Chinooker

stay in city

2010-10-04T15:16:00.000-07:00

Two disheartening incidents from a weekend drive in the country:
Every small town has a yearly festival, some sort of Pioneer Days or Round-up or Thrashing Bee. We expected the Vernonia Salmon Festival to include lots of Salmon tasting, casting contests, and perhaps a raffle. But, after speaking with the OSU extension booth about bokashi, and to the FWS woman about salmon habitat rehabilitation, all there was left to do after the silver jewelry hawkers and corndog stands was to crawl inside the giant chinook. We hung around for a bit by Rock Creek, to catch sight of them spawning, and in hopes of our expectations being acknowledged, if not met. When a girl of about 8 started throwing cans and plastic cups into the creek just upstream from where the spawning viewpoint was located, with the FWS display, we knew it was time for us to go. Which we did, right after chastising the little retard.
After fish and chips in Seaside we drove to Saddle Mountain, which I had been wanting to climb after seeing so many beautiful pictures of it. Ascending the trail people on their way down commented on the vistas from the top. It is a bit more strenuous than we had anticipated but made it to the top easily enough, just as the clouds rolled in to block any view. As we were catching our breath before clamboring back down, a chunky teenager came up to us, "Escuse me, I would like to ass you a quession. Do you think if they built a Taco Bell up here it would make any money?" Both of us paused for a moment, scanning his earnest face for something to tell us this wasn't really happening. Realizing he was serious, I walked on past him down from the peak as my friend launched into a deservedly belittling lecture about overhead costs to the fat little retard.

opisthotonus

2010-09-17T16:02:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago my roommate had a small party and folk were sitting out back on the patio. Girl sat in a chair we had found on the street and it broke. She felt bad although nobody who lived there cared about it, so she remained sitting in it with the seat at ground level, all the legs being broken (aside: I feel like there should be a more appropriate verbe tense to use here, probably one that doesn't exist in English). So I smashed it apart because that was silly, there were other people standing and the chair was mostly useless, on its last legs as they say. A few days later I went out back to water my basil in my barefeet and stepped on a nail sticking out of a chair leg. When I lifted up my foot, the foot of board lifted with it and I was forced to pull the nail out of my heel about an inch. I screamed. After hobbling inside, shutting off the burner where I had planned to make my lunch, I crumpled to the floor with piercing pain, lifting my foot onto the couch to elevate the puncture above my heart. Laying there, I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed for the better part of an hour. I have no health insurance, I can't walk, I do not have a job nor any prospects, I need to eat something, I'm probably a sex addict, I am out of shape, I am probably in love. And I don't even like basil, I bought it to manufacture a sense of a functional life.

doughy

2010-09-08T16:41:00.001-07:00

I'm baking cookies, they are in the oven as write. Right now, now write. A batch of how-am-i-doing-chocolate-chips, a saccharine litmus test. So I need to get this out quick. I saw he-who-shall-not-be-named last week. He saw me. I think I'm okay, it was an odd circumstance, as these things tend to be. A friend and I were wandering around the Pearl for firsthursday. My boyfriend was supporting his friend showing stuff at a gallery where I knew he- would be. I had told him I didn't want to go and he wasn't really trying to convince me to do so. We agreed to meet at a specific time, and he was walking outside just as my friend and I arrived. He went back inside for a few to say goodbyes. She and I waited outside and that was when we made eye contact, he- was just inside the door up a few steps in the reception. Drink in hand, raised to his perfect teeth in a half smile as he talked to somebody, his green eyes spotting up directly at mine and clashing with his green shirt. I looked away passingly and stood up straight with my back to the door, talking to my friend and holding her by the elbow intimately. Bf came back outside and I turned to leave with them, without looking back inside. I didn't need to see, for he- preoccupied my mind for the rest of the night. Unable to focus on the sound exhibit we listened to, nor the goings over about the porn she and I are making. It was a slow flooding in, like a welling up of the past, of two thousand and hate. Not counting the sugar cookies I made at work, the last batch of cookies I made were for him, the working-late-on-saturday-night-toffees, the last batch of the cookie obsession. Now what? Timer's going off, moment of truth.

overqualified

2010-08-31T12:37:00.000-07:00

Excerpted (and edited) from a recent cover letter, to a temp agency:

It’s nothing short of an understatement to say that Portland is a difficult place to find employment. I have stood in lines for over three hours for five-minute interviews and have answered essay questions on dish-washer applications. The reasons for which I had been choosing to remain in Portland I feel are no longer applicable. I value the community here, the way it nurtures the creative and progressive, but I can no longer afford to prioritize creating my home here. However, before I am able to escape from Portland and marginally free up the already saturated job market, I need to make some cash. This is the reason I desire to create a relationship with your organization. I am confident that my current unemployment is a reflection of the market, not indicative of my capabilities.

never reigns but it pours

2010-06-10T10:33:00.000-07:00

Classy Sunday

2010-05-23T17:37:00.000-07:00

trifecta

2010-05-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

Three into seven is awesome.

yee-haw

2010-05-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

Diapers are evil.

