jeff – Page 2 – jjewell.com

OK, So What Do I Have To Do? (jj church sermon 0.2)

I had a disagreement with my church. I’ve mentioned it elsewhere and will forego the details here but to say that the things I was hearing from my pastor, and the actions taken by my pastor, were simply not aligned with the scripture he is allegedly teaching.

It took me awhile to come to terms with the fact that that issue has been a primary feature of organized religion since it’s inception. The basis of all Christianity is Jesus Christ pointing out that the organized church wasn’t teaching the stuff that was there, but were operating in their own self-interest. Looking at the history of religion is looking at a litany of people coming to the conclusion “the church isn’t looking at this correctly, I can’t abide this… I’m starting something else.”

It dawned on me how much of organized religion is arguing over semantics, interpretations, and simple differences of opinion about what the “important” parts are. The history of how we have defined and practiced religion is a history of rift, schism, and holy war. The irony is how central thoughts of love and acceptance of others are to the teachings of religion: in the name of and quest for peace, love, and goodness, we have created these organizations that continue to divide and set individuals against each other, as they have through the centuries.

It seems obvious we are doing religion wrong. There will always be details, inconsistencies, and misunderstandings to disagree about… but we don’t have to focus on those areas. Religion is about bringing together… so the religion I am starting focuses on the things that bring us together.

There is some existence beyond the three spatial dimensions and time we can perceive, affect, and understand. In some ways, I see this as the very question religion itself revolves around… the sense of knowing you are a small part of something bigger, wondering how you fit in the “grand scheme” of things. I won’t pretend to understand it’s workings, but I do think a basic belief in something laying above, beyond, around this world is the basis on which we are building.
Some things are unknowable to us. Whether it is because of contemporaneous technological limitations, or our basic limitation to three physical dimensions and time, there are questions we cannot answer. Religion cannot answer these questions either.
Scripture, even divinely inspired scripture, has been copied down, translated, and edited by fallible human hands, and often for political rather than religious reasons. We look to scripture for wisdom and guidance, but not for factual answers to questions… and particularly not those questions referred to above.

It is with those three basic beliefs that I started looking for the common elements of religions, in particular with regard to personal behavior: what do all these religions agree we should aspire to, should work toward? What I found was pretty simple: Forgive All, Do No Harm, Work For Good, Help and Share. These same ideals, thoughts, patterns, behaviors are basic to the teachings of all religions. And yet somehow, people who consider themselves very religious often ignore those teachings… sometimes even in the name of their religion. We lost the message somewhere, threw a baby out with some bathwater somewhere along the way.

I have an idea where I think we lost our way. I believe a big part of the problem is when we started using religion as the baseline for the behavior of others, rather than the goal for our own individual behavior. Whatever else this little church of mine one day becomes, it will be based on each of us taking the personal responsibility to Forgive All, Do No Harm, Work For Good, Help and Share.

Discussion thread for this post on the jjewell forums

Pando People (jj church sermon 0.1)

