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung, Our words were told, our songs were sung, Where we longed for nothin' and were quite satisfied Talkin' and a-jokin' about the world outside. With haunted hearts through the heat and cold, We never thought we could ever get old. We thought we could sit forever in fun But our chances really was a million to one...

thought of the day part 2

What must it be like to be the person who can afford to buy $90 shirts and $250 pants? (and not need that money for housing, bills and food). i can only imagine...
i wouldn't know. not on $7.50 an hour...(i would imagine the employees at the businesses who sell this stuff also experience this surrealism).
what it means in my case is that i would have to make something in the neighborhood of $50 an hour to match my current level of spending on this sort of thing (and that's assuming i was buying retail, which in real life happens rather infrequently).

buy nothing day is coming up in a few weeks, a day where you are challenged to not spend any money for 24 hours. although i think the goal is admirable (i suspect many people would be disoriented by the loss of shopping), it just serves to remind me that it's based on middle class assumptions, and that for some of us, not buying things is not a choice, but a reality. many's a time i was hungry and wanted something to eat, but didn't have a dime. spending your days surrounded by things you can't have is a hard thing to endure, even if you don't even want those things. imagine the pain if you do...
i probably won't buy anything on buy nothing day. not because i'm actively participating in a political event, but rather because chances are i'll be as broke as i usually am, and going through another day without money.

it's nice to have scored some rides home from my night classes, and avoid having to ride the bus. don't get me wrong, i like the bus as much as the next driving-avoidant person, but some days i clock in 2 or even 3 quality hours on public transportation. that's a lot of time sitting in relatively uncomfortable seats overloaded with personal belongings struggling with motion sickness, and trying to read while sitting next to someone...it's nice to have a break now and then.

tonight in class we discussed dealing with homosexuality/homophobia in schools and then we watched a really good video about how teachers deal with the subject, which gave me some good ideas. i'll readily admit that i come from a place of being incredibly tolerant of human diversity and unencumbered with religious beliefs that condemn homosexuality, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with being gay...so i tend to cringe when i hear kids flinging the word "faggot" far and wide, or saying "that's so gay". since i'm not homosexual myself (but still get offended because I have plenty of friends and colleagues who are and I tend to feel like sticking up for them), i never had any really good strategies for how to deal with this except to tell the kids to cut it out and trying to convince them that it's just as bad as calling someone "a nigger". but that's a reactive stance...and as most of us know, it's a lot better to be proactive, than reactive. since i get to write a paper on this topic and come up with strategies to deal with this, maybe i'll have some better methods to use the next time it happens...
as one of the teachers said in the video, you don't necessarily teach about homophobia because you have a personal stake in the issue, but because the kids already have some idea about it, and since we all have to live in this world together, we have to learn to get along whether we agree with each other or not. and in order to do that successfully we have to get past the point of fear and misunderstanding, and realize that people are people and we all have ways of "being" in this world.

word.


and i need to keep all this in mind because i live and work in some very different worlds...

reconsiderations

the importance of not judging people has reared in my consciousness this week in some funny ways. it's a timely topic also, one that we're discussing at school (on the basis of our personal biases and how they play into teaching), but i have had my own situations to deal with in this area over the past couple of days, that prove that people are far more complex than they appear sometimes:

1. sexist pigs: so while waiting in a public place, i overheard some conversation between some guys that basically displayed some pretty sexist attitudes towards women. i remember thinking "uggh how revolting, what kind of lowlifes am i currently sharing oxygen with?" i had just resigned myself to thinking they were completely worthless human beings, then one of the participants, goes and does something quite redeeming that I end up witnessing. so i had to admit that even he had a good side, that wasn't apparent at first.

2. canyonville boys: after complaining bitterly about being woken up by loud construction noise early last saturday, i actually had a conversation with the workers (although not about them waking us up, we know it's not their fault). turns out the mystery soccer ball laying in the middle of the squash was theirs. they live all the way out in canyonville and are working up here in portland (which makes sense, there's not much work to be had down there), and apparently like to play soccer on breaks. it reminds me of our volleyball games out in the sprint back parking lot, or the guys i saw at wells fargo playing baseball in their cubicles on friday...

so yeah, i had to reconsider some surface impressions i had about people. we were watching crash last weekend, and that movie (although overly exagerrated by my standards, but who knows maybe people in LA are as crazy as they seem on tv) also explores this idea alot, where people are both reprehensible and righteous, depending on the circumstances. people are surprising...you just never know.
as the saying goes, "only fools rush in".
no matter how distasteful someone's actions may be in some situations, they may turn out to have other redeemable qualities, which complicates the picture. sometimes it's better to withhold judgement...

tutoring

mandatory tutoring is always a mixed bag. you never know what you're gonna get from one week to the next.
overall i felt like i couldn't get anyone to do anything today but oddly my least likely suspects did the most...shashannah worked on the song lyric assignment, and kanoa showed up and worked on the poem assignment. usually he just skips class altogether.
this one poor kid was so distracted, he couldn't focus on anything but videogames. he clearly needs some serious individual. and another kid seems to only be there because he likes another girl i'm tutoring...
the week after that, nobody showed up.

like i said, you never know...

reading on the way to reed

the kids from the lost film fest hit town last night, so i had to hike it out to reed college. had no idea where it was, and it turns out it's a bit tricky by bus.
i still don't really know where i was exactly, but i figured a bus full of white college kids was a good starting point, and i made it there alright despite not knowing where i was going. but figuring out what to do when i got there was the hard part...reed's a lot bigger than i had been lead to believe, and at any rate, it wasn't nearly as self-explanatory as i thought it would be.

