A Day in the Life of Chaos

Living in Portland Oregon makes me think a lot about mental health.  Not just mine but those around me.  You see I work in the heart of downtown Portland and spend my lunch hours walking up and down the Willamette River through a city park.  Traveling through a public park is a lot like visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles.  It is basically a conglomeration of everyone.  For me the saddest part of the experience is viewing the vandalism and destruction left by people that don’t enjoy the park for the reasons it exists as a public gathering point.  Portland has so much to be proud of yet unfortunately there is a small destructive element that that doesn’t share common values. Walking through the park is like walking through a healing wound.  The scab can be ugly but it is a part of us and we can only hope when the wound heals and the scab falls away, what lies beneath will be better than what covered it.  Portland is filled with homeless people.  Their lives and what it does to the

The dusty arid cliffs of Eastern Oregon rise from the land like monuments of the past.  Each crag and crease are skeletons of mountains long vanished.  Small pine trees stick out from the bone dry slopes, each green sliver pressed against the cloudless blue sky seems to cling precariously to life.  Concurrently every tree works to renew life by shedding pine needles adding to a sparse layer of top soil that dusts the rock foundations like hairs on a balding man’s head.  The enormity of the landscape seems to minimize my own presence as my eyes absorb the entirety of the vista stretching from one side of the horizon to the other.  I feel so small. When you are young you want the years to pass, when you are old you want them to stop.  There is something about age that makes you appreciate lost time. Perhaps it is because we know our life is finite and with each passing hour it marches toward a final curtain.  I tend to think of my life in blocks. My son took twenty years to raise, twenty

Edward Raymer (natural father) and me I really hate to admit this but I have passed an invisible line in life where my life is now a vivid contrast between a world I knew as a young boy and the world of today.   I have always wondered when this would happen.   When did my grandmother begin recanting the vastly historic and different world of her childhood, in the face of computers and internet?   Now I am becoming the old guy that shares stories of an intangible past to young people of today who, quietly wonder how did people in my generation survive such barbarism.   I think it often starts with technology because this is area where we can see the most visible change in our lives.  Paper to typewriters to computer screens, the evolution is dramatic.  It might be difficult for a young person today to comprehend but “in my day,” television was simple and almost unrecognizable in its current form.  I witnessed black and white tv’s evolve into to color.   The end of the aerial (that's

There are times in life when I feel like society and the social experience is slipping from my grasp.   Like greasy fingers holding a wine glass, I feel like it is sliding from my hands and hurdling to the floor with thunderous crash as a million shards randomly distribute themselves at my feet.   Moments and experiences collide like asteroids and planets.   While the fighter in me should seek to confront life in complicated moments, the monk inside me wants to withdraw to a monastery such that I can spend my days contemplating natural patterns in a stone wall. Mere days after arriving to Portland, Oregon, where the circumstances of life have dictated our new life should be formed, I found a need to plan for the welfare of my child.   This might have been simple had our child been of the two legged variety.   Most certainly a kind coworker might have watched him for a day or two.   Reality however is that these days, our child has four legs, a cold nose and a wagging tail.   While smal

When the plague descended on the world I felt it coming even before it was officially Obviously no social distancing called.  As I watched the red dots expand on the map across wide swaths of the world in my mind the pandemic was declared.  It took days before the press and government followed suit.  For the historians among us I knew what what was coming.   In my library there is a book called ‘A Nest of Corsairs.”  It is a brilliant account outlining the story of the Barbary pirates and the early elements of the Marine Corp.  This all occurs in the setting of North Africa and in my mind images of Lawrence of Arabia flourish.  Sand storms and never ending stretches of a lifeless world extending outward into infinity.  Swollen, cracked lips as men with their heads wrapped in cloth trudge across expanses of the world so vast they are seemingly impossible to comprehend.  There is a moment in the story when a consular officer describes his life locked away in an outpost of Ameri

Goonies Like many in America and pr obably the world I recently spent a chunk of time binge watching Netflix season 3 of “Stranger Things.”  It's a fun show that most directly in my mind connects me to the “Goonies” a kind of seminal experience of my child hood.  It came out in 1985 just as I was graduating high school and while most of the kids depicted were a tad younger than I, it still seemed to somehow frame my own childhood.  Maybe it was a last grasp at being young.   “Stranger Things” harkens back to the same time period in its depiction of average American kids battling the evils of the world or in the case of “Stranger Things,” another world.  On the surface I find the plot doesn’t capture as much of me as the depiction of suburban America in the late 1970’s and 80’s.  The time that was mine.  The show does an amazing job of capturing the nuance of the time.  From music to iconic events and images.  It touches on the heartbeat of what it was to be a child during

When I was a young man, maybe 13 years old, I visited my grandfather before he died. He was a salty old man, well he looked old. In truth I don’t think he was much older than 65.  Come to think of it that’s only 13 years older than I am now.  The thought makes looking in the mirror a whole new experience.  How could he have looked so old?  I think people of his generation just looked older.  Maybe they lived harder lives. Maybe it was the years of cigarettes or gallons of booze. Maybe it was being a Navy veteran in a war this world is starting to forget. Maybe he was just a sick man with paper thin skin wrapped like cray paper  over worn and fading tattoos.  A man dying of a disease that took him when war and motorcycles never could.  Before he died, as a young boy, I sat beside him and he presented me with memories he thought I might appreciate. One was his Navy Blue Jacket Manual, a guide to being a seaman.  Another was a large certificate I barely understood. It looked impor