Three Beautiful Things 11/15/08: Special Olympics Breakfast, Snug Cruise, A Purple Umbrella and a Fifty Cent Hat

1. Got up, threw on an ugly ensemble of rumpled brown highwater slacks, a half milk, half cream colored pair of dollar store socks, Whitworth hoodie, and ebony crocs and told Deke I was going to Appleby's for a five dollar Special Olympics benefit breakfast. I figured I'd be going Hans Solo, but the Deke wanted to go and so we did.

The breakfast was perfect: fluffy pancake, modest heap of scrambled eggs, three slices of bacon, not crisp, but cooked through, just the way I like it, served on a festive oval platter accompanied by a pint glass of iced orange juice . I loved that Appleby's served everyone the same plate of food: no menu, no decisions: just sit down, get some coffee and juice, wait a few minutes, and a steamy plate of morning energy appeared. And, it was all you can eat, but Deke and I stopped at one plate!

If I found out a restaurant took this one plate, one pancake, scrambled egg, tender bacon, five dollar, no order needed approach to breakfast, I'd be there every Saturday.

2. Snug and I went errand hopping and software windowshopping and we listened on the radio as the Ducks screamed to a 45-17 halftime lead over Arizona, but by the time we took a stroll in Westmoreland Park and came home to debone the whole chicken that had been in the Crock Pot all day and by the time we ate our dinner, the Ducks had squandered all but three points of that magical lead, but hung on to win 55-45, and in celebration Snug ate a Pig's Ear.

3. My midmorning, post Appleby's tooling around town featured the XM radio tuned in to the Led Zeppelin channel and I nearly ecstatically crashed into the front of Old Navy when "Hearbreaker/Livin' Lovin' Maid" jumped out of the sky and into the tinny speakers of my '93 Honda Civic.

Three Beautiful Things 11/12/08: Grateful Satellite Radio, Coleman Barks is Rumi, Not Guilty My Ass

1. Got an email today from XM Satellite radio telling me that with the merger of Sirius and XM, I have a new line up of channels to listen to. OMG! Channel 57 is the Grateful Dead channel. I love having the cosmic country sounds of the Grateful Dead as the soundtrack to my life and I can hardly wait to have the Grateful Dead channel on though the night. I've always loved to sleep with the Grateful Dead playing. I mean, I love them when I'm awake, but it's great dream music and triggers all kinds of wonderful stuff in my unconscious mind while I sleep.

2. Today I played the hour long Bill Moyers interview with Coleman Barks to my World Lit students and I loved the silence that fell in the room as Coleman Barks tried to explain the mysticism of Rumi and as he read Rumi poems accompanied by the Paul Winter Consort. For me, this is the turning point in the World Lit course. With Rumi, it's like we are entering into a world so strange, so unlike what we are used to, and this is just what a World Lit course should do for me and my students.

3. It felt good to cut loose with a string of the vilest profanity when MB told me that her stalker had pleaded not guilty to breaking the stalking order. He came, in full view of me and Margaret and campus safety and later the sheriff's officeto LCC six weeks ago to bring MB a gift wrapped knife. I hope his not guilty plea doesn't fly with the jury and pisses off the judge and, when he is found guilty, the judge punishes him severely.

Three Beautiful Things 08/10/08: Adrienne's Back, XM Golf, Wedding Bells Soon

1. The Deke's daughter Adrienne is in town again and it always lifts my spirits to have her at the house. She's funny, fascinating, and forthright. She's also very intelligent, perceptive, and insightful. She livens up our lives a lot.

2. I enjoyed listening to the PGA Championship on XM radio. I've probably written this about 100 times on this blog, but here's 101: I'm amazed by how much I enjoy listening to a golf tournament on the radio. (I also like listening to auto races on the radio.)

3. Adrienne's husband's brother Mark and his wife Carissa married each other recently. Getting married before their public ceremony helped with paperwork with the Navy for their housing. Their public ceremony is Friday. I met Carissa today at a get together at Mary's, Adrienne's mother-in-law and the Deke's close friend. It was fun seeing everyone and starting to feel the excitement that comes with the week leading up to a wedding ceremony.

