Slackjaw's Forum

Well today marks, what will no doubt be, the last forum of the year. It was, I think, a decent year for this journal. This entry marks the 44th of the year, and 145th overall. Though there were times that I tried, I still have no idea how people post more than once a week…as anyone who comes by this little site knows, it’s a very rare thing indeed, when I can find more that one thing to say over the course of seven days. Today at the mill, the decorations started to come down. The fake Christmas trees were dismantled and loaded into boxes, the swag and fake presents taken down and put away for another year. Here in the City of Destiny, the promised rumors of a post Christmas day snow have all but petered out, and though the sun was making it’s way over the mountain this morning on it’s way to what will no doubt be a beautiful clear day, I found myself wishing for those low hanging gray clouds, and the big white flakes they bring when it’s cold enough. I am looking forward to the retu...

10 things I will do to earn Christmas Spirit this year. (subject to change next year) 1.I will release all my anger, as it is poison and is actually a known Christmas Spirit repellent. 2.I will forgive people their stupidity, since being stupid is not a crime, just unfortunate. 3.I will forgive myself my own stupidity, we all have those moments in life...can't be helped. I will also refuse to rehash them over and over in my head, at least until New Years gives me some new ammunition. 4.I will Give. I'll give everything and anything I can think of. I will give without strings attached, without thought, without good reason. I will give time to someone who needs it, give hope to someone who's lost it --- give Taco's to someone who's hungry. Good tacos, not cheep lousy ones from places like Taco Bell, but really, really good tacos, the kind where the grease drips down your chin and the shell falls apart in your hands. 5.I will sing. Nothing can fill you up wi...

Sweetie and I really hit the trailer hard this weekend. We’d been given a list of improvements to make from our real estate agents, so this weekend we set about trying to see how many we could get done. Unfortunately it was very scattered effort. Usually I’m quite good at focusing on a single task and beating it to death until completion. For instance, the trailer has a number of corrugated fiberglass panels on the back porch, put there by the previous owner to close everything in. I’ve never really cared for them and a few years back when we painted the singlewide, I just had them painted over to match the rest of the house. We mostly just use the back porch for our recycling containers, paper bags, and miscellany anyway. The agents thought it made things too dark back there and asked if we could replace the panels with something a little more see-through. Easy enough I thought, so Saturday morning I headed out to the hardware store and picked up the pieces to what I thought would be...

Well we’re starting to put into motion the first steps that are going to lead us out of this trailer park and into a new home. This afternoon we meet with the real estate agent so that she can put a price on the singlewide and we can give her a better idea of what we’re gonna be in the market for. Moving seems like an impossible mountain to climb right now. In some small way, I imagine it feeling like what the pioneer families must have felt, when, at the end of the long journey through the great planes, they at last came upon the Rocky Mountains. I can completely understand how there were some who just parked their wagons in Bozeman and said "To hell with that – I’m done." But being done is not really an option for us. I know deep down, like all those other pioneers crossing this country knew deep down, that if you want to reap the benefits of the Puyallup river valley’s rich soil and winter rains, you are gonna have to put that first foot down on a snow covered mountain p...

I have in the past on this site, railed against Christians and the Religious right. As a non-believer in either god or the bible, I have been, this past week, writing diatribes in my head blaming the church for all the hatred and divisiveness in this country. Blaming narrow mindedness for allowing this country to be consumed in bigotry and moralistic fear the like of which has not been seen since the days of Joe McCarthy and his witch-hunts. I was angry. Angry at these elections for what they say about America and for the direction my fellow countrymen have chosen to allow this country to go in. I was all set to take that anger and put it out into the world and then I received this email from a good friend of mine that took it all away, leaving me with a feeling of something else entirely…not exactly hope I guess…something a little more hard to define. Promise, maybe? How This Liberal Christian Will Respond to Bush's Re-Election I've calmed down, and now I can think rati...

