Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Mrs. Perils received an IM last week that purported to be from an online book group acquaintance of ours, but upon closer inspection it turned out to be from the woman’s daughter, saying that her mother had passed away suddenly.  We really haven’t been exposed as yet to that many contemporaries dying, so it’s a shock, still, when it happens, even to someone you’ve never met in person.

Which leads to another facet of this relatively new phenomenon of online socialization.  I’ve read people debating about the relative “reality” of “f2f” (face-to-face) friends and those we’ve met online. To me, at least, these online friendships are just as real as those corporeal ones.  So, it would seem to require a new protocol in how we prepare for our demises.  We may have elaborate conventional wills and other instructions to our real-life executors for the throwing of parties, the scattering of ashes, the presence or absence of in-laws at the memorial, and perhaps even how to adjudicate among the 5 people to whom you’ve promised that priceless Ming vase.

But what provisions do we make for disseminating the presumably unwelcome news of our demise to our online communities?  Does it just come down to a sudden silence that stretches on and on, without even a disembodied foot washing up on some cyber-Vancouver Island?  Or do we include instructions in our wills for the orderly scrolling through our IM Friends, Outlook Contacts, blog readers, World of Warcraft nemeses?  How about that Second Life that your spouse didn’t know you were leading?

In the absence of such a protocol, I was impressed that our friend’s daughter took the trouble to free-lance as she did.  I’ll have to consider what provisions to make myself.  But in view of my periodic extended silences, you’ll probably just think I moved to Milwaukee.

Well, last week in Milwaukee engendered another of my inexplicable blackouts. I guess the combination of intense work and hotel nights just sucks away my inspiration.

On Friday night, I hopped over to Detroit, met up with my youngest brother, and we zipped down I-75 to Perrysburg to visit our mom for the weekend. She’s recovering nicely from a bout of pneumonia that had hospitalized her for a few days in late June (and scuttled her trip to join us in Ashland). My bro and I took a long walk around town with the specific purpose of seeing what has changed and what’s stayed the same, and to just revel a bit in the high midwest summer, which repaid us by behaving exactly according to type - 90-ish sunny heat, followed by a short rain squall, followed by more sun that created a foggy soup of palpably aqueous air.

I actually enjoy a bit of that kind of weather for nostalgic purposes, and marvel a little that we endured summers without a shred of air conditioning in our house.

Here are a few pics from our walkabout. It’s not unusual in our hometown to find homes flying flags or other insignia of either Ohio State or Michigan year-round. Despite the changes in weather throughout the year, there is a binary time-template superimposed over the year: football season, and not-football season. It’s not so usual, and it even speaks to a certain bothersome moral relativism, when you find the emblems cohabiting in such close quarters as this (Click any pic to enlarge):

In this milieu, I am able to wear an OSU t-shirt without having to affect an air of irony in defense against west coast urban chic. Even a t-shirt commemorating our blow-out loss to LSU last year in the national championship game. You can get some idea of the heat and humidity from the shirt’s drenched state:

We walked through a street to which I stoically delivered newspapers in Jr. High, and emerged in the area of the municipal swimming pool, where we spent many a summer afternoon trying to position ourselves nonchalantly near ladders where a girl might emerge with just a little too much water weighing down her bikini top. This is also where Mrs. Perils worked as the cutest lifeguard ever..and to which we repaired one summer post-midnight to rewrite from a species standpoint the reason that W. C. Fields claimed to not drink water.

Just up the street we came upon the elementary school which my bro attended and where Mrs. Perils’ mother taught third grade. We think that was her room at the far left.

Perrysburg has a fairly typical midwest-town main street, at the end of which stands a statue of the town’s namesake, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. It’s unclear why his statue is flanked by two lesser statues of lounging cabin boys with hands firmly gripping their…swords, but Little Bro has apparently taken a liking to one of them:

The walk ends as we approach my mom’s house (in red brick. The house on the left was where my paternal grandparents lived). The place looks great now in summer, but the year my parents built it and moved us in (1961), it was a forlorn island in a sea of newly-graded dirt. Dirt which I toiled in that summer to plant grass, shrubs and trees, and upon which I toiled for many summers after with a push lawn mower. I actually ended up making my high school living mowing 5 or 6 such lawns in the neighborhood.

Our nostalgia for that agrarian toil found us on Saturday afternoon and Sunday trimming trees and bushes, planting a couple of Rhododendrons. The roseate glow of memory did not extend, however, to the legions of mosquitoes that attacked us unceasingly as we tore into their hidey-holes with clippers and rakes. As evening encroached, fireflies, which we don’t have in Seattle, flickered their Morse code of high summer, but by then I considered them merely as tracer bullets for the kamikaze mosquitoes. I retired to the house slick with sweat and festooned with mosquito body parts.