Have you ever heard of Pando? Pando is a forest of birch trees in the western US. Burton V. Barnes started studying the forest in the late sixties, and noticed something peculiar: the trees in the forest all seemed to be just alike. Simply based on morphology, what the plants looked and acted like, Barnes believed that the trees in the forest made up a single unit. Future tests and techniques bore him out: Pando is a forest of genetically identical trees, trees that are connected by a single root system. Pando might very well be the largest living thing on this planet, depending on how you go about measuring such a superlative, the largest living thing humans have ever encountered. But from the outside, without digging around for miles underground, or digging into microscopic genetic code… Pando just looks like a bunch of trees.
I have come to think of human beings as resembling Pando. From the outside, we look like a bunch of individuals of a particular type… but if we look deeply enough, if we are willing to dig… we will discover that not only are we more alike that we ever imagined, we are in fact all a part of one connected entity.
Genetic science has made incredible progress and discoveries; it is now within the grasp of many humans to submit their own material and find out specifics of their background. We discover that all of us trace back to a few lineages. Something like ninety percent of all humans can be traced back to sixteen historical fathers… some known to us, some lost to history. Genetically, our family tree grows from few roots. I have no doubt that with continued improvements in testing and data mining, we will eventually narrow those roots even further. I think it is obvious that, like the trees of Pando, individual humans grow from the same genetic root.
I also believe something less obvious, something that we have not developed the tools and methods for which to dig. Humans seem to have a further connection that science has not yet understood. Linguists have noted that, based on the amount of the language human children are exposed to, there’s no explanation for how we learn to speak, how we learn to communicate. Psychologists have described the collective unconscious, that which we all seem to know innately, that which seems to be passed down through generations without our realizing it. This connection is not the only thing beyond the limits of current science… the simple question “where do we come from” ends with the mysterious and poorly named Big Bang; which, for all we can explain, happened for no reason out of nothing at all. We can’t explain how the elemental forces that affect us work together, or really, work at all. We have ideas, theories… string theory is one that could help explain the nature of these forces; but string theory requires we do our theoretical math in sixteen or twenty-five dimensions, rather than the three we can point to and touch.
The Big Bang, the beginning of everything from nothing… and the the equal but opposite mystery of what lies beyond the universe we know… are particularly difficult to wrap our minds around. We understand height, width, and depth, and even the quasi dimension of moving inexorably forward through time. But we literally have no frame of reference for what might be above height, farther out than width, behind depth… or before that time zero when everything we know and understand just simply… started.
What if it is really that simple, though? We are creatures created within that realm of time and three dimensions, our perceptions are only built to conceive of those axes. What if the outlandish prediction of string theory is correct, and there exist dimensions outside our perception, outside our reason, outside our comprehension?
Human beings are Pando, individuals sprung from the same genetic stock, appearing separate and distinct but exactly the same underneath, and intricately and intimately connected. The Big Bang is the ground from which these apparent individuals grew, hiding the nature of our connected root system. That root system, that connection we have noticed but can’t define or explain, simply lies in dimensions beyond those which we were built to sense and comprehend.
Looking at life and lives in this framework, science and religion avoid their apparent dichotomy: science understands its limits are these three dimensions, and religion understands its implications lay beyond and aren’t always measurable or actionable in those three dimensions.
This probably sounds like a strange “sermon,” but it is an important plank in the platform I want to build, the church I want to attend. My church is intended to be an exploration of religion, a celebration of the paths and methods man has used and continues to use to find a larger sense of order, to find their place in the “Grand Scheme” of things. My church wants to deal with human information as far back as we have records… and my church isn’t trying to force those historical narratives to adhere to the three dimensions we can actually perceive. My church values the history of religion beyond its adherence to the limits of our science, and values science constantly improving the world within those limits.
I’d love to hear what you think of my church.

Discussion thread for this post in the jjewell forum.

Starting Somewhere

I have had an idea for some time. It’s a big idea, literally world changing. There have been many nights I’ve lain awake thinking that this is what I’m here for, what I’m supposed to be doing for myself and for the world. It’s a big deal… And I want to get it right. Which has led to overthinking: where to start?

I want to change the way we think about religion and politics, and how the two have to live together to get the most out of either of them. Sounds obvious and necessary, but do you start by examining what is broken, or reestablishing a religious basis, or a political movement? How do you even start a religion or a political party? I’ve felt as though I need to write at least three books just to get this thing going.

So as much to lay the starting brick for myself as for those I hope to follow, I am starting with a declaration of intent, including why I feel something must change, and the foundation upon which that change must be built.

The very first part is the why, and to get into that, we have to get into story time. My story, how I got to where I felt I had to change something. In particular, my religious and political history.

I still have the bible I was given from Northside Methodist Church in 1975. I don’t remember receiving it, nor any particular events at the church in those days: we were a Christmas and Easter family, at our best, and we weren’t at our best very often. By high school, I wouldn’t be able to recognize anyone from the church, and they wouldn’t have been able to recognize me. I lived much of my adult life this way. It was only after years of working through depression and ADHD that Suzy and I decided to make the church a part of our lives again. Suzy still has her bible from Northside circa 1977, and several of her family members were and are still church pillars there, so that’s where we went. We were in the choir, and the bell choir, I played guitar for outdoor summer services; Suzy became the head of children’s ministries, I became president of United Methodist Men at Northside; I took lay speaking courses, became certified, taught Sunday School classes, and even preached from the pulpit on more than one occasion (yes, that means precisely twice).