Three Beautiful Things 06/30/08: Tigers, Rays, Dogs Playing Poker

Today was a prone position day. I spent the day still recovering from my sweltering drive on Saturday from Pendleton to Eugene. But while not sleeping and while lying awake, these three beautiful things took place:

1. The Tampa Bay Rays hung on to beat the Red Sox and I listened to it on XM Radio.

2. Then I switched over to the Twins/Tigers game and listened as the Tigers came from behind and beat the Twins. I just wish the White Sox had lost, but I sure like the direction the Tigers are moving: I think they've won 18 of their last 22.

3. Stumbling around on the World Wide Web, I enjoyed coming across Dogs Playing Poker. Here's one of them:

Three Beautiful Things 02/24/08: Cinemagic, Making Movies, Shaft

1. Cinemagic is the movie soundtrack channel of XM Satellite radio and I enjoyed listening to music soundtrack after soundtrack of movies that have won Oscars over the years.

2. It's funny listening to music from the movies: I hadn't seen several of the movies whose music came over Cinemagic, and yet I found myself imagining scenes from the movies, as if the music led me to creating a movie for myself.

3. Listening to movie soundtracks led me to go to YouTube and search for Isaac Hayes singing "The Theme from Shaft". I didn't find what I most wanted, Hayes' 1972 performance at the Oscars in his chainmail vest. I'm a bit embarrassed by how oddly and deeply moved I am by Hayes performing "Shaft".

Three Beautiful Things: 02/07-09/08: Cocktail Ice, Denying Denial, Reconciles Discordant Elements

1. I have taken a brief respite from alcohol abstinence. I remembered that the key to a good cocktail, the variable that can help overcome any other flaw that might undermine a drink, is ice. I love taking a pint beer glass and packing it with ice and then generously squirting the ice with lime, and then combining Meyers dark rum with Coke or with orange juice. If a drink's ice is working right, the drink gets so cold that it preserves the ice in the drink and the cocktail doesn't get watered down by melting ice because the ice is keeping itself cold, as well as the drink.

2. I'm listening to X-Country, the alternative country station on XM Radio and I'm trying to come to peace with how my happiness seems to depend on keeping contradictory joys and pleasures in my life all going at the same time: Snug, writing, drinking alcohol, drinking coffee of all kinds, Johnny's Bar weak to Seattle's Best strong (all I need is milk), drinking Diet Pepsi with half and half, acting, chewing tobacco, praying, reading Buddhism, Greek tragedy, stories of mountaineering, books about coal, playing Bejewelled2, gambling, eating gravy, hamburgers, sausage, as well as steamed vegetables, teaching, serving others, driving to nowhere but getting somewhere, listening to Regina Spektor, classic rock and roll, classic country, Bach, Gershwin, Crazy Horse, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant (that's enough). I have to come to peace with the contradictory nature of what makes me happy mainly because there's always someone, doctor, friend, family member, fellow blogger, someone implicitly or explicitly pushing me not to enjoy some of these things, especially drinking, gambling, and chewing. No one seems to care if I pray! I'm not very good at denying myself pleasure. Somehow I've gotten the idea in my head that a good life is a life of denial and I tilt more toward indulgence.

3. I had a great time subbing for Jeff Friday afternoon. His WR 122 students are working to understand, among other things, ideas of beauty and I listened to them and within myself kept resisting the idea that our ideas of beauty are mostly received cultural ideas. I tend toward a more romantic idea that something in the human person is alive to beauty and that this soul yearning for beauty can be moved for no reason that makes sense. I like how Wordsworth puts it in The Prelude:

The mind of man is framed even like the breath
And harmony of music. There is a dark
Invisible workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, and makes them move
In one society.