it was very dark which added to the mystery factor (they don't seem to waste much money on street lights, which is good for budding astronomers but bad for the lost), none of which facilitated me finding anybody more quickly. i wandered around all over campus and got a full spectrum of the kinds of conversations that only college freshmen tend to have on residential college campuses. i eventually got lucky and found who and what i was looking for, but it was more accident than design, believe me.
didn't look like anyone else had this problem though, there were plenty of people in the auditorium when the films started...I'm guessing there was some kind of electronic forum that everyone there tunes into that made it abundantly obvious where and what they were looking for...

i'm not going to give a whole recap of what i watched except to say that:
a. rappers from europe are pretty weird.
b. i haven't laughed this much in months (a small blessing, having something to laugh about).
c. the lord of the rings remake by the stolen collective was hilarious
d. watching cops beat the crap out of kids on bikes still sucks

i had to leave pretty early to catch the bus back, and leave the mysterious world of reed college behind, and return to my own.

weather surprises

amazingly it was sunny almost all day today. quite the contrast from the past several weeks...
i spent most of the day out in the garden, sloshing around in my barn boots (the same boots i thought for sure i wouldn't need here in the city go figure) pulling up spent plants, rotating the tree lineup, and picking the last of the tomatillos, peppers and some basil that was hanging on. although i haven't observed it myself, the word is it has frosted at least once and may do so again at any time...
i brought the salvia apiana out of the rain...poor girls probably don't like to be as wet as they've been getting. and filled up the compost bins with the remains of vegetable corpses. and grimaced at the new superstructure going in next to the garden that will no doubt consume half of the growing space we have in the monstrosity of its shadow.
maybe i sound bitter but hey it's huge, and they woke me up on saturday morning with all their banging at a time well before 8am. it's rude and i don't mind admitting that i think they deserve retaliation for serenading the whole neighborhood with their racket.

other than getting muddy and slimy (things that are dead and wet have a way of being slimy too), i've spent most of the day reading a book about rural japan. i feel far better than i did yesterday but that's probably a given.

i got a rather surprising telephone call that may lead to another tutoring gig. it would be nice...i have far too much time on my hands, and would rather teach kids how to read than load packages at UPS, which is unfortunately looking like the more realistic of the two options.

my friend liz is in town, so i'm on my way to hang out with the philly kids. yay, i wish more people would come and visit me. life can be dull when there's no visitors, yo.

cold wet and invincible

Economics and common sense make strange bedfellows...

I had hoped at least, for a ride to the transit center. my umbrella was missing in action, and today was the kind of day that you really need one unless you wanted to swim in your clothes.

if you guessed that i had to wade through the rain to get to the TC, you would be absolutely correct.

Jumping over the small lakes that had materialized on my quiet neighborhood street, i made it to the bus stop just in time for the rain to start falling in earnest. and i had to stand there for about 10 minutes because the bus was a good 5 minutes late.
10 minutes is just long enough for it to soak in to the outer layers...

i froze waiting for the train to come...the underpass must've been 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding area. makes me think the barriers against sleeping were probably a bit pointless, who in their right mind would want to sleep under that icebox of an underpass?

by the time i got off the train, the rain, if anything was even worse. i was on the wrong side of the highway from the shopping center, but luckily there was a pedestrian bridge, so i sloshed over that (the water had soaked through my shoes from stepping in too many puddles), and made it to the shopping center with 10 minutes to spare.
Except this wasn't the right shopping center, which became abundantly clear.
So I had to go back....

I was pretty good and wet by the time I came to my next quandry. The new directions were to head west, which seemed to defy common sense...west was a long expanse of a nursery growing operation on one side of the road, and trees and trees and trees on the other. No sign of a shopping center.

But I went that way anyhow. There was no sidewalk so I had to walk along side the road past speeding cars. If anything, it rained even harder, but by this point it hardly mattered. I went from feeling an innate sense of despair, to the zen like calm of being completely at one with the rain...an attitude that makes perfectly good sense considering that I wasn't going to get any drier anytime soon.

Just when I was starting to think this whole trip was not only a complete loss, but an utterly insane idea, I came across the reassuring sight of a shopping center full of recognizable corporate chains...I had made it and the journey was at an end. To add a note of irony to this whole moment of catharsis, the sun came out all golden and glorious, shining with full force upon my sodden defiance of common sense.

So at last I made it and stalked across the wet parking lot, oblivious to lane conformity and the the parking and exiting needs of the drivers of cars, all of whom were much drier and warmer than I was.

I don't know what if anything will come out of this (besides some kind of illness perhaps), but it all seems far less traumatic now that I'm home wrapped up in a blanket on the couch. Now I know that there are worse things in life than being rained on.

scary guy

"Git off my proper-ty!!!" shouted the man in the blue jacket, who dropped his box at his feet, as we came around the corner after walking out of a late class. He had all the look of despair, and emanated confusion, belligerence and incoherence. He also followed us to the parking lot and spewed a narrative of physical violence and skewed logic. Fortunately before he could act on these ideas, he got distracted by someone else and followed them towards the bus stop, and we rolled out of the parkinglot and into the night...

I don't know what else happened. We were lucky to walk away. Maybe he was on drugs, or is mentally ill...it all comes out the same at times like this.
In psychology we're talking about brian chemistry and neural structural differences, and you know I don't have a hard time believing that this poor guys brian structure is quite different from mine. It makes a lot of sense actually...when logic is absent, you have to wonder what's going on inside someone's head.

How did he get where he is, following night school students around in an intimidating fashion late at night on the rainy streets of north portland? Was his mother abusing drugs when she was pregnant? Was he abused as a child? Did he even have a family? What must his school experience have been like? When did he discover drugs? Where did they take him? Is he homeless (as he appears)? What was he doing an hour before we ran into him?

I can't help but wonder...