As we got more and more involved in the church, and became more a part of decision making and leadership, it became more obvious that the UMC, the organization, was operating primarily as a business. And although I can’t say I am so naive to believe that’s not going to be the case in the US, even worse, it was being run as a bad business. Large, successful churches had a lot a “small groups,” for instance… so our tiny, older congregation was tasked with creating such groups. This led to all the groups being the same people; I was over fifty when they needed Suzy and I to be a part of the “Young Adults” small group. Instead of looking at the strengths and need of the individual churches, leadership was pushing to generate what amounted to fake numbers that looked like what they themselves defined as being successful. There was also a pastor that did not get along with a significant portion of the congregation: he was directly responsible for the only couple actually younger than Suzy and I in the Young Adults group leaving the church. Even Suzy’s grandmother, who’d been with Northside since it was people knocking on doors saying “we should start a church ’round here,” had taken to pointing out “it’s not his church, it’s our church” on matters involving this pastor. When Suzy’s grandmother passed, she did not want the pastor in question to preside over the ceremony, and we contacted the previous pastor. We were told that she would not be comfortable doing it, because, and I quote “that’s his flock now.” That’s when I realized that the organized church is not working for its congregations, but rather operates believing that its congregations work for it.

Religion, as practiced by the organized church in the US, is broken.

I was brought up Republican, which is to say that I was aware of my parents and grandparents voting Republican in the seventies and eighties. In high school, I was already getting the idea that both major parties had more in common with the actors in the other party than either of them had with the citizens they supposed to be representing, and I was sporting the “withdrawal in disgust is not apathy” banner to remove myself from political conversations. As I grew older, it occurred to me that the political conversation ended up affecting me whether I took part in it or not, and I have been an advocate for third parties ever since.

Over the past couple of decades we have seen the worst gridlock and political obstruction in our history… and our government is currently shutdown, despite bipartisan congressional agreement, at the childish whim of someone who can’t get us to pay something he told us someone else would pay for.

Politics, as practiced by the major parties in the US, is broken.

When we think about who we are, what we are for, what is our greatest good… we all too often compartmentalize a vast array of moral and social values into lumps we call politics and religion. Because of the peculiar brokenness of politics and religion in the US, we largely define ourselves within structures hundreds, even thousands of years old, that we did not build and to a great extent don’t even understand.

We have to start over. The structures we have are broken. My task as I see it is to create new structures, which both acknowledge the reality of the existing structures and plan for their eventual replacement. The next step is defining exactly what they are and what they do.

I’m not looking to replace religion or politics themselves, but rather the structures we use to define them: basically, a new church and a new political party. For now, they’re called the jj church and the jj party. Part of the foundation of these new structures is that they are not intended to completely replace existing structures: I can foresee someone meaningfully calling themselves a “jj Republican” or a “jj Methodist.” One ideal of these structures will be to focus on common ground and working together to move forward, to make sure our differences don’t stand in the way of our similarities.

The very first thing we have to agree on, that has to be similar, is what we are trying to do with these structures. We toss around terms like “politics” and “religion” as though we all know exactly what we are talking about and to what extent. But we need to know why the structures exist in the first place… we don’t seek out a religion or political party because we like the colors of the building (or at least we shouldn’t), we seek them out to fill needs within and outside ourself. At its most basic level, religion is an attempt to understand where we as individuals fit in the “grander scheme” of things. At its most basic level, politics is an attempt to understand where we as a society can move forward the “grander scheme” of things. The insistence of separating church and state has always seemed odd to me when clearly the one was little more than an outward, societal take on the other.

To summarize: with the intent of offering a better version of objectively broken modern US politics and religion, I am starting a new church and a new political party. These new structures will be intentionally built to focus on first working around, then eliminating these problems.

Re-presenting The jjewell North American Tour 1998

I first established the jjewell.com domain in 1996. I can’t really remember what it looked like, right at first, and neither does the Internet Wayback Machine. But when 1998 brought the closing of the manufacturing plant where I was working and provided me with a severance package, my fledgling web empire became the home of my first weblog (although they weren’t even called that, yet… much less “‘blogs”), the story of the jjewell North American Tour 1998.

And actually, the Internet Wayback Machine doesn’t even remember what that looked like… but I do. It was raw html coded in notepad. At first it had a dark grey marble background image with bright text in blue, green, and yellow. Yeah, I know: that didn’t even last the length of the tour, it ended up in more classical looking greys and navys by the time I returned home.