Three Beautiful Things 02/02/08: Stormy, Whiskey and Cigarettes, Space Truckin'

1. I needed to get out in the driving rain and near the swollen rivers with Snug and drive the road from Eugene to Florence and then have a two hour mind clearing video slot casino session. I did it. It was my second visit to the new sparkling, ringing, buzzing, chiming, flashing Three Rivers Casino in Florence and I enjoyed myself a lot and was very happy to have held myself to a two hour playing limit.



2. Grey Like Sunday made me think that a Jack on the rocks and a Camel straight some day would, indeed, be a fun way to have an hour in the way back machine. It would be fun to find a way to ride that machine together on a Bonners Ferry tavern porch overlooking the Kootenai River.



3. Every Saturday, 11 EST, 9 MST, and 8 here in the west, XM Radio's Deep Tracks Channel 40 plays "Inna Gadda Da Vida" and for the fourth or fifth straight week, I made sure I was comfortably reclined near the radio so I could jump in my psychadelic Iron Butterfly Space Shuttle and rocket into the far reaches of inner space and time.

Three Beautiful Things 11/10/07: Victory, Led Zeppelin, Violence

1. The long time underachievers of the Big 10, Illinois, rose up and conquered the undefeated Ohio State Buckeyes today, 28-21. Will the Oregon Ducks rise to #2 or, gasp, #1 in the BCS standings this week? I'm on pins and needles.

2. I discovered today that XM Radio has a new channel that plays Led Zeppelin 24/7. I feel a whole lotta love.

3. I spent much of this evening going deeper and deeper into Ken Burns' program "The West". It's all about violence. It's unnerving just how violent the history of the west is and how alive that violence continues to be.

In My Room: Sibling Assignment #24

This week's sibling assignment comes from InlandEmpireGirl: Remembering a room: Think of a room from our growing up years. It can be in one of our houses, another person's house, or a relative's house. Write about remembering that room and why it was significant to you.

InlandEmpireGirl's post is here and Silver Valley Girl's is on its way.

When our family moved to what is now Mom's house in 1962, I was assigned the bedroom upstairs. It's a small room with a curved ceiling that peaks in the middle, but tapers down on the north side, following the pitch of the roof.

That room was the physical space where my imagination resided.

At first, when I was only eight years old, my imaginings were most dark and frightened. The room put me closer, as I perceived it, to thunder and lightning. When thunder storms would gallop in from Montana, I would crawl under my blanket and put my cheek in the small pocket formed my rump and hide from the noise. Some nights, lightning flashed brightly enough that I could see it through the blankets and I'd whimper in fear. I braved out storms. I didn't want anyone to know I was so afraid.

One night, a storm blew the outside storm window of my bedroom off its hinges and crashed on the sidewalk below. I bolted upright. Another night, the Day's minx next door was in heat, wailing like a starving baby. I had never heard the sound before and ghoulish pictures of creepy beasts haunted me all night.

As I grew older, the night frights subsided. My imagination switched to sports heroics. I had trundle bed about four feet high. It was perfect for making diving catches against the Candlestick Park or Yankee Stadium wall of the bedroom wall my bed rested against. I tossed a baseball out ahead of me and dove across the bed, making acrobatic catches, always to preserve a Giants' victory, whether in Candlestick against the Dodgers or in my version of the '62 World Series, where fortune fell on the Giants' side, not the Yankees.

Willie Mays and Willie McCovey and Jose Pagan and Felipe Alou will be happy to know that their '62 Giants won that World Series about 400 times in my bedroom, thanks to game saving catches I made on long drives by Mickey Mantle or Elston Howard or Clete Boyer.

I also loved to bring a blown-up balloon to my room. Then I could be a championship boxer. I tied the balloon to the string that fell from the room's one light bulb, and punched it with sharp left crosses, devastating upper punches, and crushing left hooks. I didn't pretend I was any boxer in particular. Names of boxers hadn't quite sunk in to me left. My opponents were nameless, too. I just liked boxing the balloon. One day, though, I smashed the balloon with too forceful downward chop and busted the string. I left enough string to grab and turn the light off and on, but my boxing days were over.

