From Vancouver, Wash., Portland’s northern suburb, comes this gem of a public meeting.

Someday, maybe, we can develop zero-point energy and get rid of all those unsightly transmission lines. Still, I love seeing Mt. Hood in the morning.

Life is funny and time is fleet of foot.

Twenty-one years ago, I moved to Oregon with a band of hippies, trying to make my living playing the bass and singing country- and reggae-hued psychedelia.

That band broke up soon after we disembarked from the ’63 Chevy Step-Van in Portland, and life took me through some twists and turns, including work in the colorful world of organic produce and stints as a band instrument repair man, sheet music sales clerk, and side man in a tex mex band.

After about eight years of mix and match, scraping the rent together somehow or another, I got engaged and decided I needed a career with a future. I retired the axe and got a cubicle job shuffling bits on computers, and dedicated myself to raising my two children. When they hit school, I got ridiculously entrenched in school politics and citizen journalism, which eventually spilled over into way too much civic involvement. I also got back into skating and started playing a lot of pickup hockey, which I likened to music in many ways.

After deciding the City of Portland and Portland Public Schools are hopelessly anti-child, we moved to the suburbs, where it was decided I should withdraw from politics and return to my music.

The funny thing about my brain is that while I present as well-adjusted, I’m a little OCD. I’ve had a couple of unfinished songs going through my mind for nearly 20 years. So even though I had veered into cumbia, salsa and Latin jazz when I dropped my musical career on its head thirteen years ago, I was unable to get back to that without first going back further and purging my mind of the country- and reggae-flavored songs from the early 90s.

I set up my studio with a Macintosh and started using it as my pensieve (for you non-Harry Potter devotees, a pensieve is a place to store memories, thus uncluttering one’s mind).

First to be extracted and stored away was “Falling off the Mountain,” a song I started writing with my friend Tony on Thanksgiving circa 1990 while hiking and camping in Oregon’s Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness. I’m not much for lyrics, and Tony never did send me that second verse. So, as they say, “last verse, same as the first!”

It’s like magic… that song doesn’t go through my head anymore since I’ve committed it to bits!

Next up was a little flat-picking ditty I started writing after seeing Doc Watson at the Melody Ballroom, also in 1990, I think. It was right after Totem Soul broke up after our acoustic trio (the Holistic Ramblers) had a gig from hell at Portland’s Laurelthirst Public House.

Nancy‘s always saying she likes country music “cuz the men are always sorry and the women are always leaving.” With that in mind, I wrote a second verse and pulled “The Dark Desert Sky” out of my head and deposited it in the pensieve.

Now that those are out of my system, I want to write some stuff in this vein:

Banda Brothers (Ramon and Tony and friends) playing “Dime Caridad” (by trombonist/arranger/composer Francisco Torres) from their most excellent album Acting Up.

It’s amazing how much time I have, now that I’m not researching and writing in-depth exposes and going to school board meetings, urban planning meetings, community meetings and rallies. Now I can help my daughter discover the joy of wind instruments and ensemble playing. If you want to see me now, I’ll see you in the band room (not the board room), clarinet in hand.

The truth cannot be hidden, and it is a fact that the world is ruled by an increasingly concentrated elite who have no regard for the future of humanity. On this ninth anniversary of a horrific act of murder, launched by criminally deluded believers, we should assert, to ourselves and our neighbors, that war is also a criminal, immoral enterprise, and acknowledge that the decade of war and destruction we have wrought on the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan is on a scale almost unimaginable to most Americans.

Humankind teeters on the brink, with an old guard, counter-progressive elite clinging to power — through warfare and global economic oppression — even as they endanger the very survival of humankind on planet Earth.

As R. Buckminster Fuller said, we must turn from making “killingry” to making “livingry.” The alternative to this planetary shift of consciousness will surely be many thousands more slaughtered. Or extinction.

As a memorial to the millions of innocents extinguished in the wars of modern times, let’s make the shift.

When I wrote about Bob Dylan’s concert in Troutdale, Ore., I got an unexpected link from a Dylan fan site… Bam! Our server got the most hits in one day since the days we used to write about stupid stripedy clothes-wearing white people and their penchant for trying to start charter schools rather than send their precious spawn to school with poor, black and/or Spanish speaking kids.

Anyway, that was interesting, but also interesting was when a Japanese Dylan fan site picked up my post and excerpted it in Japanese. I don’t speak Japanese, so I’ll assume the person who translated it did a decent job, and isn’t responsible for the hilarious machine translation back to the English:

It Is not You, Babe
This man, funny shit.

Come on people rose in Mellencamp started playing. We were just like my DMZ. Mellencamp while playing, but we were sitting, but started to stand in front of you. The screaming started throwing ice cubes on your back then. hit lesbian couples wearing torn chunks of ice that had preceded. they are whining because people are standing before. I I thought it would sit for two more songs about Sume, she would not. “Hey! Wine T-shirt there! Sit!! (poweredbyfinewine of youth shirts)” … the voice of one another Gatchiritaipu man …. next thing you are, “Sit down!” he said.
…
Mellencamp looks at his wife “feel good” he said. Does your wife is hot Mellencamp?
…
I’m not a rock critic. But let me say it ?Ere “JustLikeaWoman” were floating in tears in her eyes. The encore was two songs not good, great. We drive back to Beaverton, sober and happy.

My old farts beer league team finished 5-5, 4th place out of eight, then lost to the fifth place team in the first round of the playoffs. I thought cuz I skipped it, my team would have a better chance… but no dice.

Birthday girl requested, in order: hash browns for breakfast, left over mom’s mac and cheese for lunch, spaghetti and potatoes o’brien for dinner, and a combo deal on the cake: one with coconut, one with chocolate frosting, both based on the old family pound cake recipe. And what goes with pound cake and coconut cake? Why, chocolate syrup, of course! Yum! (And yes, it is, in fact, the second time I’ve made birthday cakes in as many weekends. It’s a special time of year for us over here!)

I love Pete Seeger, here singing a Tom Paxton song, apropos the start of a new school year:

Chehalem Mountains

Looking south from Cooper Mountain Vineyards, our local organic, bio-dynamic winery… their attitude is right, the pinot’s pretty damn good, and the view is sublime.