On the coffee table:

“i say to my friends/
well, they can kiss my ass…”

— NWA

My kids are little taekwondo masters now, quite good. Not black belts, but they should get there within a few months, is my guess. Here’s their mantra:

“i will obey my parents, sir/
i will respect my parents, sir/
i will be faithful to my spouse, sir/
i will respect my brothers & sisters, sir/
i will be loyal to my friends, sir…”

well, that last line (all of it resonates for me, but esp. the last line, lately) just gets me. I love my friends, I love my community, and just because we had to leave North Portland, for circumstances beyond our frickin’ control, don’t think that we love Jefferson High School any less today than we did 10 years ago. (Or in my case, thirty years ago. Cuz I loved Jeff even when I was going to high school at Madison. Any time I got invited to a party or a dance with Jeff students, I’d be all, yes, yes, yes.)

So, the school board is trying to make some bad decisions right now. Really bad decisions.

But no one’s going to let them.

Remember what they say in North Portland? “Why don’t you stick it in my eye and then I’ll be able to see that you’re fucking me.” Yeah, that’s a good one. Is it already time to re-run this? Yeah. I guess it is. Again.

The End.

“Beer! Now there’s a temporary solution…” — Homer J. Simpson.

“…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand….”

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone. “When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.” -Lewis Carroll, mathematician and writer (1832-1898)

i love the way he sings.

This list, a good book, a journal, and a cup of herbal tea, is about all you need to get by. Have a good work, y’all.

— wm

We cooked today — enough for a couple of dinners and lunches this week and enough for the freezer — lasagna and split pea soup. It was pretty good. Pretty, pretty good, as Larry David would say. For lunch I had a delicious toasted poppyseed bagel with butter, Toby’s Tofu Pate and relish. Relish from a jar. You know what would have been really good with it? Chow-Chow. Homemade.

CHOW-CHOW
You use onion, green tomatoes, cucumbers, red bell peppers and grind all that up. I put some vinegar in there and let it cook on the stove for awhile. Then you seal it up in jars. I gave some to my friend Sally – it had been three years and she said it was the best thing she’d ever had. She took some out to her daughter’s.
My kids used to like it with beans.

— my grandma

ps I watched that show “Bridezillas” with my kid yesterday and it was AWFUL. What a scary, scary show that is! Then we couldn’t turn it off, it was like they trapped us. So we ate the rest of the fudge and a big bowl of kettle corn and yeah, that made it worse. The End.

pss my daughter would like me to tell The Internets that I wasn’t going to have any Internet time today, but then I did. The End. Again.

“Love involves a peculiar, unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.”

— Diane Arbus, photographer (1923-1971)