Front and back in the saddle

2010-05-22T19:20:00.000-07:00

Back in the good ol' States, I've gotten a new job and here is a glimpse:

Temporarily Suspended

2009-03-16T02:31:00.000-07:00

Chinooker is temporarily suspended, this is fitting considering I have moved out of the great Pacific northwest. Mid-March I moved to Yemen to teach english. Of course, I will continue to write about my life and experiences. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Yemen, so I have created a new blog that takes that into account: Mid Easy. Writing style will be the same and all that, but just more family friendly. Please be mindful of this when reading. Thanks, and sorry for the run-around. Once again, the link is http://mideasy.blogspot.com

little miss sunshine weekend

2009-02-01T10:24:00.000-08:00

Friday afternoon at the bar with K8 and Brain suggests we go to the coast. A few hours later, after calling in to work, I'm in a '77 Westfalia named Sweet Pea with three other people, three dogs, no heat, and a forty, crossing the pass in the dark. We got to Lincoln City around one in the morning and all crashed after some popcorn.
Day two had a late start after bacon and cold showers. We drove up the coast, eating lunch at one of those places that have the giant anchor sticking out of the ground. Kicked it on the beach in Netarts with the dogs and then ran out of gas. So, we pushed the VW up a hill for two miles back into town and borrowed a jerry can. Snuck into PDX from the west side in the evening and ditched my Bend friends. I guess Brain, Cheese, and K8 broke the plumbing at her ex-'s house and then showed up late to get K8 and she didn't talk for the entire frigid ride back to Bend.
I bummed around PDX until Monday, saw a bunch of friends, drank a bunch of red beers. Monday afternoon Jane reluctantly let me take her car (probably would have been easier to pull her teeth) and Vassar drove me to Hood River.
Both Monday and Tuesday nights my coworkers got a house at Black Butte for a party, but my brother's Christmas present to the family was two nights at a rented house overlooking the Hood river. It was rad. Hood River is like Bend in that there's a large contingent of outdoor folk, what with being so close to mountains. Less rednecks than Bend, and the town is smaller, so more convenient. I drank a lot of brown ales with the family and caught a ride with the folks on Wednesday to Maupin. They were appalled that my plan to get back to Bend was hitching. Once they left me in Maupin, I stole a car. It sucks, so I made a video letter to Jane to thank her for letting me take Alice.

still no facial tattoos

2009-01-23T09:45:00.000-08:00

At work, in order to get my two free guest lift tickets, I had to go through Orientation. One of my managers went with me and I jokingly called it Preference Training but he didn't seem to get it. Previously when a different manager was telling me that I needed to go to Orientation, I interrupted him to add diversity training to the list of descriptors he was making. He scoffed at my comment, insinuating (albeit correctly) that there isn't diversity on the mountain. Orientation was a pretty standard HR presentation to illustrate customer service and explaining the pay periods and then the harassment policy. There were provisions about discrimination upon race, national origin, gender (whatever that is), age, and disability. But not based on sexuality. Furthermore, Mt Bachelor retained the power to add or delete anything on their harassment policy. So is the mountain just adhering to the law? Does the legal lowest common denominator not include sexuality in the anti-discrimination policies? If it doesn't, does the mountain not care or has the need never arisen? I also found out that I can transfer my season pass to anybody, which I will do since I can't ski anymore. Spouses of employees get a season pass, kids too maybe. What of domestic partners? I like to imagine myself asking the HR person these questions, but I probably won't since I don't have a domestic partner and I don't feel discriminated against due to thick skin. Asking about these issues would probably just make me feel more out of place than I already do.

so free

2009-01-14T15:50:00.001-08:00

So I'm working at Mt Bachelor, some, not as much as I would like, but enough. There's an employee bus which I ride there and back, and it's about a mile walk from my house. Yesterday, while walking home, I was hit by a car. This makes five times in two years, this is the third time walking in a crosswalk, the other two incidences being on bicycle. Everything's more or less alright, a little sore, but the impact really hit me this morning, reinforcing my feelings being a refugee. I leave home while it's still dark and come home just at dusk, and it's always cold, oftentimes with snow. This morning I limped the mile to the bus in the cold and the dark, went up to the mountain where the atmosphere was awful blizzard conditions, uncanny and eerie. I work with a bunch of idiots with soul patches that talk about their parole officers and how hungover they are. And then I rode the bus back to town and limped home in the cold and the dark.

i blog

2009-01-12T10:19:00.000-08:00

Where have I been? Not on the internet apparently. Although my resolutions for the new year do not include blogging more, I'll try to keep this up better. That said, here's the hurry-scurry of life since my life since last seen in April.

Got a job baking cookies which ended in September under similar situations as the bagel job. I busted up my hand after a rafting trip and couldn't really perform my primary functions. My boss said, "so are you giving me your notice?"

"Are you firing me?"

"Are you giving me your notice?"

"Are you firing me?"

Spent the last week of September on a road trip with Aunt Carol, Uncle Doug and Aunt Joyce going to Glacier National Park and the eastern Rocky Mountain Front. Spent an odd week or two care-taking the ranch while the folks were vacationing on the moon or wherever. This time was alternated with time at the house in Portland and ~~looking for jobs~~ drinking. November I was hired at Macy's for seasonal floor staff, but couldn't stomach it and ended up ditching out. My paycheck was just over twenty dollars for the training and I'm glad I didn't stick around. Instead, I tucked tail and moved home just before Thanksgiving to work on the ranch and collect myself. A couple days after Christmas I got a job at Mt Bachelor and a place to live in Bend, where I am now.

About the time I started baking cookies I also began staffing open hours at the Q Center, and at the beginning of autumn was the first meeting of Q Theory, a community reading and discussion group of (not just) queer theory which failed by December due to lack of attendance, among other factors to be discussed later, mostly heartbreak and disenfranchisement.

peak bagel, back in the saddle

2008-04-30T12:22:00.000-07:00

I lost/quit my job at the bagel bakery.

On Wednesday, my Uncle Mike had a heart attack, he died in hospital Sunday. I arrived at Aunt Carol's house Saturday, borrowed her car to work Sunday morning, came back to Beavertron, went to the airport, went to hospital. An hour after his passing, on three hours of sleep in the past forty8, I called my boss to tell him I was bereaved and not coming in to work at two the next morning, or at five on Tuesday. He basically said no. He said I was scheduled to work and he didn't know what he was going to do if I didn't come in. I told him I could probably come back by Wednesday. Then, my boss brought up the time nearly a month ago when I called in sick and missed two days (and a concert that I was planning on going to on my day off) because I had the flu and didn't get out of bed for nearly seventy-two hours. "Someone died Jeffrey. I was very close to him and I am going to be with my family right now." He said I should call Johnny, the guy who writes the schedule and was on vacation for a few days, so calling him would have been useless. I slept just awful that night and was glad I decided not to go to work at two. Monday, I borrowed Aunt Carol's car again and came home for a couple hours. While I was gone, she went through the clothes the hospital gave her that Uncle Mike was wearing at the time of his heart attack. She found a small tin filled with a white powder, and suddenly everything got worse.
Aunt Carol was devastated by this, and Mike's sister Susie, whom came in from Nevada and was staying at Aunt Carol's, was equally shocked. I called Jeffrey, my boss, that afternoon with the intention of saying it would be a couple days before I could be back, but it sort of came out that I wasn't going to be returning because things got complicated. I left him a message and I still haven't heard word back from the bakery. I will go in next week, Thursday, to get my last paycheck, and hopefully not talk to him. But if he is there and I do, I'm going to say, "No wonder your father never loved you."

So I'm once again heartily on the prowl for employment, or means to pay the bills.

standing up mr gay portland

2008-03-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

I met a guy online, and we talked on the phone a few times and worked our schedules to hang out on Sunday. Unfortunately, this was the day my phone service was in transition, and my new phone that I got from my roommates didn't have the charger because they were out of town. So when he called me it went straight to voicemail. I was going to send him a myspace message to let him know, and got distracted by checking him out and actually reading some of his profile. Turns out he won some pageant and became Mr Gay Portland, and he works for the government. Uh... no thanks.

dear life, you suck so much sometimes

2008-03-09T18:49:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday night, I was drinking and sent a message to a random hottie on facebook. Two days later, while making bagels at work, he showed up (there's no way he would know where I work) for his first day. He was working in the front cafe part and there was really no reason for me to talk to him, since I work in the back bakery part. But, he's transferring to the bakery starting next week, so I'll end up working with him, possibly training him. I sent him another message saying I hope things don't get awkward. I don't think he's seen either of them, yet.
The funny thing was that my coworker and I spent the whole morning telling stories of past loves and cardinal rules of relationships, such as: Never ever date a coworker! It wasn't until the last hour that I realized what was happening, and then I was pretty hysterical with laughing and making incomprehensible comments about "real life."

