Blogging

Olympia, WA -

Dare I say it? The B-word? Well, I guess it beats the C-word.

Keeping up with the new blog has been more difficult than I anticipated. Not having internet at home has certainly added to the roadblock, but coming off of eleven months of five posts a day, even if they were straight talk, and a false memory of a motormouth back at 3Q, the stagnation of BTB.com has been a bit perplexing for me.

The lack of political movement, Lord knows I have zero desire to dish the pre-inauguration scuttlebutt, plays a role, I'm sure, but I've also been stonewalled by normal communication.

An article in Slate from yesterday regarding the whereabouts of those Democrats for McCain reminded me of how fortunate pro reporters are for having the ability to follow up on stories from months back, and the authority to seek various movers-and-shakers for quotes.

But it also made me wonder if there were any Dems for J-Mac who renounced their decision after the Palin choice, or at least after the Kouric interview. I mean, seriously. I think if I ever gain some sort of notoriety, I will do just that - endorse the candidate I oppose, and then renounce said endorsement upon their selection of a running mate. Of course I would only do this if my "preferred" candidate was Milquetoast, but that still doesn't change the fact that I think it is a brilliant idea. Takers?

It also added to my recent Proustian turn in remembrance of things past. Running, blogging, cooking, loving, growing a beard, spending time with friends from college. None of these have been part of my life in the last year, and why not?

2009 is proving a fertile breeding ground for finding the old things that worked, and trying to shape them with respect to the future, and it was an eagle that clinched it. Two of them, actually.

Driving home from Tacoma today, where shit was ghetto as fuck as I sat in the Blackwater coffee shop and moseyed up to the TSD building to seek answers for my potentially temporary career as a substitute teacher, I saw two bald eagles perched on nearly consecutive trees overlooking the Nisqually Delta immediately adjacent to Interstate 5, whose southbound lanes were expected to be ten feet below the Chehalis River some thirty miles south.

The flooded out combination of shallow water fish and varmints running for cover must be a veritable goldmine for eagles, and I see why. Never having seen the damage firsthand, I have always romanticized floods, the beauty of water on land and swollen chocolate milk rivers conjure up visions of bounty and nature's dominance, even as they are nothing but farm killers and land rapists whose ears who no safe word.

Still I welcome the sight.

Even downtown Olympia wasn't safe. News reports stated that the city was worried about the tenability of Capitol Lake, a fact I was not aware of when I ran today, choosing to go backwards from my normal route by running up Capital Way and down the trails instead of the usual vice versa, where I found sand bags and man-made buffers everywhere as the water lapped at the cement borders that I run along in place of the trail. Usually these borders sit between three and eight feet above the water line, but today I worried about salt water on my shoes.

Alas, there was no damage, and I merely treated the buffers as hurdles, awkwardly leaping over the black tarp coverings en route back to the elevated safety of the Eastside.

Then, after a dinner of bison fettuccine and a decidedly shitty, if cheap, Barefoot Zinfandel, I spend 45 minutes reading The Education of Little Tree to a soundtrack of bluegrass on KAOS, before folding some laundry and heading into town to get some internet and hear the jovial tin of other people talking, even if they aren't talking to me.

Its the little things.

But for now, as I forgo any proofreading of this post and regret my lack of cover letter writing for the night, I feel it is time to close up shop and live like I used to even before I became the guy constantly at the bar with his computer. Can I even remember that life?

If the beard, the footsteps and the recipes can come back after a few repetitions, I guess I am willing to believe anything.

Ahoy,
BTB



Beers drunk so far tonight
Rogue Santa's Private Reserve
Leavenworth Hodgson's IPA