oh my god; somebody recently put some serious voodoo on me i think: i have just gone through one of the worst spells of sickness in my life, or at least the worst damn summer cold/flu i’ve ever had. i’ve just finished up spending the last five days completely incapacitated with allergies, flues, colds, wheezing, completely immoderate uncontrollably bad sore throat, malaise from hell, headache, bodyache, nearly at the throat of death little summer cold. i think someone may have cursed me. but my immune system learned and is now kicking butt again. i haven’t really been sick for about four/five years and this one really kicked me. i feel so lucky to have life. to have liberty. now i’m going to pursue… so i did very little while i was incapacitated, but two days ago i did look in on some of the quotidien duties of my current life which involved checking on some cats and petting them/talking with them and then i visited my sister who thought it prudent to send me home with her first upholstered chair, an unassuming old farm style chair that she reupholstered in a lovely blue velvet in her first class upon the subject of upholstery. it really was a fine job. was is the operative here. because, prone upon this horrible cold, i did not really adequately (not at all actually) install the chair in the bed of my truck; and as a semi passed me on the marquam bridge, lending a loving gust of wind to the undercarriage to the blue velvet chair, it sputtered and twirled into the air behind the truck and tumbled through several lanes of 70+ mph freeway traffic. i felt the object lift out of the truck and followed its rapid progression into the backwards oblivion of the rearview mirror. i sort of slammed on the breaks and realized the folly of that maneuver and continued on. then i started crying. the freeway is such a foreign zone. especially the four lane section of it on the 405 segway 150 feet above the willamette. oh my god. so i did a freeway circuit and looped back around to determine whether the piece of furniture could be salvaged in the broad day and i determined that it could not because of its inconvenient position in the street lanes: directly in the middle of the freeway. so i lamented for a requisite amount of time, talked to katie who told me that it wasn’t a big deal, but didn’t get any real comfort from this because i had visited the upholstery class and saw all the tedious hours she spent pulling little staples and carefully removing all the old nasty lint and replacing it with beautiful new supports and cloths and such: weeks and weeks. THEN, tonight (now feeling much better: the sickness is nearly recovered from), eating dinner with a friend and recounting this harrowing narrative, she corroborates by telling me she saw the very chair earlier in the day on one of her ventures forth. so i borrow a reflective vest and surrender myself to the same path of freeway. and lo! in nearly the same swath of road, but now off to the side shoulder, is the blue velvet chair… in several pieces and the upholstery really holding up pretty well. so i put the hazard lights on and rescued the beloved thing. driving home i had several ideas about what to make of this new object, becuase its chairness has been deflated from its self quite a bit. i’ll attach a picture soon. until soon: buon songes.

i have just learned that all these recent attacks on lebanon, offered by the israelis, are for pretty much for no good reason. inquire if you want more information.

i spent the whole of today on the upper part of the clackamas river, whose crystaline green waters come right off mt. hood and whose banks are populated by the most enchanting old growth forests and fauna. though the river is flanked almost the entire stretch by road, down on the water, it is an archetypal experience with the element. one can see for meters into the water, the clear, distorted rippling images of boulders lying gently on the bottom of the river, or a single green aspen leaf being nestled along in the lower currents. i love the way it sounds when you dip a paddle into it and when the bubbles return finally to the surface after being pulled out of the air at the front of a big standing wave. we paddled 12 miles down it today and navigated several class four rapids and many many class three. only once did i really contend with the river: going into a big hole and fighting out to be flipped over and over by the roiling ropes of currents spindling off the hole. at my fifth roll up, gasping for air, i was out and looking back at the froth. feeling the water under your body in the kayak’s shell and the brute intense power of it is reminder of the vigerous veins pulsing across the surface of our earth. environments like this are so good for our psyches that it seems like living without them would be less than three dimensional. in general terms the river is life: it begins with propulsion, some violence, tumult and speed, flooding through narrow cavities in immense volumes, rushing over every obstacle without heed or hindrance and as it progresses, it moves mountains, it finds greater ease in itself and seeks flatter, wider terrain and its violence and confusion settle into a rythm and flow, it finds ease as it seeks to level itself and until it is a fine glass smooth moving wilderness of WATER, and in a day, two days, it is in the sea and you, i, realize that its “it” is nothingness. complete change.

i woke up this morning with a funny taste in my mouth, then someone began knocking on my door. i figured it would stop and the person would go away, but again, ten minutes later, more knocking. it was a homeless guy who i’d helped out last night and he’d made a home of the backyard for the evening. i told him in somewhat gruff terms that it is not OK that he followed me to my residence and clandestinely made camp in the backyard, despite the clear deplorable fact of his homelessness. that was not in dispute. then he asked if i could help him out again. i realized that i had not helped him out at all by giving him money the night before, but rather had created a kind of crutch, a very temporary one. i told him that life was quotidian but that it is also important to think a little about the future: like where you’re going to sleep the coming nights, or more specifically, where you’re not going to sleep. at least plan those things out. it made me feel sad and confused and and now it’s time to re-orientat to the problem.