Category: Life

I am seriously pro-food. I like to think about food, read about food, gently prod food, ferment food, garnish food, smell food, buy food, seek food and experience new food. I regale the difference between 6-month and 12-month Manchego, care whether asparagus is in season, and am honestly fond of (not just making a point of) eating sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas, usually, of calf), bone marrow, squid and fermented fish sauce. However, my upcoming trip to Iceland is making me gustatorily anxious.

Icelandic food specialties read more like grievous and fatal fraternity hazing rituals than anything that a human with extant taste buds and olfactory capability would submit to willingly. The regional recipes manage to get an F- on each of the rough trinity of food-is-yummy criteria, offending the user psychologically, aesthetically, and sensually.

A courier came yesterday with my first package of Humira®, which will, if everything goes right, take the place of the rather cumbersome Remicade infusions, which required me to spend half a day in the rather grim cancer center at St. Vincent Hospital. Remicade also required me to take a strong dose of antihistamine, lest there be reactions, which knocked me plumb out. Not to mention that Remicade has some fiercely fatiguing side effects.

Humira on the other hand can be injected at home, once we’re trained. I say “we” because my saintly David has offered to do the actual stabbing. I like the idea and hope it does not cause him too much trauma. If anything, maybe he can release some aggression! We are due at the GI clinic in an hour to be introduced to proper stabbing form.

Help me choose which of these photos from last weekend I should make a nice print of for the parents of this lovely young lady (my goddaughter). I’ll print and frame the winning photograph.

Choose from attentive and realistic, gleeful, LOG POND WITH FISH!!! or weird/blurry but cute.

I like stuff that smells good, effectively to a fault. I routinely mix up cocktails of essential oils and in ceramic vessels and then set them alight. My library often smells like a forest or a savanna or a citrus grove. We own our own copper alembic still and distill our own smells, with varying degrees of success.

Keep your eyes out for fragrance-related posts, soon.

Last year around this time, optimistically and foolishly thinking it was nigh spring, I bought a light (read: in no way insulating) jacket in a color the clothing label called “wasabi,” which was pretty funny because, first, wasabi doesn’t have a color if it’s real (the bright green is food coloring) and secondly, the jacket was bright red-pink-something; perhaps they confused it with the color (again fake) of the pickled ginger they put next to your sushi at sushi bars. Yes, perhaps that’s it.

For several months I described this color as “hot red” or “rabid salmon.” But even the term “salmon” gives you the wrong idea. It doesn’t have that coppery, sunset glow of other things you might call salmon. It is, I realize, its own color, my personal color for 2010.

Rain and sunbreaks at the Beckmans’, in the spruce forest above Cannon Beach. This was the first weekend that I was willing to believe it might possibly be spring sometime soon. The rain showers, though some of them were quite dense, were soft and almost warm. I shot this with my regular camera (Canon 5D Mark II), which does video. I under-utilize that feature!

Curiosity. I have it. The frightful 8.8 magnitude quake that jolted poor Chile last Saturday sent out reverberations: the threat of tsunamis all through the Pacific world. As it happened, I was scheduled to spend the weekend at my friend Emma’s family’s house in the misty, spruce-studded hills just above Cannon Beach. The tsunami was scheduled to reach that part of the Oregon coast at right around 3PM local time. I needed to see what this looked like.

It looked like nothing. Too subtle for humans to notice, but very much there. The water changes caused by the far-flung tsunami were merely a foot or so along the western edge of Oregon, but the fluctuations were very real.

It has been a hard day. You are probably looking for some happening to illustrate this, an example of something foul that transpired. No: this is, or at least its source is, mostly nuance. All inexplicable fury and typical social retardation on my part.

It is, you see, a miring in my own internal stink. And I never know how to say or what to say or when to say but I know what I am saying is as absurd as the trail of horseshit in the bicycle path in front of my office building today. I don’t know how it got there but it sure is stupid.

One of the Great Things I struggle with in life is balance. I get enough exercise, but I never see my friends. I read 75 books in one year, but never write anything. Sometimes I take reams of photographs, in spurts of expression; sometimes I am dry as a summer gully in this respect.

Currently it’s the latter.

About two weeks ago, I came down with photographer’s ennui. Though I still walk the same route to work, with the same, often insane visual entertainments, my camera dangles heavily at my hip.

I have a habit of, when I travel, absconding immediately to the nearest art museum. I neglect even the most vital tourist activities (various towers, mountain peaks, cathedrals, piazzas, antiquities, Disney parks, stadia, canals, funiculars, and botanical gardens), often at great experiential expense.

Simply put, here is a list of notable (note that I’ve excluded the Portland Art Museum and anything billed as an art collection in Las Vegas, et cetera) art museums I have visited. You will find reading a list of notable art museums I have visited interesting. You will.

And then you will tell me your favorites.