As I got older, I lusted for a Strat-O-Matic baseball game. Strat-O-Matic gave the player the capability of managing baseball teams and with rolls of the dice, players pitched and hit in alignment with their previous year's statistics. I often bought the Sporting News at Dick and Floyd's and would read over and over again the advertisement for Strat-O-Matic, but its price was out my range. Instead I bought a cheap knock-off game with mimeographed sheets and simple formula.

I had played Strat-O-Matic with Roger at his house, and my game was nowhere as sophisticated, but in the privacy of my bedroom, I didn't care. I took notebook paper and made a scorer's book and played nine inning games and diligently kept score, as if I were watching major league baseball. My cheap, uncomplicated game gave me hours of pleasure and kept my imagination alive as Richie Allen, Wes Parker, Wes Covington, Rocky Colavito, Johnny Callison, Jim Bunning, Gaylord Perry, and a host of other big league players visited the stadium of my mind and scrapped out nine inning games I could have them play with a roll of the dice.

Some nights, I could pick up a radio signal from San Francisco and then the San Francisco Warriors and their opponents could come into my room. I loved listening to their games and imagining what it looked life for Jeff Mullins to swish a jumper from twenty feet or Elgin Baylor to sweep across the key and extend his fingers above a defender and drop a finger roll for two.

These days still live today. I far prefer listening to all sports on the radio rather than watch on television. I subscribe to XM Satellite radio primarily because they broadcast every Major League Baseball game and now it's parks across the country I create in my mind, and instead of Willie Mays, the rooms of my imagination are populated by David Ortiz or Magglio Ordonez.

It's the same with NASCAR and major golf tournaments. I'd rather have the azaleas of Augusta National and the rigors of the US Open described on radio and feel the suspense of bumber to bumber cars speeding over 175 miles per hour described to me by broadcasters at each turn of the race track oval than watch on television.

I've never been a sports hero, but my mind and imagination are filled with the joy of my imagined triumphs, triumphs that have helped me sleep on restless nights and that have helped me experience in other endeavors just how vital and alive a life of imagination is. Ultimately, my imagination is the most important room of my life.

Three Beautiful Things 06/03/07: Research, Contact Zone, Jazz

1. I've spent a large portion of today reading student research essay drafts, emailing them back with comments, and then reading Shakespeare and Literature of Comedy essays and emailing them back with comments. Oh! And grades. I've read some beautiful work today. It's been inspiring to see the variety of ways my students come at different questions about labor, poverty, poetry, anarchism, suffering, reconciliation, and a variety of other matters they write about. I think they are learning.

2. K-Doe had some questions about her research and it led me into an online discussion with her about Mary Louise Pratt's lecture/essay "The Arts of the Contact Zone". I haven't assigned this essay for nearly ten years, but our conversation brought so much of it back and I enjoyed finding out I still had my "Contact Zone" chops.

3. XM Satellite Radio's Real Jazz (Channel 70) has become the soundtrack to my life in the study lately and it just quietly sinks into me while I work and I enjoy it deeply.

Three Beautiful Things 04/30/07: Monday, Deliberations, Comic and Tragic

1. Every night I put a baseball game on XM Radio and am almost impervious to what's happening in the game and am more interested in how each play by play announcer and fellow analyst narrates the game, an especially difficult task in baseball when almost the entire game lacks action. Tonight I listened to Rick Monday. Average.

2. I observed, mostly, and offered a few highly non-binding observations to the Denali editorial board as they deliberated over what written pieces to publish. I'm the magazine's literary advisor.

3. I gave as compelling and comprehensive a lecture as I have ever given today, addressing the complexities of Act III in King Lear. Recent trends in instruction tend to discourage lectures, but today I said to hell with trends: I let it rip. I sensed my students were captivated. I hope so.

Three Beautiful Things 04/27/07: Treat, Strange, Twilight Zone

1. I've been trying to lose a little weight, but at our Literature Dept. assessment workshop today, I couldn't resist these foot long buttery croissant bread cinnamon twist things.