In my dream last night, I was looking through the living room window out into a cold wet morning, and saw two people who I thought were the Silvey brothers. I didn’t know them all that well in college, but well enough to say hello and to find out what they’ve been up too. When I opened the door to the singlewide to say hello and get the paper they were gone, but crowded up on my front porch was a pressing group of other friends. There stood Craig and Shelly who had brought a friend named Less for a tour our house, and right behind them some other friends, Grace and Tom, who had just managed to show up at the same time, and who had, for some reason, brought a grown up version of Sweetie’s niece. We all chatted for a minute on the cold porch shaking hands and giving out hugs, and then I invited everyone in for breakfast. I’ve convinced myself this morning that this dream is all about the election, but I have no idea why I think that. If any of you have any insights as to wh...

I haven’t been writing much lately, or at least what I have been writing has remained for the most part unfinished and fragmented. These days I feel like I’m telling the same stories over and over, and quite frankly I’m starting to get bored listening to myself write. The park has been pretty quiet lately anyway, all the neighbors getting their gardens ready for winter and putting their pumpkin decorations out. Things have just been slowly drifting along, waiting for fall to turn into winter. Last night I received an email from Jeff Abshire, a friend from so long ago that it pains me to think that it’s my own life that’s past by. I don’t usually name names here on this site, mostly out of courtesy to the people in my life that I want to write about. But when I got the email from Jeff, I had to get out an old yearbook to make sure I had an accurate picture. Last night, Sweetie and I sat at the kitchen table going through those books and out popped all these names. Names ...

Every once in a while someone will come up to me when I’m pushing Ike around in his chair. Sometimes they work with kids with similar disabilities so they just want to say hi, Sometimes it’s parents who have children in similar situations and are looking for common ground, sometimes it’s little kids asking what’s wrong with Ike and why is he in a chair, and sometimes, like the guy who stopped me this weekend, it's new parents looking for answers as to how he and his wife can better cope, dealing with their newly diagnosed disabled child. All new parents of special needs kids, and that included me, want to believe that there is this secret underground healthcare society where, if they could just find the hidden entrance, they would enter a new world of help and support. A place where maybe, just maybe, a higher level of overall care would be available. One that doesn't exist for most people – to those people with the more “normal” kids. When you have a newborn ch...

It’s been a few weeks since the last update and I’m not sure why exactly. Days just seem to slip by with out a story slipping out. We spent the weekend huddled by the wood stove starting out into the rain and mud puddles that formed everywhere you looked. Spent the better part of an afternoon and evening at the Puyallup Fair on Friday night getting soaked in the downpour, dodging the rain by going between the livestock barns and arts and crafts booths. During the heaviest part of the storm we took a gondola ride that went from one end of the fairgrounds to the other, looking down upon the carneys in their yellow slickers trying to keep dry by putting their heads under the small ticket window overhangs. In all the years that I’ve been going to the fair, it was the first time I’d ever been on that ride. We bought round trip tickets so we could leave Ike’s stroller on the platform, and it was raining so hard, and the fairgrounds were so empty, that after our trip, the guys ...

For the last week or so, I’ve been staggering though computer hell. I’d purchased a wireless network for the trailer so that the new desktop, the old desktop and the way old lap top I write on, could all play together and sing camp songs by the fire. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way yet, but the good news is that they are all able to surf the world wide web at the same time and having a very portable laptop that you can take anywhere around the park and still be connected to the world, is a pretty cool thing. It took a while to get everything up and running and forced me to upgrade the laptop to Windows XP but once that was done and tweaked, everything is back to normal. The Older Boy started first grade last Thursday and though he tells me he’s still getting used to the fact that his teach is both old AND thin, and not, as he said he likes, young and thin OR old and fat, I think he’s truly excited about being back in school again. Ike doesn’t start until September ...

Thursday afternoon I headed down to the Murry Morgan Bridge on 11th. My friends at Beautiful Angle and I had taken part in the Goddess Project , putting up a fourteen foot high series of boards with pictures and words the night before, and now I’d signed myself up to hang the rest of the pieces. It was a perfect afternoon, the rain that had been hitting our city had finally slowed down and the sun was just starting to make an appearance. The lift was right where the rental company had said it would be as were the artists waiting for my help. It was going to go smoothly, it just had that kind of feel to it even though I was in a hurry and the mill was in full production mode at the moment. It didn’t really work out that way though. Coming around the corner the lift was unable to stop in time and I wound up slamming straight into the side of the 402. I put a pretty good dent in the front right fender and though the mirror popped out of it’s holder I didn’t tear it off, n...

We sat on the train near the back by the caboose, where they have a ramp to load Ike’s chair on and off. It was just to get out of the sun for a little while and rest our weary feet. We’d been on it before, a day or two earlier but hadn’t yet gone all the way around, so that’s what we did – that and chatted up the nice people who’s daughter had nodded off and who were looking for the same break in the day that we were having. It’s a quiet ride, mostly in the shade or through the various tunnels depicting the Grand Canyon, the age of the dinosaurs and a strangely warbled Zip-a-de-do-da’d Song of the South paddleboat scene. It was the afternoon of day five and by this time we had pretty much had our fill of the Happiest Place On Earth™. We’d done the Pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan, Dumbo, that “Small World” place, Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, Splash Mountain, Haunted Mansion, Autopia, Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, Indiana Jones, that safari ride boat thing, some other no...

Sometimes people prefer to run whatever race their running by starting with everyone else at the starting line. This allows them to believe that the moment is a fresh unspoiled beginning and that given whatever task is at hand, what ever challenges they face, at least the playing field is even -- that all have exactly the same chance for success, at least in that short second before the gun sounds. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s better for wheels to fall off, or for the car split in two -- to be pushed off the side of the road and driven through a barn full of hay and chickens. Sometimes it’s better to stumble at the starting blocks, to fall and scrape ones knee before gathering it together and finishing the race -- to be pushed off a bike and have to tape ones feet to the peddles. At least in Hollywood, at least in the movies. Sometimes. And sometimes people fall off porches and rupture a tendon in their ankle, finding their leg in a walking cast two days before they lea...

Well I just finished the biography, The life and Near Death of Steve Earl and decided that I can like his music as much as I want, but from here on out it has to be prefaced with “I know the man is a huge asshole, but…” That’s always the risk one takes when trying to get a little deeper into the life of someone who’s art you enjoy. Last night was laundry-folding night around the singlewide. The way we tend to decide when it’s laundry folding night, is after the laundry goes through the cycle for the second time without the first unfolded baskets ever getting put away, Sweetie gets a bee in her bonnet and we spend a romantic evening sipping wine and matching socks. Somehow I wound up folding it all myself last night as Sweetie never made it, due to falling asleep while putting the older boy to bed. As I sat in the middle of this growing semi-circle of laundry, folding yet another pair of tiny corduroys, I was struck by the fact that perhaps we’re doing this all wrong. T...

Well I said I was gonna do it and low and behold I did. For some reason this year, some 17 years after I left school for good, I went back and finished up my Bachelor of Arts degree from the Evergreen State College. I know this, not because I actually received anything in the mail saying as much, as one might think, nor do I know this because someone phoned me to say “Congratulations!” or “It’s about time!” or “Who put a bug up your butt after all this time? Way to GO!” but because I went and looked it up on line, and the Evergreen State College website said so. What prompted me to look is that I received a nice evaluation from Steve, my professor (no last names at Evergreen, you call all professors by their first names, dude) which said among other niceties, that I had “written the best piece he had read this quarter”. Now I’m not so sure how much of that speaks to my writing ability and how much it speaks to the quality of an Evergreen undergraduate education. Regardles...