The three of us had a swell time, and it at least partially made up for my mom’s disappointment at having to miss the plays in Ashland.

Just to finish up with the Ashland photos (Click any photo to enlarge):

Here’s the cottage we where we stayed. It’s nestled up against Ashland Creek, and set among several art studios.  Gotta nail it down for next year.

Before every evening performance, there is a “Green Show” performance by various artistic groups with a theme loosely related to one of the plays:

We got a bonus performance after this particular show - a woman who had been on a mission to be able to perform topless in the 4th of July parade was taking her case to the streets in rather dramatic fashion.  I love the way everyone is pretending she’s a piece of sculpture or landscaping.  Unseen, perhaps, are multiple sets of spousal knuckles buried in spousal kidneys as incentive.  (FYI, Mrs. Perils encouraged me to take this photo):

After a week of awfully good visibility on our hikes, the smoke from California fires blew into the valley, dimming the sun to about 40 watts:

It’s always a downer to leave, but it’s also always cool to catch an aerial view of the Seattle harbor and skyline:

I did the bus-bike commute from Seattle to Redmond again today, this time heading to the Montlake “station”  near Husky Stadium to catch the 545 - the one that I took home the other night with on-board WiFi, the one that stops at the Microsoft campus.

When I got to Montlake, however, there were 5 other bikers there waiting for the 545.  Since the buses only have rack space for 3 bikes at a time, I’d have to wait for the second one (at least), and they’re spaced at half-hour intervals.  Damn Microsoft and its culture of earnest youth with free fitness club memberships.

There was an “out” if I wanted to take it: “deadheading” buses, empty and headed back to their base on the east side, pull through and will load a bicyclist.  This solution gets you across the bridge, but lets you off where 405 intersects 520.  Again, I’d have to do a bit of a climb, but most would be on a bike trail that parallels 520.

Better choice than waiting for perhaps an hour, so I grabbed the next deadheader along with another cyclist who had given up hope.  I found the climbing was a bit easier today, probably owing to my adventure Tuesday, so it’s all good.

So now, I’m on a 545 headed homeward, but no WiFi on this one.  At the Microsoft station, I picked up the signal from a different Sound Transit bus in the vicinity for a few minutes, but didn’t at that point have any business to transact.  But now I’m kind of fixated on hitting the “refresh network list” button every now and then as we crawl on 520 just to see what other vehicles might be packin’. The result is sort of a Yellow Pages of businesses along the corridor: Mercedes, Physical Medicine Group, 3Dental, ApexWAP, ActionEngine etc.

All seem to be security-enabled, which warms the cockles of my post-SarbanesOxley IT-auditin’ heart.  There might be a business opportunity in this - the drive-by IT security audit. I’d sub myself out to these entities’ CPA firms and charge a sweet little pop for my life-or-death “deliverable”.

Wednesday night(ed: hangover post from our week in Ashland 6/23 - 6/30), we saw a clever play called The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, by Jeff Whitty.  The setup is that Ibsen’s heroine awakes after the end of the play (which ends with her shooting herself) to find herself again a resident of the Cul-De-Sac of the Tragic Heroines, to which they apparently decamp between performances of their characters’ plays.  Close neighbor and good buddy Medea bounces in, full of sympathetic banter.  They are soon joined by Mammy (of Gone With The Wind), who doesn’t at first apprehension seem to be a tragic character, but shares a certain disgruntlement with the other two.  She also is Hedda’s servant, a circumstance that has tragic implications.

The disgruntlement these characters share is that they are dissatisfied with their characters, and would kill (themselves or others) to get them re-written.  Medea hates the fear in her kids’ eyes as she tries to be an ordinary mom in the Cul-de-Sac, Hedda would like to be happy for a change and shed her dweeb husband, and Mammy hates being an anachronism, a fact that is limned out when the black female police detective from Law and Order makes an appearance and derides her.

They hear that they might find a remedy if they make a trek to the Fiery Furnace of Creation.  Hedda and Mammy make plans to make the trip; Medea, being older and a little more inured to the cycle, demurs.  One of the funny scenes is when Medea stumbles onto the stage fresh from a performance, soaked in blood, and says, “I did it again.  I feel just awful!”

The play then follows Hedda and Mammy on their trek, and it becomes a hilarious cross between The Wizard of Oz (Dorothy skips by once in the background, ruby slippers aglow) and a Crosby/Hope Road movie.  Along the way, they meet Cassandra (and of course don’t believe a word she says), Tosca drops out of the sky and crashes to the stage two different times and a feathery hulk named Icarus also crashes resoundingly.  They meet two more characters of Mammy’s “anachronism” (as opposed to “tragic”) ilk, gay refugees from something very like Boys in the Band, who are angst-ridden that modern gay men disdain their queenly ways.