2. Two of my fellow teachers talked about how they work to make subject matter strange. In other words, they try to help students see something from a new perspective. When we see something as strange, we step back, have a new perspective. I was very stimulated by this discussion. I thought how this is precisely the strategy of satire; no duh, Raymond: the movie is called, after all, Dr. Strangelove!

3. I fell asleep early last night with Classic Rock on the Top Tracks (Channel 46) channel of XM Satellite Radio. Every so often, a tune would wake me up and I'd have the experience of being in the past, trying to figure out where I was, realizing I couldn't be there, coming back into the present, and then playing an internal game of Name That Tune. I love these half asleep travels from one reality to another to another, fueled by Rock Tunes from thirty to forty years ago!

Three Beautiful Things 04/24/07: Jethro Tull, MLB, Reunion Approaching

1. Top Tracks on XM Satellite radio played song after song that I loved to hear tonight, ranging from "Locomotive Breath" to "I Need a Lover (Who Won't Drive Me Crazy)"

2. Listening to Major League Baseball on XM Radio while grading papers. I care somewhat who is playing, but just the sound of the announcer and the background sound of the crowd humming and bat cracking and the slow pace of play is relaxing. Tonight I heard the Red Sox and Cubs lose, which I didn't like, but the sound of it happening was deeply satisfying.

3. Imagining 35 year reunion, trying to imagine how it will be to see Kellogg High School graduate from the Classes of 1970-'73, a large number of whom I had, and I'm sure will have, high regard for. I keep trying to imagine what people will look like and look forward to talking about how things are going and sharing stories about how things used to be.

Three Beautiful Things 04/17/07: Coal, Annhilation, Nine Innings

1. I've seen the movie at least five times now and with every viewing I am more deeply affected by "Harlan County, USA". It's hard to argue against the assertion that this is the finest documentary movie in existence.

2. I've been previewing "Dr. Strangelove" for my Lit of Comedy class as we study war satire. As I grow older, I more and more deeply admire Peter Sellers' beauty as an actor. His ability to embody a character, let alone, in this movie, three characters is nearly unparalleled, imho.

3. I listened to the Detroit Tigers build a pretty good lead on the Royals, blow it, recapture the lead, and defeat Kansas City. It's a pleasure to have and XM satellite radio subscription during baseball season and fill my study with the sounds of radio announcers bringing the games alive.

Three Beautiful Things 02/11/07: Cyprus, Big Tracks, Sarah

1. Experiementing with self-portraits in the theater again. In *Othello* I appear as a drunk from Cyprus a couple of times and then return as the bearer of a blanket so that the dead Roderigo can be carted off. I photographed myself tonight in my Cyprus costume. You get the sense of lousy overhead lights in the dressing room and what a bomb shelter it can feel like:





2. I have been listening to XM Satellite Radio Channel 49: Big Tracks. It's like one guilty pleasure after another. Tonight the programming seemed especially fixed on the Electric Light Orchestra. Guilt, guilt, guilt: Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.

3. I was very happy to learn that Sarah, the stage manager for "Othello", loves the movies "Dirty Pretty Things" and "Pieces of April". She glowed when talking about them and I hope I glowed back!

Three Beautiful Things 01/14/07: Laurie, Monk, Outside the Bun

1. My brother-in-law, Paul's, sister, Laurie, wrote me an email that provided another perspective on the wedding reception I wrote about, here. I was touched that she's been reading this blog and that she took the time to let me see that that reception looked different to her than to me. It was a kind and refreshing email.

2. While I was writing earlier this morning, I had half an ear on XM Radio Channel 70 and Wynton Marsalis giving a talk about Thelonius Monk. I didn't stop writing to give the program my full attention, but each time I did listen, my understanding of jazz and of Monk was bountifully increased.

3. I need to be careful about this one: Last year while working on and performing Much Ado About Nothing, I got in the habit of going to Taco Bell after performances for a midnight snack. We have not begun performing, but there I was tonight after rehearsal, ordering a taco and two chalupas and a Diet Pepsi. I could see my waistline increase right before my eyes. Until last year's Much Ado run, I held Taco Bell in disdain. Now it's another guilty pleasure!