At any rate, those updates from a cross-country road trip contain some of what I consider to be my most entertaining writing, and I’ve wanted to repost the series somewhere. I finally decided that jjewell.com was where they were born, jjewell.com is where they should dwell. So I’ve retroactively posted all the NAT updates here.

Now… between these old posts and the Wayback Machine, it’ll be days before I find time to do something useful… Start here…

Asheville, NC – evening

Last update from the road, but only just barely.

So why the hell would I stop in Asheville, about 50 minutes from home? Damned if I know, talk to Roberta Verona, it was her idea.

The last mechanical problem, that “missing,” or just not wanting to take the gas uphills, particularly after running for awhile, popped up again. I alternated between 60mph down hills and 20mph up hills for about 20 miles into Asheville. Luckily, if you enter North Carolina from the east on I-40, it’s pretty much straight down for an awful long way. After getting onto I-26 and wrestling with the question of whether to just tough it out the last few miles, I remembered talking with my dad the night before (and he thought I never listened to him…). The last thing he said was “Don’t push the RV too hard.” So, actually, it’s my dad’s fault I’m in a Shoney’s just outside of Asheville.

It feels good to be home already. An old girlfriend lived in Asheville for awhile when we were together, so I know the city pretty well, and the drive back to Greenville is basically a long driveway for me at this point. I feel like home.

I can’t wait to introduce Scout and Kato to Crash. I’m secretly hoping that the boys will kinda team up on Kato, who’s been pretty rude to Scout since she showed up. No respect for it being his house first. I just have a feeling Scout and Crash will get along.

The second thing I’m going to do is file the new “big books” I got in San Diego. The big dogs get special treatment including two Mylar sleeves (one upside down inside the other, to seal without any tape. We don’t like tape anywhere near a multi-hundred dollar comic book) and are filed off separately. This way I get to look at all the coolest stuff without digging around in multiple boxes for it. Hey, so I’m a geek. I like it.

After that, I’ll start the arduous unpacking process. I’m not even going to try to get everything tonight, but I’ll bet all the comics and Atari stuff gets unloaded first. After that, I may just play until I fall asleep and worry about the rest of it tomorrow.

There will be at least one more trip update, perhaps more as things like photo developing happen. I’ve also discovered that I have something to say about this whole Clinton thing (on long trips, AM stations stay with you longer than FM, for some reason, so I’ve been listening to Rush Limbaugh take enormous glee in demanding impeachment, indictment, disbarrment, excommunication, deportation,and a good flogging for Mr. Bill. As usual, the fat man makes some excellent points but fails to reach the appropriate conclusion…). It doesn’t really fit into the update category, so it looks like I may start using my webspace to shoot off my big bazoo about stuff on some regular basis. Stay tuned…

Somewhere, NE

I already mentioned the problem with long drives–plenty of time to think of great things to say, but they leave my tiny head before I get a chance to write them down. Another problem is that I keep rolling into campsites at one, two, maybe three in the morning, and really don’t feel like doing much other than sleeping. I tried to make this one a little better (theoretically, I should have been in a little after midnight), but another damn time zone rolled by and these stupid campsites are impossible to navigate at night. Particularly by yourself. I had to unhook the Tracker by myself in the dark because I couldn’t make the turn they wanted me to and you can’t back up with the Tracker attached.

Hey, only two distinct topics in that paragraph, I’m back on the road to literacy. I technically could go back and start a new paragraph at “I tried…,” but this way it’s like a look inside my mind, a “Making of The Update” kinda deal. My treat to you.

I’m kinda punchy after all the driving, so I’ll apologize in advance for what this update must look like. 540 miles today, 625 yesterday, and 508 the day before. Yowza. If I can get a decent start tomorrow, and if Roberta Verona keeps running as well as she has been, I’ll be waking up in my own bed Wednesday morning (actually, more like Wednesday afternoon, at the rate I’m going).

But again, that depends on tomorrow being another 600+ mile day. I hope I can get to sleep, what with the adventures getting the RV parked tonight and the fact that Nebraska’s thermostat is set noticeably warmer than Wyoming’s (I miss Wyoming, I didn’t know how good I had it), and the fact that the campsite I finally got wedged into is only 20 amp electrically. Don’t know & don’t care precisely what that means, but the practical implications are that I can’t run the AC. Oh, well, I think it’s safe to run the fan (and by “I think it’s safe” I mean I’m doing it now, and have not yet exploded into a huge fireball that scatters debris for miles and miles), so I’m doing that, anyway.