Upon reaching the Fiery Furnace, they observe characters spewing forth from its maw that live briefly, then fall dead.  They are informed that such is the fate of the badly-written and/or well-written but unmemorable characters.  Oblivious to the implications this may have to their various quests, they plunge into the Fiery Furnace to mind-wrestle with their authors.

The two Boys exit the Furnace basically unchanged.  Seems they got sidetracked by a happy hour of some sort and forgot to get themselves re-written.  Mammy and Hedda, however, emerge with their wishes granted.  And soon start to feel a little…wan…no, downright sick.

I guess it’s a message on two levels; as individuals,we can become obsessed with perceived flaws both physical and in our personalities.  To the extent that we suppress them and cleave towards “normality”, we become less interesting and imperil our spirits.

On the artistic level, a work of art achieves greatness because it causes us to experience an extended level of humanity, either by happy example or tragic.  To pluck out the components that disturb us in such a work would dilute its effect by obviating that cognitive stretching that great works of art compel us to do, excising what makes it memorable for us.

I’m blogging from the 540 bus crossing 520.  Just thought I’d mention that.

I’ve been meaning to re-initiate my prior practice of biking to the University District, throwing my bike on the front of a bus and riding over to my client’s in Redmond, but I always seem to be pairing my trips over there with other stops that obviate either bike garb or biking itself.

The reason I have to use the bus at all is because there is no bike lane on the 520 bridge, as there is on the I-90 bridge 5 miles to the south.  And, yes, I could turn it into a 50-mile round-trip commute by riding an excellent bike trail that goes around the north end of Lake Washington, but I’m too lazy.  No, I’m not sure I could do it without more specific bike training.

The big advantage of doing this is in the evenings, when the 520 bridge backs up and sometimes subjects me to an hour’s commute.  The bus is not immune from all traffic jams - that’s the downside of surface-level mass transit as opposed to dedicated rail - but it does get to use a commuter lane on the approach to the bridge.

Later that same day…

Thankfully, transit Darwinism isn’t always fatal, although there were several opportunities.  Last fall when I was doing this commute, the 540 bus rolled to within a block of my Redmond client.  Over the winter, however, they apparently changed the route, and imagine my surprise when they announced Kirkland as the last stop.  7 miles and one good hill climb from my client’s.

Since I’m quite unfamiliar with the streets over here on the east side, I was in some trouble.  But the biggest shock was having to climb the hill out of Kirkland.  Finally made it, sweating unattractively.

Now, I’m on my way home on a different bus route, one that stops at the Microsoft campus, and guess what?  It (the bus) has wi-fi.  I’m goinig to press “post” now and you, lucky readers, won’t have to wait until I get home for this exciting missive.

I finally prodded and tweaked our hike photos from our Ashland trip last week and assembled them into photo galleries:

• The Pacific Crest Trail, near Mt. Ashland
• Grizzly Peak, just east of Ashland
• Wagner Butte trail up to an old fire lookout with a 360-degree view of Medford, Ashland, Mt. Shasta and the Siskiyou mountains
• Soda Mountain segment of the Pacific Crest Trail southeast of Ashland

I’ll return to this post and add some editorial comments.  Right now, I’m headed out to kayak a bit and try my Canon A720 and its new waterproof case.

Wow.  We’re down to our last hour in our sweet little abode here in Ashland.  I set the bar pretty high for quantity, if not quality, in the Our Town review, and just couldn’t muster the same level of effort for the other plays.  I had promised my mom I’d post faithfully, and here we are.  Well, the poor woman watched me go through high school, so the incomplete-on-it’s-way-to-an-F shouldn’t be a shock.

Our schedule here didn’t leave a ton of time for quiet reflection, although less drowsing in the mornings might have yielded some results.  Typical day: roll out of bed at 9:30 or 10, coffee & toast, then off into the woods for the day’s hike.  We’d hike 8-10 miles, plan to be back in town by 5 or 5:30, and ravenous for dinner.  Our play for the day would start at 8:30, and we’d be back in our lodging by 11:30.

The weather was marvelous for both hiking and for watching plays under the stars.  I have a ton of photos, which I’ll process into html-able bites over the next couple of days.

One early casualty of the week was my Canon S3 IS (I had given it an unwarranted promotion to S5 in my post last week ).  I let the batteries get depleted, and on our Tuesday hike the lens would not retract.  When I got back to town and put in fresh batteries, it still wouldn’t retract, giving me a “lens error/restart camera”.  Of course, it wouldn’t let me restart the camera, and the wisdom of the internet suggests that it needs to go to Canon for repair.  It should still be under warranty, but it’s a pain to do the shipping, etc.

