Lassitude

I haven't set foot off my property in days. I try to walk 3 miles three times a week on non-busy local streets, keeping twenty feet away from everyone I encounter, but a certain languor is setting in as I don't see any familiar faces anymore and the best I can do is take virtual trips in this time of disquietude.

This is my favorite photograph from my favorite trip, a trip of eight days and seven nights down the Grand Canyon in 2008 with former classmates from the University of Colorado. They mostly graduated in 1974 or 1975 whereas I didn't make it out of CU until 1978, having a hiatus of several years working in the restaurant business wintering in Aspen and summering in Nantucket, "between semesters." It all worked out okay for me, except for the part of meeting my ex-wife on Nantucket, who turned out to be in my opinion a raging (high on the Trumpian scale) covert narcissist, which I believe is an impossible, destructive (to others) personality disorder.

I also enjoyed a trip to the great Northwest in 2012 as I completed my checklist of visiting everyone of the 48 lower states in my lifetime.  My most poignant day was spent visiting Mt. St. Helens and realizing by first-hand observation the vastness of the natural disaster there in 1980.

The most spectacular thing I saw on that trip was Crater Lake in Oregon, a vast caldera filled with blue-as-the-sky rainwater and snow runoff.  Other than the Grand Canyon, it is the most memorable natural landscape I have seen.  It was created by a volcanic blow-up fifty times greater than the Mt. St. Helens explosion and gradually filled in with water over the centuries to its current level.

Portlandia

My friends tell me there's a cable offering that mocks the over-the-top green attitudes of Portlanders (the Left Coast variety) that's screamingly funny.  Undoubtedly.  (Abe is there.)

I traveled to Portland over the Fourth of July weekend to attend the wedding of my twenty-something niece, who lives around there with her significant other.  Now that they're married, are they still Significant Others, or are they husband and wife?  (The mother of the bride and one of my other four sisters conversing before the ceremony.)

Everything good is "sustainable" out there, whatever that means.  The wedding photographer summed it up on his website by saying that he appreciated being asked to shoot the wedding of the couple because their union is "sustainable" (I suppose so if they don't get divorced like half the couples who get married do) and the three of them started out the happy day by going to a state park to get some shots of the two there because the park offered "cool locations" and it was "sustainable" (was it suspected of going somewhere?).  (In Portland, you can run over the many bridges spanning the river, which is cool.  Here is a sign on the Steel Bridge which establishes the pecking order in terms of right-of-way on the bridge, being pedestrians before bicyclists, and in fine print Prohibits you from hurling yourself from the bridge.)

I was only there for two nights and one day (two mornings) but I got two runs through the city in.  It's a great city.  (In Portland, the water faucets are always On, spouting water needlessly and endlessly.)