Called Suzy on the run from somewhere in Wyoming (it’s fun just to say that… really stretch it out now: WHY-OOOHHH-MING. See? Fun) and she commented that I sounded a lot better, and looking at what I’ve read I think I’m reading a lot better, too.

I think I got to the point where I didn’t _have_ a point, anymore. Newport was fantastic (and it’s currently my choice for where-to-live-after-I-leave-SC, whenever that might be), but I really wasn’t _doing_ anything there. I had gotten to all of the places that I’d planned to go, met the people I wanted to, took the photos I hoped for (well, I missed Grand Canyon, but there’s not a chance in hell I was driving back through Nevada just for some piddly-squit hole in the ground, I don’t care how good it’s PR department is…), and ended sentences with the prepositions I wanted to (see, the rules of grammar are yours to toy with as long as you draw attention to it before the reader notices! Silly reader!). Steve Winwood helped me realize that it was time I should be going, and that was all it took. Zoom, like an RV on rails.

I am looking forward to getting home. I miss Scout a lot, I know this probably sounds weird, but that cat is the best friend I’ve ever had. Crash and I are getting along great, but still… I’m also looking forward to sorting out all the stuff I’ve accumulated and stashed throughout the RV. I’ll bet I’m going to be surprised by half the stuff I find.

And I’m looking forward to my music. I’m still not sure what the first step is as far as getting in front of lots of people, but I’m pretty sure there will be a homebrew tape available with acoustic stuff written, recorded, or otherwise worked on while on the road. Right now it looks to be six songs, but there may be a seventh if the stuff that’s been roaming around my head the past couple days stays there long enough for me to get a chance to extract it.

So, plan on me being home sometime Wednesday (although I’m secretly shooting for late Tuesday night). And we’ll go from there.

Somewhere, ID – afternoon

I did Oregon wall-to-wall in a day yesterday.

Roberta Verona has seemed as though she wants to run, so I’ve given in to the request. I went far past the distance I was expecting yesterday, and I’ve already got three hours worth under my belt today. I expect that will be the first of three driving sessions today, which should take me through Idaho and Utah and on into Wyoming. That means I’ll have run the entire western portion of I-84. 84 is the only Interstate with an eastern section and a western section, I think.

I had thought of a ton of stuff to say while driving, and I’ll probably forget most of it now that I can write.

Approaching Portland from the south is not the way to see Portland. Spend your time on the east side of town, playing in the Columbia River Gorge. Although the scenery was going by at a steady 55 miles an hour, it was fantastic. Around one turn you get a view of a mountain (I’m assuming Mt. Hood) that’s like all the magazine pictures of mountains.

Turns out they have desert in Oregon, too. The good news is that the heat isn’t nearly so severe, and there’s actually little towns every so often to break up the monotony.

Not that I stopped at any of the little towns. Apparently, I’ve decided I’m ready to be home, because driving has been easy, even long hours of it. Although there have been a couple places that I’ve been tempted to stop (Snake River Canyon, for instance. By the way, the Snake River has done some spiffy landscaping, even outside the Canyon proper), the overall impulse is to drive on. So I’m driving on as long as it lasts.

Crash (that’s the kitten’s current name, due to his tendency to crash into stuff while he’s playing, as well as his ability to force me to narrowly avert crashes as I remove claws from my ankles…) seems to have taken to travelling okay. He spends a certain amount of time alseep in my lap, then he’ll climb up the steering wheel and sleep on the dash for awhile, then he’ll climb down the steering wheel and across my left arm (this is tricky while I’m steering, and he has been known to bounce down my leg and into the floor while attempting this manuver, which gives you some insight as to how he’s earning his name) and sit on my shoulder looking out the window for a while. Then sometimes, he justs disappears for a while.

Every time I stop, he wants out. I keep telling him that he has to wait to get to South Carolina before he can go out and play, but comprehension does not seem to be his strongest suit.

So anyway, Crash and I are cruising through the mid-west. I don’t know if it qualifies geographically as “mid-west” yet, but there’s lots of straw and hay and cows. It’s pretty dull.

I saw the coolest cement plant last night.