Luckily, I had my new A720 along and, althought the zoom and some of the other creature comforts of the S3 are missing, I got a pretty decent set of photos.

Well, it’s checkout time, and we’re packed for a sprint to the Medford airport.  See you on the other side.

We saw Our Town by Thornton Wilder last night in the outdoor Elizabethan theater.  I thought I remembered seeing this play sometime when I was in high school, but maybe I only read it.

It’s a 3-act play set in the small New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners, in the years between 1901 and 1913.  From the start, a couple of oddities strike you.  The set is completely bare.  I read that Wilder specified this because he wanted the personal interaction to dominate the audience’s consciousness.  The other device that jars you is the presence of a meta-character called Stage Manager, who introduces the play, shepherds the plot along and offers other commentary.  It’s as if one of Shakespeare’s Prologues was the nephew of the director, and got a longer part written for him as a result.  The danger of this device is that one might suspect that the Stage Manager is there to rescue what otherwise is weak dramatic material.

I think the intent, however, is to provide an emotional buffer between the audience and the characters, to make the experience of this play more of an academic exercise in anthropology and psychology than an immersion in plot and circumstance.  This is reinforced at some point when the Stage Manager brings forth a professor to elucidate the historical development of the town.  (this hits a comic moment when the professor chooses to start his narrative in the Pleistocene Era).

In snippets I’ve read from Wilder about the play, he’s making a concerted effort to move away from the particular and towards the universal, and these two devices (the bare set, the Stage Manager) seem to be part of that effort.  I have to say that it works very well.  We’re left with the bare facts of how generations accrete: two families raise two children, those children meet, court and marry and eventually everybody dies.  (the last scene is set in the town graveyard.

From my memory of the play, I was expecting something of a Norman Rockwell painting of small town life, and I suspect it may have been staged that way the time I saw it.  If I actually saw it.  And you do get a sense of generational and social connection peculiar to small towns.  But you also see, and the playright intends for you to see, how people’s expectations get cropped in order to fit the mold.  We only see one person who actually moves away, and the “out West” he moves to turns out to be Buffalo.  Another character that doesn’t fit, the church choir director, town drunk who evinces some thwarted artistic airs, commit suicide and is judged to “not be made for small-town life.”

The graveyard setting is the third strange aspect of the play.  It shows that everybody eventually leaves town, one way or the other.  Death doesn’t seem to be a strictly binary experience.  The folks in the graveyard can still observe life in the town.  But their interest in the events of the living seems to fade as their responsibility for influencing events is relieved.  A newly-dead character, not yet inured to this separation, wishes to relive a day of her life.  The more experienced dead advise her against it, but she returns anyway and is taken aback at how absorbed in the quotidian, the everyday, the living are, and returns to her grave unsatisfied.  The lesson we’re to take from this, I guess, is to try to maintain a heightened awareness during our brief days.

Not much intellectual challenge to our first (well, truncated) day here in Ashland.  We checked into our digs - a sweet little house nestled up against Ashland Creek, and I immediately felt my mom’s absence, since the three of us have lodged here for the last 3 years or so in Ashland.  So, I called her and checked up on her recovery.  As it happened, she’d played bridge in the morning, and was resting up.

We walked over to the Ashland Co-op and bought groceries.  I perceived that, despite spending over $80 for staples, there was nothing that could remotely be called “dinner” amongst our gleanings, and followed my intuition with inquiries that led to our repast at Standing Stone Brewery, where I dined on a buffalo burger.

Following dinner, we stopped into the liquor store (hey, we had to go back to the house to put the half of Mrs. Perils’ steak sandwich that we boxed in the fridge, and the liquor store was on the way).  It’s a treat to buy our favorite vodka, Crater Lake Vodka, here in Oregon - it’s cheaper than in Washington, plus there’s no sales tax here in Oregon.  However, tonight I discovered a companion product that just might have to become the official beverage of Perils of Caffeine in the Evening (as always, click any photo to enlarge):

(j/k.  I don’t think I could actually put something like this in my mouth)

Our lodging is set amongst a collection of little art galleries, and as we headed out for a post-prandial hike up the Ashland Creek watershed, this whacked-out Honda Civic parked in front of our complex:

It had what appeared to be a 9-hole golf course on its roof, but the golfers were not your standard country-club fare:

And the back end…with a sufficient slug of weed, you could stare at all the bric-a-brac in rapt fascination until you starved to death. Or until the owner moved the car (assuming that you noticed that the owner moved the car).

As we emerged from the creek and headed back to the house, the setting sun emblazoned the west-facing hills above the town. The bump on the upper right is Grizzly Peak, and we’ll be hiking there sometime in the next few days: