A Day in the Life of Chaos

As you grow older it seems like events increasingly mark age.   They are like a highlighter illuminating a moment of our existence.   Today I opened an article that explained to me that on this day in 1967 the Beatles released Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.   I would have been 20 days old.   If you tried to explain this album to young people today it would be as mythical as the Iliad and the Odyssey.   Hell even people of my generation are often disconnected, post Beatle remnants.   Technology is the most vulnerable to rapid change and a lack of understanding from one generation to the next.  Often words can become meaningless or non-sensical in just twenty years time.  I often make a joke when I hear a phone ringing that increasingly no one understands.  The ring sounds and I yell “I’ll get it.”  In the era of cellular telephones attached to everyone of this who understands.  When I was young we had a single telephone in the house we all shared.  When a phone call came in some

As life progresses I am progressively certain that much of our life is determined in the early years of our own lives.  We live with our parents voices always over our shoulder long after they are gone.   Perhaps it is their everlasting gift or, equally possibly, their ever present revenge.  One way or another they tend to always be there in life and in death.   I wonder how one day my voice will echo in the mind of my son.  Hopefully positively or at the very least, elicit a quiet smile.  It will probably resound mostly in my sarcasm or the stupid jokes that I make annoying and perhaps comforting in the same sentence. My mother’s voice often echos in my mind.  It happens at so many different levels.  Could it be that mother’s nag us more and that is why they stay with us?  Everyday at work when the cleaning women makes her way through the office she stops to clean the restrooms.  It always seems to happen at the moment I need to pee and I think she spends an excessive amount of insi

I grew up during the middle and end of what could be considered the Golden Age of television.  It was an era when there were three channels.  Almost inconceivable today in an era of endless variety.  When I turn on my 150 channel cable package I search through pages of networks I have never heard of.  I find my televisions on services like Hulu, Netflix, Apple and Amazon that don’t even broadcast a signal.  Long gone are the broken signals of NBC, ABC and CBS that we pulled in with a split antenna extending out from the television set.  The sitcoms we watched were more like theater productions often filmed before live audiences, almost always with canned laughter. They were made on studio sets and the actors seldom changed locations.  The other day I was sitting at my desk in my corner of an office filled with modern half walled desks.  There is a bit more privacy these days than the open squad room of eras past yet everyone still essentially works within sight and voice of each othe

As you age it becomes increasingly difficult to segregate moments of time.   Our memories can recall events yet trying to reconcile the event with age can be problematic at best.   I find that if I start with an event I can build a recollection however, if I was to start with an age, say what happened to me when I was 8 years old, it is nearly impossible to construct.   There are times when I attempt to torture my mind by trying to rebuild a picture of not only an instant but everything that was around me.   Often times our only recollections are programmed around photographs that remind us and often reconstruct moments long forgotten.   When does this happen in life?  How old are we when our minds transition to a point of fogginess with incidental clarity?  I have recently taken interest in period television that reconstructs the past.  My past.  I drift away from the story to analyze the environments and try to recall if it was the same as I remembered.  Sometimes when I watch a pe

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