I painted the front door red this weekend -- A deep colonial red with a high gloss finish. Three years ago when we decided that the trailer would look better with wood screen doors, I took that opportunity to strip all the paint off the front door as well and that’s the way it’s been sitting for the past 1000 days. Zane, our old blind cat, came out and kept me company for some of it, cautiously moving about the front yard sniffing the flowers and laying in and out of sun spots. It made me sad to think that there likely wont be many more times in her life that she’ll get to do that, so I tried to let her roam as far as I could. I didn’t let her get to far out of my site though, people don’t always pay attention when they’re driving through the park and I don’t think she would want to go out of this world under the front tire of the Dodge pickup Earl drives. Dewy and Ham have a new dog named Slot-car that they’ve been dragging around for the past month or so. I say draggi...

The gifts keep coming, little boxes wrapped in newspaper or red Christmas ribbons, or showering down out of the sky in little spitting drops – Rain before the real rain begins. They come in the form of letters, in the form of four letters of an upper left-hand cornered envelope marked T.E.S.C. In the form of friends, old and new, friends I didn’t even know I knew, who would come out to listen to live music on a Saturday night and write how much they enjoyed it on a Monday morning. They come from inside my grill in the shape of a salmon’s side – skin blackened but not the deep pink flesh – or from dodge-ball games the Older Boy plays with is friend from across the way. In the small containers that push themselves up from the garden’s dark soil, in the shape of pumpkins and tomatoes. In Straw Flowers, Fox glove, Dahlias and Lemon Balm. They come in the form of a half-inch reel-to-reel eight-track machine sitting in Corlis’ front room. And thankfully they come in the...

I wonder if it’s that I don’t have enough going on in my life right now. I mean what else could explain it? It must not be enough to be thinking about finding a new house, or getting Ike his new chair or getting presents and cleaning the house for Sweeties birthday. Maybe there was something lacking and unfulfilling about the Steve Earl concert that we took the boys to last Wednesday, or the Forth of July party on Lake Desire on Sunday or the family birthday get together yesterday. Though that may sound like a lot, I don’t think it’s a matter of trying to do to much, because if that were the case, wouldn’t I be lying in bed trying to figure out the logistics of getting everything organized for the next event? No, if I had enough to do in my life I most certainly wouldn’t have to spend quality sleeping time helping PBS’s reality show Colonial House. Not that there WAS any problem with the show to begin with. Hell, I only watched one or two episodes anyway…not enough to ma...

I haven’t been sleeping all that well lately and I’m not sure why. The heat could be a factor, though it’s already been hotter than this, so could the lack of a breeze to break up the stagnant air. I tend not to do well with the fans blowing all night, but I do even worse sweating in our stuffy bedroom, so if it’s hot I’ll usually turn one on. These days, my neighbor heads out for work at 5a.m every morning. I know this because he parks his ancient van directly behind his ratty tent trailer taking up all the room beneath the birch trees on one side of our lot. He gets in, slams the creaky door shut and after a few errant tries, starts it up and heads out. Why is his van parked outside our single-wide you ask? Well it’s a complicated story but I will do my best to explain it all to you here. When the Simpson’s, our old neighbors who lived a few lots down, moved to Purdy, they decided to give their trailer and lease to a sibling. She’s married and has a couple of kids an...

Saturday night was spent up in Arlington for the summer solstice . We met up with the same group of people that we meet up there every year, sitting around the fire singing songs and watching the kind of stars that you can only watch when you’re far away from city lights. The Older Boy saw the Big Dipper for the first time. The kids all played together staying up late and of course, waking up early with the sun as well. The weather was almost too hot for my liking but we stayed until lunch before packing it in and heading south. After we’d made the long drive back down along I-5, through the mysterious weekend traffic-jams of the 520 intersection, past the MLK exit we used to take before the boys were born, past the Federal Way Mall and the Poodle Dog restaurant in Fife, we sat on the stoop of the single wide gathering our strength and trying to figure out how we were gonna make it though the next few hours of a nieces birthday party hosted at one of Sweeties sister’s ho...