I thought that needed to have its own paragraph for the full effect to set in. But, seriously, about one in the morning last night (for me it was right about midnight, but I crossed another one of those damn time zones along the way), I saw a bunch of lights up in the distance. Now, it gets _really_ dark out in that mountain/desert/prairie melange they’ve got going, so dark you can’t see more than a couple feet off the edge of the road. Lights in the distance can be tricky to figure out. At least twice before, I thought that there must be a river up ahead, because the lights were obviously a bridge. Nope, just an interstate up the side of a mountain. So I’m trying to be logical and figure out what this thing is.

As I get closer, I can tell there’s a bunch of three different types of lights, and random others here and there, all in a fairly tight grouping. Doesn’t look like a town, doesn’t really loolk like a bridge (unless they’re building spiral bridges out west these days).

Like I say, turns out it was a cement plant. There was a big steel frame structure, with bluish lights at regular intervals, a massive building that looked like it might have been made of stone (or, duh, cement, I guess) lit weirdly from the top and bottom with yellowish/brownish lights, and a low brick officy kind of building. There were also a bunch of normal type streetlight dotting the facility.

The two big buildings, lit like they were, looked like something I would have seen in Las Vegas, but bigger. And the real amazing part was the way the different lights played off of the rocky, hilly landscape, throwing multiple oddly colored shadows off of every stone. Really neat.

That’s about all I can think of to bring you up to date, which is a Perkins just off the 84 in Idaho, past Twins Falls heading east but not to Pocatello yet. I’m not hungry anymore, but damned if I’m going to leave any of this French Silk Pie. I intend to stay at one or the other of two KOAs along I-80 in Wyoming, depending on just how far I drive tonight. Hopefully, I’ll get to actually post this at that point…

Lincoln City, OR – late night

Last night on the Oregon Coast. In some ways, the last night of the trip, because I think the rest is starting to look like one long drive.

I had wanted to get to the Northeast, but it’s just not in the cards this time around.

I knew it was going to be a long way back, at least approximately equal to the distance out here, anyway. But, damn. Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa. Ain’t a narrow state in the bunch of ’em. Except for Idaho, I’m going through them the long way, too.

Well, hopefully by sticking to Interstates (84, 80, 70-some-odd I think, then 75) Roberta Verona will be on level enough ground to do some serious hauling. I do have a nifty book from National Geographc that list interesting sites by the Interstate they’re near. So you just turn pages in the I-84 section as you go east. So I might still find some cool stuff to take pictures of.

But overall I’m done. I’m overextended, financially and mentally. There’s no structure to my life right now, so I keep veering off one edge or the other. I’m getting tired more, even though I’m sleeping more. I slept for eleven hours last night, that can’t be normal. And paragraphs end up looking like this. Never a good thing.

I’m not going to schedule very far ahead, but I’d like to make it across most of Oregon tomorrow, then into Utah the next day. Because of extended days driving, I may not be able to post updates very regularly at all. We’ll see. On the road is when I do the best writing, I think, so maybe they won’t get posted until late, but hopefully they’ll be worth it.

I’m not sure what else to say right now. Like I mentioned, I’m tired, and I’m weary, if you understand the difference I’m talking about. It doesn’t feel like there’s much there to come out at the moment.

I made last trips to both the Rogue Tasting House (Garlic Cheese Bread & Beer Sampler) and the Rogue Public House (“Public House” is where “pub” comes from, I found out some people didn’t know that. Oh, a Hamburger and a Brutal Bitter). The guy at the Tasting House is really cool, and he recognized me even though I randomly shaved off my moustache and goatee last night. By “randomly,” I mean I couldn’t say why I did it, not that I sliced away random parts, leaving others. I think I’m going to grow them back. My mouth looks uneven and my lips got all chapped today.

Alright, I’m just going to stop even attempting to have paragraph breaks mean anything. Sorry for my behavior, but I told you I’m not operating at peak efficiency (just to underscore my point, it took a couple tries to spell “efficiency”).

It’ll be good to get home, although I’m not looking forward to some of the things I’ll have to do once I get back. You know those little junky details that pile up at the end of the day? I’ll have two months worth of those. Ouch. And Scout’s _really_ going to have to go out… (Just kidding. Suzy and Mark have been taking good care of the kitties, I understand).

Okay, so there’s not much for me to say here. Hope to keep updates coming, otherwise, I’ll see you all in a couple weeks.

Newport, OR – evening

Well, I’m still in Newport. Apparently, getting an existential imperative to get out has little practical weight when compared to the necessities of laundry, full holding tanks, and an RV full of junk just tossed around over the past week. And when I told them I was staying one more night, they told me that was my sixth night, and I get the seventh free. So I’m now scheduled to leave Friday morning.

I did my laundry, and got most of the junk appropriately stowed. It was early afternoon, and it was a nicer day than it was yesterday, so I decided to revisit some of the cool places I went to yesterday, to see if I could get more color in some pictures. Of course, I ran out of 100 speed film, which I was using a lot of because I am hoping to do some enlargements of this stuff when I get back. Oh, well. I put some 200 speed in and hoped for the best.

It’s hard to judge whether some of the shots were better or not, I’ll just have to wait to get them developed. But at Boiler Bay, I saw a whale. I say “saw” because I only got one shot of it, and I’m not sure how well it came out, so I’m not promising anything. I’ve got the 210mm lens, but that’s really not enough for wildlife shots (in case anyone’s looking for a nice Christmas gift for me, we’re talking Nikon Auto-Focus, something in a zoom to 350mm or so…). And besides, whales are mostly underwater animals. You can spot the spout when they surface, but try getting a camera aimed and a shot framed before the thing’s underwater again. I stood out there a while, eye to camera, pointed in the general direction of the last surfacing, but no luck. Oh, well, again. Perhaps the one I got will turn out to be wonderful.

Now I’m back at The Chalet having dinner, because my stomach didn’t let me sleep well again last night. The dinner I had here a couple nights ago was the only one this week that has let me sleep. I’m going to try to get to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight and tomorrow so that I can start travelling early Friday. Hopefully, my stomach and the kitten will go along with my little plot.

Well, I should have had pancakes again. The chicken pot pie was kinda disappointing. So was the strawberry pie, but at least it did have real whipped cream on it. Not enough, of course, but it was a step in the right direction.

Oh, well. It doesn’t look like I have much of value to say right now. I know, par for the course. I’m going home.

Lincoln City, OR – late night

I met a girl today.

But actually, that happened pretty late in the day. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s put the horse up front there.

The vets in Lincoln City were finally open today, so I took Stray Boy in for a once over. I’d already bought ear mite medicine, and the vet gave him some worm medicine. Apparently kittens are basically born with ear mites and worms. Other than that, he checked out great. About 10-12 weeks old, they guessed. Born on the Fourth of July, maybe. So I felt pretty good about that.

The pancakes from the night before had gone down relatively smoothly, so I figured a patty melt wasn’t too far out of line for lunch. Wash it down with a nice smooth milkshake. So far so good.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. The vet and lunch had ended up taking a bit longer than I had planned, and I had knocked around the ideas of shopping (at least one guitar store and no less than three used book stores had caught my eye. Plus there was one of the omni-present Outlet Store Malls, and the Toy Liquidators and the Starter Outlet signs were tantalizingly right there on the freeway. Starter does the Dolphins’ uniforms, so I figured I had a decent shot at getting a non-Marino jersey there. Not that there’s anything wrong with a Marino jersey, it’s just that they’re everywhere. I kind of like to get the oddball numbers. I’ve got a Mark Clayton era #83, for instance. Would you believe there’s not a #83 on the team this year [unless Gadsden picked up 83. He was added to the roster after I last checked it. That would be cool, he’s going to be something]? I’ll have to web crawl around to see what I can find once I get home), or going to see Keiko off (the whale from _Free Willy_ has lived in the aquarium here for some time, and as of tomorrow, he’s off for his new home in Iceland), or stopping at several of the numerous State Parks dotting the coastline to see if there were any cool places to take some pictures.

I decided on a combo shopping and picture trip. The Starter Outlet and the Toy Liquidators were busts, but there was also an Eddie Bauer outlet and I got a great fleece jacket. I found a graphic novel at one of the bookstores, one I almost paid full price for at San Diego. I got it for half cover, here. I also got _Dianetics_ and _Dianetics Today_ for a buck apiece, both of which appear to be internal editions printed from within the Church of Scientology. The _Dianetics Today_ looks for all the world like a first edition. I have such problems dealing with my life that this type of book, that gives you the straightforward answers to everything, fascinate me, even when all external evidence points to it being a fresh steaming load.

