Scraps

My new MO is leaving an entry to marinate on the desktop for a while. The stuff below was written on an unbearably hot day. I’ll give y’all a heads when below is the below of a bygone day. This year chock full of bygone days, like cap’n crunch with extra crunchberries. Those better versed in iterations of the cap’n crunch franchise are encouraged to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think there was, or still is, an all crunchberry version. Seems like a bad idea. The elegance of regular crunch mixed in with crunchberries is the texture. The regular cap’n can scar the roof of your mouth, crunchberries are smooth as the cap’ns head.

There’s a couple few phrases that bug me; per say, suffice to say and a new meaning for tapped out. The first is obvious, suffice to say, though suffice it to say will work just as well, they mean something along the long the line of adequate enough information. It’s a long, pretentious way of basically saying I’m going to be brief. It’s damn hard not to sound pretentious, my opinion, impossible. Almost any sentence without suffice to say is improved by editing the phrase out.  Same with per say, with the notable exception that most people use it wrong, which makes it wrong and pretentious as opposed to just pretentious. Again, any sentence is improved by removing the phrase and you can make the most brilliant sentence less shiny by adding it.

Tapped out is a different. When I first moved to Portland I often gave spare change to the countless street people who asked. When I had nothing to give and didn’t feel like a discussion about my broke-ass-ness, I said “Sorry, I’m tapped out”. Now it’s used more as a verb phrase, like tapping out in a fighting sport from kick boxing to wrasslin’. I’ll guren-god-damn-tee there are a lot more broke motherfuckers than there are wrasslers. Oh, yeah, and the television is convinced that out of pocket means either exposed or, god forgive me, off the reservation, in federal police jargon. It could be that I’m not hep to modern jargon, but for me out of pocket means expenses you paid for yourself. My version makes sense in a literal way, I have no idea how out of pocket can mean something so radically different. I suspect that neither does your average federal agent, or, half the screenwriters that use it. The other half are stoned, like white powder stoned.

Ok, now the below is the below.

Not really sure what the top temperature of a motherfucker is, but it’s been hotter than one. For May and in the swamp. I used to tell of how I left Michigan in March to travel to Anchorage. It’s a cool adventure when all the bells and whistles are included, the point, however, was that it was warmer in Anchorage. And, I always preferred the winters.

My line about Michigan summers is that they are a lot like New Orleans without the good food and music. Two years ago, I made a summer trip to New Orleans, it was cooler and less humid. Ok, not specifically to New Orleans, but I passed through. In the little town I went to, every place had the AC cranked.

This morning was the coolest it’d been all week, like 72 at dawn and ninety five percent humidity. We caught the aftermath of tropical storm Alberto. It cooled things down and left a lot of water and some hail on the ground, though, the humidity is usually that high. It’s a fucking swamp, a landlocked swamp. Even Detroit and Chicago, lop-sided a bit towards the east other wise damn near in between, have wind off the lakes, Huron and Michigan respectively, and so cool down at night. Two nights ago, it was ninety and midnight.

All my missing Oregon has become sentiment and not desire. They had a few damn hot summers in a row, and, when I went back, I want to say two years ago for my daughter’s wedding, Portland was a mess, overpopulated, traffic jams at 630 AM. If I ever plan on moving back it won’t be to Portland metro. My plans are sort of moving out of the country. There’s a lot of reasons to bitch about being an American, but the real allure would be national health care. It’s not really the cost, ok, it’s not primarily the cost, it’s the shitty quality. I’d like to live somewhere with first world health care. I think one of the very few things that keeps America in the first world is arms; we could blow up third world countries without making a dent in our armaments. I don’t entirely trust our government or those who voted for them not to blow up a country just because they are living better than us.

Canada and New Zealand are top picks for me. Both have easy immigration policies and parts of both are beautiful. And I don’t have to fix my broken command of other languages. North of Vancouver, or just outside of Christchurch. Ok, so I know Canada much better than I know New Zealand. I want to be close enough to a city where I can go in to shop and have sewer lines and cable internet connection, but far away enough where I don’t have to deal with throbbing, yearning, unwashed masses.