garfield

2008-03-05T16:26:00.000-08:00

After two solid months of corresponding via email, phone, and having been stood up for a scheduled meeting once (seriously, in the email sent to me afterwards she said that it was great that I met the receptionist, obviously forgetting that she was given my information from the executive director) , I finally met with the volunteer coordinator of a prominent environmental non-profit. The meeting was brief, we set a shift on Monday for me to come in each week and donate my time, and then she toured me around the office and introduced me. "This is Ben, he'll be volunteering with us."
"Oh! You're Dan and Jeanne's son, aren't they just fantastic?"
"Uh, yea they're alright I guess." I'm reasonably apprehensive of this all. To complicate matters, when I came in for my first actual stint, I realized that my time is going to be wasted here. It is not an internship nor an apprenticeship and apart from my initial tour, the only person I will deal with is the volunteer coordinator, so I am not establishing much of a network either. The work that I'm doing, also, is brainless and menial, data entry mostly.
A further annoyance about this was that I missed a shift that I didn't know I was working at the bakery. Upon getting back from my delivery route, I was preparing to bicycle home and they told me I was scheduled to keep working and I had no idea. I got it covered, and now have Mondays off at the bakery as a result. They were pretty understanding, the boss said, "If this is your dream then do not give up. For me, I will have bagel kingdom!"

pot dealer

2008-02-26T14:04:00.000-08:00

...I am not.
Yesterday I missed work and received my "final warming." Shitty that if my alarm doesn't go off at one in the morning I won't wake up until after my whole shift is over. So, in an effort to pay off some debt that I owe to friends, I took a course about how to deal pot. My roommates, other friends, and even some family have been telling me recently that the best drug dealer is one who doesn't do them. This really makes zero sense to me, how could I sell pot if I never have any? How do you meet stoners when you don't get stoned? The only way I could see doing this would be to have a client base handed over to me. Anyways, my drug dealer friend gave me some (a lot, really) of instructions about it. He has just recently moved to Ptown and is always trying to exploit my social capital and get me to deal for him. Figuring that I'll be fired from making bagels soon and will need some income, I took him up on this and got the Stumptown marijuana training. It took nearly two hours and was a real big waste of both his and my time. He used a chalkboard and told me about the differences between Indica and Sativa, between genotypes and phenotypes, the history of cultivation and hybridization, and all this information that I thought was useless to sell pot. I mean, if it gets you high right? Wrong.
The hands on portion of the training was just as fruitless. He sells three kinds of pot, each of varying quality and price and flavor: Pineapple, Train wreck, and Pitbull. He pulled them out of their respective jars and I studied them for the test. Apparently, besides phenotypes, the best way to differentiate pot plants, is by the smell, if you aren't going to smoke it. This, among other very good reasons, is why I can never be a pot dealer: I don't smell. When it was time for the test (yes, he tested me), I couldn't tell which buds were which varietal. Whatever, we moved on, this was a minor obstacle as long as I could figure out a way to tell them apart, like labeling the jars they were in.
The next part of the training was role playing. Now, salesman I am not, and long story short, I didn't make the sale. I won't be dealing pot anytime soon.

bagel baker

2008-02-21T20:11:00.000-08:00

Success! I started a new job on Tuesday making bagels and delivering them early early in the morning. It isn't really such a success though because the only way I was able to get my foot in the door was through my roommate who recommended me after working there only three weeks and quitting, which is about as long as anybody else has worked there. He's only been open for a year, and there is only one person still employed after that much time. The turnover rate is high because, as nearly everyone who works there has been eager to tell me, "the boss is really crazy." When I met him for my interview he was quick to tell me about the times he has fired three quarters of the crew for no apparent reason. He said I could stay working there as long as I did a good job (duh) and didn't talk to much. "I fire so many for talk too much." There are notes posted all over the place about the talking rule, but so far he seems a pretty standard boss.
I'm pretty surprised at how much I like the job. The hours are awful, starting at five sometimes. Tomorrow I have to be there by two in the morning. The coworkers are noticeably frazzled by the hours, which is entertaining. I get to bring home six bagels per shift, which is thirty-six servings of bread for the roommates and I to consume. And truth be told, I secretly hate bagels. But I'll probably get fired for talking anyways.

carbon footprint

2008-02-17T10:36:00.000-08:00

I've been getting myself really down recently because of my carbon footprint. When I first calculated it a few years ago in the Eugene it was around 6 earths, in Oakland I had it down to 1.2, but here in Ptown it's at 2.8 with certain destructive choices that I can't help but make because of finances. Even after calculating it with my ideal choices, like buying all local foods and going vegan and never being in a car, it was still at 1.8 earths! The problem is my housing, which I don't really see as being a choice I can make. Somehow, the infrastructure of society here has been designed to be institutionally destructive. So by the mere fact of my existence, I am actively (and consciously now) making my future worse. That's quite a load to bear everyday, filled with anxiety about the future.