I started getting into the scenery as I left Lincoln City. The day was rather overcast (which, as far as I can ascertain, is par for the course in this area at this time of year), so I’m not entirely sure my pictures will come out as well as I hope. But I shot places with such colorful names as Boiler Bay, Foulweather Point, and Devil’s Punchbowl. Hopefully, the photos will live up to the names.

Along the way I stopped at a music store I’d seen. No Napa Valley tape shelves (sorry, Dad), but they did have one of the Epiphone Firebird re-issues. I was sorely tempted to just slap that puppy on a credit card and go, but good sense (or chickenshit, I can never tell the difference. See below…) prevailed.

The last stop was Yaquinto Head (I think I’m spelling that right). The sign along 101 says “Yaquinto Head Outstanding Natural Area” and has some government seal on it, in what about amounts to a challenge, in my book. So I gave it a shot.

The main thing that everyone sees is the lighthouse, and, hey, it’s a lighthouse. But some of the views elsewhere on the promontory are eye-popping. Right out from where I parked was an inlet where the bay had cut holes in the cliff walls, so there were tunnels and pillars of stone with surf pounding through them. On the other side, you could actually walk down to the beach, which in this case was covered entirely in small black rocks worn smooth and round by the waves. Dozens of yards of them, in every direction, who knows how deep. It was like walking in a sandbox full of marbles. At the far end of the beach, away from where the stairs were, was an area where two huge rocks guided the surf a particularly long way up the beach. As I got closer, I noticed this… sound. As the waves receded and the undertow pulled at the beach, hundreds of these little round rocks clattered and bounced their way back into the ocean. The sound was like being inside the biggest rainstick ever. I felt very alone realizing that there was no way to even take a picture of this, no way to share even a shadow of it. You’d just have to go there, I’ve never heard that sound anywhere else.

So, after agreeing that this was, at the very least, a noticeably Above Average Natural Area, I started to leave. There was one road off down the side that I hadn’t taken, so I did. Something about tidepools. I parked the car.

And there she was.

There was only one car in the parking lot, presumably hers, and she had on blue sweatpants and an overshirt that matched, so I assumed that she was a park ranger type getting ready to tell me this area was closed for the day (it _was_ getting late).

She was stunning. Tall and thin, dark skin and eyes, with unweidy amounts of black hair that moved as though she had conscious control over it. She walked as though she’d been outside all her life. She talked as if I was her oldest friend.

It didn’t take long before I realized she wasn’t a tour guide, she was just there looking at cool stuff. She confessed to touching the wildlife, in spite of the signs. Well, there were great reds, and great greens, but not in the same picture… so she improved upon nature somewhat.

Her name was Cherie (I’m assuming the spelling. She did say it was French). We talked about the things she’d seen, and where she’d traveled. When I say “we talked” I of course mean that she talked and I stood around with my mouth half open. She talked about the tidepools, how they didn’t seem to have as much life in them as she’d thought they would, about how one of the plaques had said this was an experiemental area, about how she thought these were man-made.

I regrettably added little to the conversation. She seemed so excited, so full so life, so thrilled, just to be… there. I felt so small, so far away, so insignificant compared to what was… there.

I have friends who would have stayed in touch with Cherie for years, have traded letters and hostel addresses, news of low airfares and names of people who’d let you stay in their garages for free. I have other friends who would have slept with her right there in the tidepool. I was there, she was there, I could have done any of those things, if only…

If only… If only I knew what I’d wanted to do. If only I had any idea what I was doing.

She was there talking to me and I felt as shallow and lifeless as the artificial tidepools.

We walked back to the cars and I managed to say something about loving to travel and see things but being hamstrung by fiscal realities. She talked more about youth hostels and places in Norway and Guam and Guatemala that would pay your way in trade for some small amount of work restoring castles, digging for fossils, or even shearing sheep.

I think we both realized at that moment that she was in a place I can’t yet comprehend.

I have not found my middle road. I do not understand where necessity ends and sacrifice begins. I cannot see the difference between a calling and an impulse. I celebrate the trivial and fail to believe in the meaningful.

I drown in what I don’t know because I can’t stand on what I feel.

We got into our respective cars and drove off. I turned on the radio so I wouldn’t have to hear myself think. Steve Winwood told me: “When some cold grey wind is blowing, and there’s nothing left worth knowing, and it’s time you should be going…”

I’m leaving Newport tomorrow.